at L600 or L700 annually; a sum more adequate to procure all the comforts, and many of the luxuries of life, than thrice the amount at present.  We must, at the same time, recollect that though Dryden is nowhere censured for extravagance, poets are seldom capable of minute economy, and that Lady Elizabeth was by education, and perhaps by nature, unfitted for supplying her husband’s deficiencies.  These halcyon days, too, were but of short duration.  The burning of the theatre, in 1670,[32] greatly injured the poet’s income from that quarter; his pension, like other appointments of the household establishment of Charles II., was very irregularly paid; and thus, if his income was competent in amount, it was precarious and uncertain.

Leaving Dryden for the present in the situation which we have described, and which he occupied during the most fortunate period of his life, the next Section may open with an account of the public taste at this time, and of the revolution in it which shortly took place.

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] Malone’s “History of the Stage.”

[2] [Although criticism of the purely literary kind has been as much as possible avoided in these notes, it seems necessary to say a few words here to put the reader on his guard.  Scott’s acquaintance with the English drama was extensive, but he was not equally well acquainted with the French, and (as almost all persons in France as well as in England were till recently) was all but ignorant of French drama before Corneille The attribution of the French classical drama to the Scudery romance and the influence of Louis XIV. is entirely erroneous.  That drama was introduced by Jodelle, the dramatic poet of the Pleiade in the middle of the sixteenth century, and was strictly fashioned on the model of Seneca.  Successive improvements, culminating in those of Corneille, were introduced in it, but its main lines continued the same.  Scott has also left out of sight a very important element in the constitution of the English heroic play.  When Davenant before the Restoration obtained Cromwell’s permission to reintroduce dramatic entertainments, if not plays, music necessarily formed the chief part of the performance.  It was in fact an opera, and operatic peculiarities remained after all restriction had been taken off.  Scott assigns on the whole far too much influence to the French drama and to the personal predilection of Charles.  The subject is a large one, and has never been fully handled, but readers may be referred to the present editor’s Dryden, pp. 18-20; and still more to an essay on Sir George Etherege by Mr. E.W.  Gosse in the Cornhill Magazine for March 1881.—­ED.]

[3] Haud inexperta loquitur. “I have,” she continues, “(and yet I am still alive,) drudged through Le Grand Cyrus, in twelve huge volumes; Cleopatra, in eight or ten; Polexander, Ibrahim, Clelie, and some others, whose names, as well as all the rest of them, I have forgotten.”—­Letter of Mrs. Chapone to Mrs. Carter.