Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine, afterwards Duchess of Cleaveland, to whom he addressed a copy of verses on her encouraging his first play, which he acknowledges was very ill received, and would have been driven from the scene, if this admired beauty had not by her favour and applause given "new life to his condemn'd and dying muse."9 It was, however, he tells us, well received at court, and was more than once the divertisement of his Majesty by his own command.

If we consider our author as a dramatick writer, his life may be commodiously divided into four periods. 1. from his outset as a playwright to the temporary suspension of dramatick exhibitions in 1665.-2. from their revival to the time when the

9 In a SESSION OF THE POETS, written about the year 1670, this poem is treated with as little respect as the play to which it relates :

"Sir Robert Howard, call'd for over and over,

"At length sent in Teague with a packet of news, "Wherein the sad knight, to his grief, did discover

66

How Dryden had lately robb'd him of his Muse. "Each man in the court was pleas'd with the theft, "Which made the whole family swear and rant, Desiring, their 'obin in the lurch being left,

86

"The thief might be punished for his WILD GAL

LANT.

Dryden, who one would have thought had more wit,

66

The censure of every man did disdain,

Pleading some pitiful rhymes he had writ

"In praise of the Countess of Castlemaine."

King's Theatre was destroyed by fire in 1671-2.3. from that era to 1682, when he discontinued writing for the stage.-4. from 1690 to 1694, in which period his last five plays were produced.

In settling the dates and succession of his plays, Dr. Johnson was led into many errours by following Langbaine, who in his " Account of the English Dramatick Poets," adopted a very absurd method, that of arranging them alphabetically; and frequently annexed to the several pieces the date of a late, instead of the earliest, edition. Dr. Johnson does not seem to have known that Dryden himself had published a list of his plays arranged in the order in which he wrote them.' With the aid of this list, and the assistance furnished by the entries in the Stationers' Registers, it will not be difficult to allot almost all his dramas to the years in which they were first performed.

It was a bold attempt, he observes, " to begin with a comedy, which is the most difficult part of dramatick poetry."-Finding himself unsuccessful

Prefixed to KING ARTHUR, 4to. 1691, is the following Advertisement:

66

Finding that several of my friends in buying my plays, &c. bound together, have been imposed on by the booksellers foisting in a play which is not mine, [THE MISTAKEN HUSBAND,] I have here, to prevent this for the future, set down a catalogue of my plays and poems in quarto, putting the plays in the order I wrote them. JOHN DRYDEN." The list subjoined will be found in a more perfect state, in a following page.

in that attempt, his next performance was a tragicomedy, THE RIVAL LADIES, which probably was exhibited in the winter of 1663, being entered on the Stationers' Books, June 5, 1664; and it not being customary at that time to commit plays to the press till they had run their course on the stage.

Our author's connexion with Sir Robert Howard led him to assist that gentleman in writing THE INDIAN QUEEN, of which how much was written by Dryden cannot be now ascertained; but the versification of this piece is so much superiour to that of Sir Robert's other plays, that he probably in this instance derived no inconsiderable aid from his coadjutor. The books which it was necessary to consult on that occasion naturally suggested to Dryden the subject of his next tragedy, THE INDIAN EMPEROR, which, though the play was not printed before October 1667, probably had been acted early in the winter of 1664-5; for the INDIAN QUEEN must have been performed in the middle of the year 1664 or before; and two lines of the Prologue to THE INDIAN EMPEROR shew that one year only intervened between the first exhibition of these plays :

"The scenes are old, the habits are the same
"We wore last year, before the Spaniards came."

A couplet in the Epilogue also

"As for the coffee-wits, he says not much,
66 Their proper business is, to damn the Dutch “---

He means, before the Spaniards arrived in South America.

furnishes us with a further confirmation of that date; for in December 1664, letters of reprisal against the Dutch were issued out, and soon afterwards above an hundred Dutch prizes were taken by the English fleet; and war was proclaimed against that nation on the 2d of March following. Accordingly, I find this tragedy entered for publication at Stationers' Hall, May 26, 1665, though, owing to the subsequent national calamities, it was not then printed.

In consequence of the plague breaking out soon afterwards, and of the fatal conflagration which laid a great part of London in ruins in the following year, no dramatick entertainments were allowed to be exhibited from May 1665, to Christmas 1666. During these eighteen months, Dryden, who in this interval, I believe, married Lady Elizabeth Howard, appears to have resided principally in the country, probably at Charlton in Wiltshire, the seat of his father-in-law, the Earl of Berkshire. Here he amused himself with writing his elegant ESSAY OF DRAMATICK POESY, which he afterwards dedicated to Charles, Lord Buckhurst, and published in the latter end of the year 1667.*

Though the Art of Criticism at this period had

3 Rosc. ANG. 8vo. 1708. p. 26.

4 It was entered in the Stationers' Books by H. Her. ringman, Aug. 7, 1667, and published in quarto, probably between that time and Christmas, though the titlepage, according to the custom of booksellers, is dated 1668.

not been so diligently cultivated in England, as it has been in the present century, some essays had been made to ascertain and teach its principles, and a few strictures on English versification had appeared. Gascoigne, before 1575, had given "Certain Notes of Instruction concerning the making of Verse or Rime in English." About the year 1580, Sir Philip Sydney displayed great ingenuity and good sense in his excellent DEFENCE OF POESY, against which so furious an attack had been made by the Puritans, that, as he tells us, "from the highest estimation of learning it had fallen to be the laughing-stock of children:" a work in which, amidst many judicious observations on the various kinds of poetical composition, he has introduced the principal precepts of Aristotle on the subject of the drama. Webbe a few years afterwards (1586) published " a Discourse of English Poetry, together with the Author's judgment touching the reformation of our English Verse;" and Puttenham, in 1589, had more largely and methodically treated of the same subject in his ARt OF ENGLISH POESY. A small tract, containing some Observations on this Art, by Thomas Campion, in 1602, the object of which was to recommend the absurd practice of making English verse "halt ill on Roman feet," (which a few years before had found some warm advocates,) drew from Daniel, the poet, in the following year, his elegant DEFENCE OF RHYME. The fourth part of Edmund Bolton's HYPERCRITICA professes to treat of