value were crowded away westward by the new demands of commerce. In Dryden's day there were ducal houses looking upon Lincoln's Inn Fields; and others, with pleasure grounds about them, close upon Covent Garden Square. Americans go to that neighborhood now, in early morning, to catch sight of the immense stores of fruit and vegetables which are on show there upon market-days; and they are well repaid for such visit; yet the houses are dingy, and a welter of straw and mud and market débris stretches to the doors; but the stranger, picking his way through this, and through Russell Street to the corner of Bow Street, will find, close by, the site of that famous Will's Coffee-house, where Dryden lorded it so many years, and whose figure there in the chimney-corner, with his pipe, laying down the law between the whiffs, and conferring honors by offering a pinch from his snuff-box-Scott has made familiar to the whole world. It was an earlier sort of club-house, where the news in the Gazette was talked of, and the last battle if there were a recent one- - and the last play, and the last scandal of the court. Its discussions and potations made away with a good many nights, and a good many pipes and bottles, and was not largely provocative of domesticity. But it does not appear that the Lady Elizabeth - Dryden's wife — ever made remonstrances on this score; indeed, Mr. Green, the historian, would intimate that my lady had distractions of her own, not altogether wise or worthy; but we prefer to believe the best we can of her. To this gathering-place at Covent Garden Etherege and Wycherley found their way - all writing men, in fact; even the great Buckingham perhaps —before his quarrel; and Dorset, fellow-member with Dryden, of the Royal Society; maybe Butler too, when he found himself in London; and poor Otway,* hoping to meet some one generous enough to pay his score for him; and the young Congreve, proud in his earlier days to get a nod * Otway, b. 1631; d. 1685, son of a Sussex clergyman, was author of many poor plays, and of two-"The Orphan" and "Venice Preserved" - sure to live. With much native refinement and extraordinary pathetic power, he went to the bad; was crazed by hopeless love for an actress (Mrs. Barry) in his own plays; plunged thereafter into wildest dissipation, and died destitute and neglected. from the great Dryden; and, prouder yet, when, at a later time, he was honored by that tender and pathetic epistle from the Laureate : "Already I am worn with cares and age, Be kind to my remains; and O defend, Against your judgment, your departed friend! I said that he wrote plays; wrote them by the - You do not know them; and I hope you never will know them to love them. They have fallen away from literature never acted, and rarely read. He could not plot a story, and he had not the dramatic gift. One wonders how a theatreful could have listened to their pomposity and inflation and exaggerations. But they did, and they filled Dryden's pockets. There were scenic splendors, indeed, about many of them which delighted the pit, and which the poet loved as accompaniments to the roll of his sonorous verse; there were, too, fragments here and there, with epithet and characterization that showed his mastership; and some times the most graceful of lyrics budded out from the coarse groundwork of the play, as fair in sound. as they were foul in thought. In private intercourse Dryden is represented to have been a man of courteous speech, never low and ribald as were many of the royal favorites ; and when he undertook playwriting to order, to meet the profligate tastes of the court, he could not, like some lesser playwrights, disguise doublemeanings and vulgarities under a flimsy veil of courtliness; but by his very sincerity he made all his lewdness rank, and all his indelicacies brutal. This will, and should, I think, keep his plays away from our reading-desks. Dryden's satires, written later, show a better and far stronger side of his literary quality; and Buckingham, long after his lineaments shall have faded from a mob of histories, will stand preserved as Zimri, in the strong pickle of Dryden's verse; you will have met the picture, perhaps without knowing it for the magnificent courtier, who wrote "The Rehearsal : "A man so various that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome: Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong; Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon; 39 A man who writes in that way about a peer of England was liable to write of lesser men in a manner that would stir hot blood; and he did. Once upon a time this great king at "Will's' was waylaid and sorrily cudgelled; which is an experience that however it may come about- is not elevating in its effects, nor does it increase our sense of a man's dignity; for it is an almost universal fact that the men most worthy of respect, in almost any society, are the men who never do get quietly cudgelled. Later Poems and Purpose. Far on in 1682, when our Dryden was waxing oldish, and when he had given over play-going for somewhat more of church-going, he wrote, in the same verse with his satires, and with the same ringing couplets of sound, a defence of the moderate |