This connection between the high-born beauties and the poets was at first delightful, and honourable to both: but, in time, it became degraded and abused. The fees paid for dedications, odes, and sonnets, were any thing but sentimental:--can we wonder if, under such circumstances, the profession of a poet "was connected with personal abasement, which made it disreputable?"[14] or, that women, while they required the tribute, despised those who paid it,--and were paid for it?--not in sweet looks, soft smiles, and kind wishes, but with silver and gold, a cover at her ladyship's table "below the salt," or a bottle of sack from my lord's cellar. It followed, as a thing of course, that our amatory and lyric poetry declined, and instead of the genuine rapture of tenderness, the glow of imagination, and all "the purple light of love," we have too often only a heap of glittering and empty compliment and metaphysical conceits.--It was a miserable state of things. It must be confessed that the aspiring loves of some of our poets have not proved auspicious even when successful. Dryden married Lady Elizabeth Howard, the daughter of the Earl of Berkshire: but not "all the blood of all the Howards" could make her either wise or amiable: he had better have married a milkmaid. She was weak in intellect, and violent in temper. Sir Walter Scott observes, very feelingly, that "The wife of one who is to gain his livelihood by poetry, or by any labour (if any there be,) equally exhausting, must either have taste enough to relish her husband's performances, or good nature sufficient to pardon his infirmities." It was Dryden's misfortune, that Lady Elizabeth had neither one nor the other. Of all our really great poets, Dryden is the one least indebted to woman, and to whom, in return, women are least indebted: he is almost devoid of _sentiment_ in the true meaning of the word.--"His idea of the female character was low;" his homage to beauty was not of that kind which beauty should be proud to receive.[15] When he attempted the praise of women, it was in a strain of fulsome, far-fetched, laboured adulation, which betrayed his insincerity; but his genius was at home when we were the subject of licentious tales and coarse satire. It was through this inherent want of refinement and true respect for our sex, that he deformed Boccaccio's lovely tale of Gismunda; and as the Italian novelist has sins enough of his own to answer for, Dryden might have left him the beauties of this tender story, unsullied by the profane coarseness of his own taste. In his tragedies, his heroines on stilts, and his drawcansir heroes, whine, rant, strut and rage, and tear passion to tatters--to very rags; but love, such as it exists in gentle, pure, unselfish bosoms--love, such as it glows in the pages of Shakspeare and Spenser, Petrarch and Tasso,--such love As doth become mortality Glancing at heaven,