Such were the strains once preferred to the magnificent verses of Dryden; whose very worst bombast is sublimity compared to them. To prove which, the reader need only peruse the Indian's account of the Spanish fleet in the "Indian Emperor," to which the above lines are a parallel; each being the description of an object familiar to the audience, but new to the describer. The poet felt the disgraceful preference more deeply than was altogether becoming; but he had levelled his powers, says Johnson, when he levelled his desires to those of Settle, and placed his happiness in the claps of multitudes. The moral may be carried yet further; for had not Dryden stooped to call to the aid of his poetry the auxiliaries of scenery, gilded truncheons, and verse of more noise than meaning, it is impossible his plays could have been drawn into comparison with those of Settle. But the meretricious ornaments which he himself had introduced were within the reach of the meanest capacity; and, having been among the first to debauch the taste of the public, it was retributive justice that he should experience their inconstancy. Indeed Dryden seems himself to admit, that the principal difference between his heroic plays and "The Empress of Morocco," was, that the former were good sense, that looked like nonsense, and the latter nonsense, which yet looked very like sense. A nice distinction, and which argued some regret at having opened the way to such a rival. The feelings of contempt ought to have suppressed those of anger; but Dryden, who professedly lived to please his own age, had not temper to wait till time should do him justice. Angry he was; and unfortunately he determined to shew the world that he did well in being so. With this view, in conjunction with Shadwell and Crowne, two brother-dramatists, equally jealous of Settle's success, he composed a pamphlet, entitled "Remarks upon the Empress of Morocco." This piece is written in the same tone of boisterous and vulgar raillery with which Clifford and Leigh had assailed Dryden himself; and little resembles our poet's general style of controversy. He seems to have exchanged his satirical scourge for the clumsy flail of Shadwell, when he stooped to use such raillery as the following description of Settle: "In short, he is an animal of a most deplored understanding, without reading and conversation: his being is in a twilight of sense, and some glimmering of thought, which he can never fashion either into wit or English. His style is boisterous and rough-hewn; his rhyme incorrigibly lewd, and his numbers perpetually harsh and ill-sounding."