addresses. The character of Dryden's immediate patron was always his cue for praise: if he stood forward against a predominant party, he was necessarily Cato, the most virtuous of men; if he yielded to the torrent, he was Phocion or Cicero, and Cato was a fool to him. With the few grains of allowance which his situation required, Dryden's praise of Halifax is an honest panegyric. It is certain, his wisdom prevented a civil war in the last years of the reign of Charles, and indirectly led the way to a bloodless revolution. The age in which he lived was therefore so far indebted to him, as our author has elegantly said, for the lives of husbands and of children, for property unviolated, and wealth undiminished. Nor does the present owe him less; for, when is it that a government, erected by a party successful in civil dissention, does not far exceed their just, and even their original pretensions? The parties had each founded their plea and their pretensions upon sacred and integral parts of the constitution, as the contending factions of the Jews occupied, the one the temple, and the other the palace of Jerusalem. In a civil war, one bulwark or other must have fallen with the party which it sheltered; and it was only the Revolution of 1688, which, leaving both whig and tory in full strength, compelled them mutually to respect the constitutional vantage-ground assumed by each other.] [Footnote 13: Lord Halifax was unquestionably a man of wit; and we have some tolerable bon mots of his, handed down by his contemporaries. Burnet says, "The liveliness of his imagination was always too hard for his judgment. A severe jest was preferred by him to all arguments whatever; and he was endless in consultations; for when, after much discourse, a point was settled, if he could find a new jest to make even that which was suggested by himself ridiculous, he could not hold, but would study to raise the credit of his wit, though it made others call his judgment in question." We may not, perhaps, refine too far in supposing, that the bishop was not always able to estimate the policy of this subtle statesman. It was more frequently his wish to avoid taking decisive steps than to recommend them; and what could more effectually retard violent councils than the conduct remarked by Burnet, or what argument would have weighed with Charles II. like a keen jest?] [Footnote 14: The Roman veterans were dismissed after twenty years service; a regulation equally politic and humane. In 1691 a French invasion, in behalf of King James, appeared not improbable.] [Footnote 15: We cannot trace the result of this study any where but in the song of the Saxon priests; and it did not surely require much reading to glean up the names of the Saxon deities, which are almost the only traits of national manners exhibited through the drama.] [Footnote 16: Under that of Jotham in "Absalom and Achitophel."] PROLOGUE, SPOKEN BY MR BETTERTON.