Otway crawls at the feet of the King's concubine, the rapacious Duchess of Portsmouth, in his dedication of "Venice Preserved," and almost invites her to void her rheum upon his head. However generous the woman may have been to him, the man is abject. The play he presents is but as the poor apple offered by a clown to an emperor! "Next to Heaven," all his gratitude is due to her Grace! It was she who dragged him from the mire, and set him to bask in "those royal beams whose warmth is all I have, or hope, to live by." Then, after asserting his loyalty and his scorn of republicanism, the poet thus tumbles for the amusement of, or by way of homage to, this handsome and painted Jezebel!--"Nature and fortune were certainly in league when you were born, and as the first took care to give you beauty enough to enslave the hearts of all the world, so the other resolved to do its merit justice that none but a monarch fit to rule that world should e'er possess it; and in it he had an empire. The young prince you have given him, by his blooming virtues early declared the mighty stock he came from;" and so forth. That this prince, the first Duke of Richmond of the present line, will always aid the cause of the Stuarts and smite all rebels, is part prayer, part prophecy, on the side of the poet, who in this case was no Vates, for the Duke served as aide-de-camp to William in Flanders, and died a Lord of the Bedchamber to King George I. In course of time, as the little Duke grows to manhood, the poets keep him in view, and in their dedications oppress him with praise of his parents' qualities and his own. Southern is among the foremost and the most flattering of these eulogists. He dedicates his first venture, the "Loyal Brother" (1682), to the Duke. "Could my vanity," says the author, when dedications were paid for at a rate varying from five to twenty guineas, "carry me to the hopes of succeeding in things of this kind, I am confident my surest way would be to draw my characters from you, in whom the fairest images in nature are shown in little. Your royal father's Greatness, Majestic Awfulness, Wit, and Goodness, are promised all in you. Your mother's conquering beauty triumphs again in you. Nothing is wanting to crown our hopes, but time, to make you in England what Titus was in Rome,--the Delight of Mankind." The Russian Admiral, Livsoski, claims that title now for the Czar,--the holy master of the Mouravieffs and De Bergs,--whose shedding of human blood is gratefully acknowledged by the new Titus,--athirst for vengeance.