If Langbaine delights in exposing the antagonisms and contradictions of Dryden's thirty years at the controversial center of London life, he also inadvertently reveals to us a man on a hobby-horse riding at full tilt with a motley pack. His obsession with Dryden, like most obsessions, was, no doubt, a fault. It seems, however, to have generated much of the energy required to accomplish so assiduously such large tasks. Langbaine's attacks angered some contemporary readers;[39] they seem, ineffectually, to have made no adverse impression on at least one of Dryden's patrons: in the same year that Langbaine dedicated the _Account_ to James, Earl of Abington, the Earl commissioned Dryden to write a commemorative ode to his wife Eleanora. For the modern reader, Langbaine's point of view happily supplies the interest which raises his catalogues from any dullness inherent in their genre. Langbaine is a writer one now appreciates not simply for the extensive accuracy of his theatrical recording, but as a man whose attitudes (and many of his inaccuracies) arise passionately out of his interests and prejudices. To paraphrase Mirabell, _quite_ out of context, we admire him "with all his faults, nay like him for his faults." University of California, Los Angeles NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION FOOTNOTES: [1] John Loftis, "Introduction," Gerard Langbaine, _An Account of the English Dramatick Poets_, The Augustan Reprint Society Special Publication (Los Angeles, 1971), p. i. [2] For a bibliographical study of play catalogues, see Carl J. Stratman, _Dramatic Play Lists, 1591-1963_ (New York, 1966). [3] William Riley Parker, "Winstanley's _Lives_: An Appraisal," _MLQ_, VI (1945), 313. [4] Parker, pp. 317, 315. [5] Parker, pp. 317-318. [6] "Just as Phillips copied all of the source citations from Vossius for the ancients, so he took most of the scholarly references to the moderns from Edward Leigh's _Treatise_" (Sanford Golding, "The Sources of the _Theatrum Poetarum_," _PMLA_, LXXVI [1961], 51). [7] Parker believed that only Winstanley used Kirkman directly, but Golding shows that Phillips used both Kirkman's 1661 and 1671 lists (Golding, p. 51). [8] The 1671 _Catalogue_ is bound, bibliographically independent, with John Dancer's _Nicomede_, which was published by Kirkman. Kirkman's earlier list, _A True, Perfect, and Exact Catalogue_ (London, 1661) contains 685 plays and is bound with _Tom Tyler and His Wife_. [9] Specifically, the catalogues of Richard Rogers and William Ley and of Archer, both published in 1656. See Stratman, pp. 7-8. [10] See, for example, Kirkman, The Stationer to the Reader, in _The Thracian Wonder_ (1661); this and similar advertisements are reprinted in Strickland Gibson, _A Bibliography of Francis Kirkman_, Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications, N. S., I (1949), 73. [11] Gibson, pp. 93-94.