From 1682 to 1686 John Dryden lived in Long Acre, on the north side, in a house facing what formerly was Rose Street. His name appears in the rate-books as “John Dryden, Esq.”--an unusual distinction--and the sum he paid to the poor varied from 18s. to £1.[513] It was here he resided when he was beaten, one December evening in 1679, by three ruffians hired by the Earl of Rochester and the Duchess of Portsmouth. Sir Walter Scott makes the poet live at the time in Gerard Street; but no part of Gerard Street was built in 1679. Rochester had the year before ridiculed Dryden as “Poet Squab,” and believed that Dryden had helped Mulgrave in ridiculing him in his clumsy “Essay on Satire.” The best lines of this dull poem are these:-- “Of fighting sparks Fame may her pleasure say, But ’tis a bolder thing to run away. The world may well forgive him all his ill, For every fault does prove his penance still; Falsely he falls into some dangerous noose, And then as meanly labours to get loose.” A letter from Rochester to a friend, dated November 21, in the above year, is still extant, in which he names Dryden as the author of the satire, and concludes with the following threat:--“If he (Dryden) falls on me at the blunt, which is his very good weapon in wit, I will forgive him, if you please, and _leave the repartee to Black Will with a cudgel_.”[514] Dryden offered a reward of fifty pounds for the discovery of the men who cudgelled him, depositing the money in the hands of “Mr. Blanchard, goldsmith, next door to Temple Bar,” but all in vain. The Rose Alley satire, the Rose Alley ambuscade, and the Dryden salutation, became established jokes with Dryden’s countless enemies. Even Mulgrave himself, in his _Art of Poetry_ said of Dryden coldly-- “Though praised and punished for another’s rhymes, His own deserve as great applause sometimes.” And, in a conceited note, the amateur poet described the libel as one for which Dryden had been unjustly “_applauded and wounded_.” But these lines and this note Mulgrave afterwards suppressed. Poor Otway, whom Rochester had satirised, and who had accused Dryden of saying of his _Don Carlos_ that, “Egad, there was not a line in it he would be author of,” stood up bravely for Dryden as an honest satirist in these vigorous verses:-- “Poets in honour of the truth should write, With the same spirit brave men for it fight. * * * * * From any private cause where malice reigns, Or general pique all blockheads have to brains.” Dryden never took any poetical revenge on Rochester, and in the prefatory essay to his _Juvenal_ he takes credit for that forbearance.[515]