We had not gone much farther, but at the corner of a dirty lane we found a wondrous throng of attentive scoundrels, serenaded by a couple of ballad-singers, who stood in the middle of the tatter’d audience, with their hands under their ears, singing, _With a rub, rub, rub, rub, rub, rub, in and out, in and out ho_: who should come limping by just in the interim, but Mr. _Dryden_ the poet: there’s a delicious song for you, gentlemen, says he, there are luscious words wrapt up in clean linen for you; tho’ there is a very bawdy mystery in them, yet they are so intelligibly express’d, that a girl of ten years old may understand the meaning of them; my lord _Rochester_’s songs are mine arse to it: well my dear _Love for Love_, thou deservest to be poet laureat, were it only for the composure of this seraphick ditty, ’tis enough to put musick into the tail of an old woman of fourscore, and make a girl of fourteen to be as knowing in her own thoughts, as her parents that got her; oh, ’tis a song of wonderful instruction, of incomparable modesty, considering its meaning. Who should come puffing into the crowd in abundance of haste, with a face as red as a new pantile, but _Nat Lee_? Hark you, _Nat_, says _Dryden_, did you ever here such a feeling ballad in your life before? egad, the words steal so cunningly into ones veins, that nature will scarce be pacified till she has dropt some loose corns into one’s breeches. Foh, you old lecherous beast, says _Nat Lee_, here’s a song indeed for a poet-bays of your gravity to admire! I have heard twenty better under _White-Fryars_ gate-way. You’re a mad man, says _Dryden_, you never understood a song in your life, nor any thing else, but jumbling the gods about, as if they were so many tapsters in a lumber-house. I’ll sing you a song, says _Lee_, worth fifty on’t that I made when I was in _Bedlam_, to be sung in my play, that had five and twenty acts in’t; now pray observe me, and your self shall be judge. _The gods on a day when their worships were idle,_ _Met all at the sign of the_ half-moon _and_ fiddle; _Old_ Bacchus _and_ Venus _did lovingly joyn,_ _And swore there was nothing like women and wine:_ _They drank till they all were as merry as grigs,_ _And wallowed about like a litter of pigs;_ _Till their heads and their tails were so little apart,_ _the breath of a belch, mix’d with that of a fart;_ _But as it fell out, poor unfortunate_ Mars, _Just nodded his nose into_ Venus’_s arse;_ _Why how now, says_ Mars, _ye old jade, d’y’ suppose,_ _Your arse was design’d as a case for my nose?_ _Then pulling his head from her bumb, fell a swearing,_ _Her honour smelt worse than a stinking red-herring_,