rights against pretenders, he made a terrible example of one poor wretch, who had been puffed for the moment into undue popularity. This unfortunate was Elkanah Settle, and the occasion of the attack was a heroic tragedy written by Settle, acted with great success both on the stage and at Whitehall, and published with illustrative woodcuts. On this performance Dryden made a most merciless onslaught in a prose-criticism prefixed to his next published play, tearing Settle's metaphors and grammar to pieces. Settle replied with some spirit, but little effect, and was, in fact, "settled" for ever. Rochester next patronized Crowne and Otway for a time, but soon gave them up, and contented himself with assailing Dryden more directly in such lampoons as we have quoted. In the year 1679, however, suspecting Dryden to have had a share in the authorship of a poem, then circulating in manuscript, in which certain liberties were taken with his name, he caused him to be way-laid and beaten as he was going home one evening through Rose-alley to his house in Gerard-street. The poem, entitled _An Essay on Satire_, is usually printed among Dryden's works; but it remains uncertain whether Dryden was really the author. It was fortunate for Dryden and for English literature that, just about this time, when he was beginning to be regarded as a veteran among the dramatists, whose farther services in that department the town could afford to spare, circumstances led him, almost without any wish of his own, into a new path of literature. He was now arrived at the ripe age of fifty years, and, if an inventory had been made of his writings, they would have been found to consist of twenty-one dramas, with a series of critical prose-essays for the most part bound up with these dramas, but nothing in the nature of non-dramatic poetry, except a few occasional pieces, of which the _Annus Mirabilis_ was still the chief. Had a discerning critic examined those works with a view to discover in what peculiar vein of verse Dryden, if he abandoned the drama, might still do justice to his powers, he would certainly have selected the vein of reflective satire. Of the most nervous and emphatic lines that could have been quoted from his plays a large proportion would have been found to consist of what may be called _maxim_ metrically expressed; while in his dramatic prologues and epilogues, which were always thought among the happiest efforts of his pen, the excellence would have been found to consist in very much the same power of direct didactic declamation applied satirically to the humours, manners, and opinions of the day. Whether any critic, observing all this, would have been bold enough to advise Dryden to take the hint, and quit the drama for satirical, controversial, and didactic poetry, we need not inquire. Circumstances compelled what advice might have failed to bring about. After some twenty years of political