Indelicacy, and its consequence, immorality, being likewise acceptable, in an age when a father could jest with his son on the success of that son’s amours,[490] the taste of the lofty and luxurious patron was even consulted by writers whose nobleness of thought and elevation of fancy might have led the world to expect better fruits from the growth of their own untrammelled inclinations. Hence that mixture of “dissolute licentiousness and abject adulation,” of which Johnson too justly accuses Dryden; but from which our older poets, the pure and exalted Milton, and his inimitable predecessors, Shakspeare, Cowley, Spenser, were nobly exempt. The merriment, and the adulation of Dry den were, as Johnson also remarks, “artificial and constrained, the effects of study and meditation,—his trade, rather than his pleasure;” and the same may, with reverence, be observed of the prince of flatterers, the great, the little, the powerful, the weak, the satirical, the fawning Alexander Pope. The system of patronage called into being another class of writers, who also “traded in corruption.” These were the political pamphleteers of the day, a paid regiment, in which, to the disgrace of the sex, a female author, unparalleled in any day for the power of invention, or rather of perversion, received no slight encouragement in her gross and horrible attacks upon personal character, from the most eminent in rank and in intellect among the party by whom her services were hired. Mrs. de la Rivière Manley, or Rivella as she was figuratively called, the pupil, in her early days, of the infamous Madame Mazarin, and the confidante of the scarcely less infamous Duchess of Cleveland, was the disseminator, if not the originator, of those calumnies which party spirit chose to affix to the characters of the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, and of the latter in conjunction with Lord Godolphin. Her own history, translated from the French, and supposed in the narrative to be communicated by Louis Duc d’Aumont, ambassador in England, in 1712, to his friend General Tidcomb, whilst taking the air in Somerset-house garden, is said, by its dreadful details, sufficiently to prepare those who are condemned to read it, for the subsequent works of this wretched woman. Of these, the most popular were her “Atalantis,” the “History of Prince Mirabel’s (Marlborough’s) Infancy, Rise, and Disgrace, collected from the Memoirs of a Courtier lately deceased,” and the “Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians,”[491] first published and inserted among the State Tracts by Dean Swift, in 1715.[492] This patronage on the part of Swift, which scarcely excites our wonder in the clergyman who could remodel and publish the “Tale of a Tub,” ceased only with the life of the abandoned Rivella, which closed at an advanced age, in 1724.