and then running to the footlights and beginning her speech to the audience:-- "I come, kind gentlemen, strange news to tell ye: I am the ghost of poor departed Nelly. Sweet ladies, be not frighted; I'll be civil: I'm what I was, a little harmless devil." &c. &c. It is a tradition that it was this epilogue that effected Nell's conquest of the king, and that he was so fascinated with her manner of delivering it, that he went behind the scenes after the play was over and carried her off. Ah! and it is two hundred years since that fascinating run to the footlights took place, and the swarthy face of the monarch was seen laughing, and the audience shrieked and clapped with delight, and Pepys bustled about the boxes, and Dryden sat looking placidly on, contented with his success, and wondering how much of it was owing to Nelly! One can see how, even if the choice had been made strictly with a reference to the claims of the candidates, it would have been felt that Dryden, and not Butler, was the proper man to succeed Davenant in the laureateship. If Butler had shewn the more original vein of talent in one peculiar walk, Dryden had proved himself the man of greatest general strength, in whom were more broadly represented the various literary tendencies of his time. The author of ten plays, four of which were stately rhymed tragedies, and the rest comedies in prose and blank verse; the author, also, of various occasional poems, one of which, the _Annus Mirabilis_, was noticeable on its own account as the best poem of current history; the author, moreover, of one express prose-treatise, and of various shorter prose dissertations in the shape of prefaces and the like prefixed to his separate plays and poems, in which the principles of literature were discussed in a manner at once masterly and adapted to the prevailing taste: Dryden was, on the whole, far more likely to perform well that part of a laureate's duties which consisted in supervising and leading the general literature of his age than a man whose reputation, though justly great, had been acquired by one continuous effort in the single department of burlesque. Accordingly, Dryden was promoted to the post, and Butler was left to finish, on his own scanty resources, the remaining portion of his _Hudibras_, varying the occupation by jotting down those scraps of cynical thought which were found among his posthumous papers, and which show that towards the end of his days there were other things that he hated and would have lashed besides Puritanism. Thus:-- "'Tis a strange age we've lived in and a lewd As e'er the sun in all his travels viewed." Again: "The greatest saints and sinners have been made Of proselytes of one another's trade." Again: "Authority is a disease and cure Which men can neither want nor well endure." And again, with an obvious reference to his own case:--