He seems to have been too strongly tinctured with that vice which belongs more to literary people, than to any other profession under the fun, viz. envy.  That lord Rochester was envious, and jealous of the reputation of other men of eminence, appears abundantly clear from his behaviour to Dryden, which could proceed from no other principle; as his malice towards him had never discovered itself till the tragedies of that great poet met with such general applause, and his poems were universally esteemed.  Such was the inveteracy he shewed to Mr. Dryden, that he set up John Crown, an obscure man, in opposition to him, and recommended him to the King to compose a masque for the court, which was really the business of the poet laureat; but when Crown’s Conquest of Jerusalem met with as extravagant success as Dryden’s Almanzor’s, his lordship then withdrew his favour from Crown, as if he would be still in contradiction to the public.  His malice to Dryden is said to have still further discovered itself, in hiring ruffians to cudgel him for a satire he was supposed to be the author of, which was at once malicious, cowardly, and cruel:  But of this we shall give a fuller account in the life of Mr. Dryden.

Mr. Wolsely, in his preface to Valentinian, a tragedy, altered by lord Rochester from Fletcher, has given a character of his lordship and his writings, by no means consistent with that idea, which other writers, and common tradition, dispose us to form of him.

’He was a wonderful man, says he, whether we consider the constant good sense, and agreeable mirth of his ordinary conversation, or the vast reach and compass of his inventions, and the amazing depth of his retired thoughts; the uncommon graces of his fashion, or the inimitable turns of his wit, the becoming gentleness, the bewitching softness of his civility, or the force and fitness of his satire; for as he was both the delight, the love, and the dotage of the women, so was he a continued curb to impertinence, and the public censure of folly; never did man stay in his company unentertained, or leave it uninstructed; never was his understanding biassed, or his pleasantness forced; never did he laugh in the wrong place, or prostitute his sense to serve his luxury; never did he stab into the wounds of fallen virtue, with a base and a cowardly insult, or smooth the face of prosperous villany, with the paint and washes of a mercenary wit; never did he spare a sop for being rich, or flatter a knave for being great.  He had a wit that was accompanied with an unaffected greatness of mind, and a natural love to justice and truth; a wit that was in perpetual war with knavery, and ever attacking those kind of vices most, whose malignity was like to be the most dissusive, such as tended more immediately to the prejudice of public bodies; and were a common nusance to the happiness of human kind.  Never was his pen drawn but on the side of good sense, and usually employed like the arms of the ancient heroes, to stop