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 sometimes 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 double-meanings 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 everything by starts, and nothing long, But in the course of one revolving moon Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon; Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking, Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.” 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._