of his apostasy from the court an invention of his enemies after his conversion, for it prevailed at the commencement of the party-disputes; and the name of Dryden is, by a partisan of royalty, ranked with that of his bitter foe Shadwell, as followers of Shaftesbury in 1680.[41] But whatever cause of coolness or disgust our author had received from Charles or his brother, was removed, as usual, so soon as his services became necessary; and thus the supposed author of a libel on the king became the ablest defender of the cause of monarchy, and the author of the “Spanish Friar” the advocate and convert of the Catholic religion.

In his private circumstances Dryden must have been even worse situated than at the close of the last Section.  His contract with the King’s Company was now ended, and long before seems to have produced him little profit.  If Southerne’s biographer can be trusted, Dryden never made by a single play more than one hundred pounds; so that, with all his fertility, he could not, at his utmost exertion, make more than two hundred a year by his theatrical labours.[42] At the same time, they so totally engrossed his leisure, that he produced no other work of consequence after the “Annus Mirabilis."[43] If, therefore, the payment of his pension was withheld, whether from the resentment of the court, or the poverty of the exchequer, he might well complain of the “unsettled state” which doomed him to continue these irksome and ill-paid labours.

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] Malone, vol. i. p. 124.

[2] Dennis’s account of these feuds, though not strictly accurate is lively, and too curious to be suppressed.  “Nothing,” says Dennis, “is more certain, than that Mr. Settle, who is now (1717) the city poet, was formerly a poet of the court.  And at what time was he so?  Why, in the reign of King Charles the Second, when that court was more gallant and more polite than ever the English court perhaps had been before; when there was at court the present and the late Duke of Buckingham, the late Earl of Dorset, Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, famous for his wit and poetry, Sir Charles Sedley, Mr. Saville, Mr. Buckley, and several others.

“Mr. Settle’s first tragedy, ‘Cambyses, King of Persia,’ was acted for three weeks together.  The second, which was ‘The Empress of Morocco,’ was acted for a month together; and was in such high esteem both with the court and town that it was acted at Whitehall before the king by the gentlemen and ladies of the court; and the prologue, which was spoken by the Lady Betty Howard, was writ by the famous Lord Rochester.  The bookseller who printed it, depending upon the prepossession of the town, ventured to distinguish it from all the plays that had been ever published before; for it was the first play that ever was sold in England for two shillings, and the first that ever was printed with cuts.  The booksellers at that time of day had not discovered so much of the weakness