Dryden attributed whatever merit he had as a writer of prose to having studied the works of Tillotson, and the prelate, it will be remembered, owed some of his graces of delivery to Betterton. In his comedies, Dryden was the encourager, not the scourger of vice; and yet he could warmly approve the purity of Southerne, when Southerne chose to be pure, and acknowledge that it were as politic to silence vicious poets as seditious preachers. If there were few good poets in his day, Dryden sees the cause in the turbulence of the times; and if people loved the stilted nonsense of heroic tragedies, it was simply, he says, because "the fashion was set them by the court." To court-protection, he himself owed much, and he states what one may smile at now, that the King's kindness, in calling the "Maiden Queen" _his_ play,--that singular piece, in which there are eight women and three men, saved the drama from the malice of the poet's enemies. There is no such privilege for poets in our days! Had Shadwell, who left the law to find a livelihood by literature, not been a Whig, we should have heard less of him in parallels or contrasts with Dryden. Of his dramatic pieces, amounting to about a dozen and a half, there is scarcely one that does not please more in perusal than any by the poet of the greater name,--always excepting Dryden's "Love for Love." Shadwell's "Squire of Alsatia," "Bury Fair," "Epsom Wells," and some others, were necessarily favourites with _his_ public, as they are good character comedies, brisk with movement and incident. For attacking Dryden's "Duke of Guise," Dryden pilloried the assailant for ever, as "Mac Flecnoe;" but when he says that "Shadwell never deviates into sense," he has as little foundation for his assertion as he has for his contempt of Wilmot, when he says in the _Essay upon Satire_, "Rochester I despise for want of wit." Rochester may have praised Shadwell because he hated Dryden; but Dryden's aspersions on the other two spring decidedly more from his passion than his judgment. To Shadwell was given the laureateship of which Dryden was deprived. The latter would have borne the deprivation better if the laurel-crown had fallen on another head, as he sings to Congreve: "Oh that your brows my laurel had sustained; Well had I been depos'd, if you had reigned!"