would be his charge.  Dryden is to be accounted the most famous and successful of prologue writers, but it must be said that his productions of this class are deplorably disfigured by the profligacy of his time, and that all their brilliancy of wit does not compensate for their uncleanness.  Dryden’s prologues are also remarkable, for their frequent recognition of the critics as a class apart from the ordinary audience; not critics as we understand them exactly, attached to journals and reviewing plays for the instruction of the public, but men of fashion affecting judicial airs, and expressing their opinions in clubs and coffee-houses, and authors charged with attending the theatres in the hope of witnessing the demolition of a rival bard.  The prologue to “All for Love” opens with the lines—­

    What flocks of critics hover here to-day,
    As vultures wait on armies for their prey,
    All gaping for the carcase of a play!

And presently occurs the familiar passage—­

    Let those find fault whose wit’s so very small,
    They’ve had to show that they can think at all. 
    Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;
    He who would search for pearls must dive below. 
    Fops may have leave to level all they can,
    As pigmies would be glad to lop a man. 
    Half wits are fleas, so little and so light,
    We scarce could know they live, but that they bite.

Another prologue begins—­

    They who write ill, and they who ne’er durst write,
    Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite;
    A playhouse gives them fame; and up then starts
    From a mean fifth-rate wit, a man of parts.

The more important critics are described as—­

    A jury of the wits who still stay late,
    And in their club decree the poor play’s fate;
    Their verdict back is to the boxes brought,
    Thence all the town pronounces it their thought.

“The little Hectors of the pit” are also spoken of, and there is mention of “Fop-corner,” the prototype of “Fop’s-alley” of later years.  Now, “a kind, hearty pit” is prayed for, and now, in a prologue delivered before the University of Oxford, stress is laid upon the advantages of “a learned pit.”  It may be noted, too, that the prologues of Dryden, apart from their wit, and overlooking, if that can possibly be managed, their distressing grossness, are invaluable for the accurate and minute pictures they present of English life, manners, costumes, and character in the reign of Charles II.