"His mighty Dryden to the shades is gone, And Congreve leaves successor of his throne: Though long before his final exit hence, He was himself an abdicated Prince; Disrobed of all regalities of state, Drawn by a hind and panther from his seat. Heir to his plays, his fables, and his tales, Congreve is the poetic prince of Wales; Not at St. Germains, but at Will's, his court, Whither the subjects of his dad resort; Where plots are hatched, and councils yet unknown, How young Ascanius may ascend the throne, That in despite of all the Muses' laws, He may revenge his injured father's cause, Go, nauseous rhymers, into darkness go, And view your monarch in the shades below, Who takes not now from Helicon his drink, But sips from Styx a liquor black as ink; Like Sisyphus a restless stone he turns, And in a pile of his own labours burns; Whose curling flames most ghastly fiends do raise, Supplied with fuel from his impious plays; And when he fain would puff away the flame, One stops his mouth with bawdy Limberham; There, to augment the terrors of the place, His Hind and Panther stare him in the face; They grin like devils at the cursed toad, Who made [them] draw on earth so vile a load. Could some infernal painter draw the sight, And once transmit it to the realms of light, It might our poets from their sins affright; Or could they hear, how there the sons of verse In dismal yells their tortures do express; How scorched with ballads on the Stygian shore, They horrors in a dismal chorus roar; Or see how the laureate does his grandeur bear, Crowned with a wreath of flaming sulphur there. This, sir, 's your fate, cursed critics you oppose, The most tyrannical and cruel foes; Dryden, their huntsman dead, no more he wounds, But now you must engage his pack of hounds." [50] According to Ward, his expressions were, "that he was an old man, and had not long to live by course of nature, and therefore did not care to part with one limb, at such an age, to preserve an uncomfortable life on the rest."--_London Spy_, Part xviii. [51] "I come now from Mr. Dryden's funeral, where we had an Ode in Horace sung, instead of David's Psalms; whence you may find, that we don't think a poet worth Christian burial. The pomp of the ceremony was a kind of rhapsody, and fitter, I think, for Hudibras, than him; because the cavalcade was mostly burlesque: but he was an extraordinary man, and buried after an extraordinary fashion; for I do believe there was never such another burial seen. The oration, indeed, was great and ingenious, worthy the subject, and like the author; whose prescriptions can restore the living, and his pen embalm the dead. And so much for Mr. Dryden; whose burial was the same as his life,--variety, and not of a piece:-- the quality and mob, farce and heroics; the sublime and ridicule mixed in a piece;--great Cleopatra in a hackney coach."