To you, ye fair, for patronage he sues;
O last defend who first inspired his muse!
In your soft service he has past his days,
And gloried to be born for woman's praise:
Deprest at length, and in your cause decayed,
The good old man to beauty bends for aid;
That beauty, he has taught so oft to moan!
That ne'er let Imoinda weep alone,
And made his Isabella's griefs its own!
Ere you arose to life, ye blooming train;

Ere time brought forth our pleasure and our pain;

He melted hearts, to monarchs' vows denied,
And softened to distress unconquered pride:

O! then protect, in his declining years,

The man, that filled your mother's eyes with tears!
The last of Charles's bards! The living name,
That rose, in that Augustan age, to fame!
And you, his brother authors, bravely dare
To join to-night the squadrons of the fair;
With zeal protect your veteran writer's page,
And save the drama's father, in his age:
Nor let the wreath from his grey head be torn,
For half a century with honour worn!
His merits let your tribe to mind recall;
Of some the patron, and the friend to all!

In him the poets' Nestor ye defend!

Great Otway's peer, and greater Dryden's friend.

Southerne, on his eighty-first birthday, was complimented with a copy of verses by Pope; and on 26th May 1746, he died at the advanced age of eighty-five and upwards.

EPISTLE THE TENTH.

SURE there's a fate in plays, and 'tis in vain
To write, while these malignant planets reign.
Some very foolish influence rules the pit,
Not always kind to sense, or just to wit;
And whilst it lasts, let buffoon'ry succeed,
To make us laugh, for never was more need.
Farce, in itself, is of a nasty scent;
But the gain smells not of the excrement.
The Spanish nymph, a wit and beauty too,
With all her charms, bore but a single show;
But let a monster Muscovite appear,
He draws a crowded audience round the year.
May be thou hast not pleased the box and pit;
Yet those who blame thy tale applaud thy wit:
So Terence plotted, but so Terence writ.
Like his, thy thoughts are true, thy language

clean;

Even lewdness is made moral in thy scene.*
The hearers may for want of Nokes + repine;
But rest secure, the readers will be thine.

* The moral of "The Wives' Excuse" is as bad as possible; but the language of the play is free from that broad licence which disgraces the dramatic taste of the age.

† Nokes was then famous for parts of low humour. Cibber thus describes him: "This celebrated comedian was of the middle size, his voice clear and audible, his natural countenance grave and sober; but the moment he spoke, the settled seriousness of his features was utterly discharged, and a dry,

VOL. XI.

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5

10

15

Nor was thy laboured drama damned or hissed, 20
But with a kind civility dismissed;

With such good manners as the Wife* did use,
Who, not accepting, did but just refuse.
There was a glance at parting; such a look,
As bids thee not give o'er for one rebuke.
But if thou wouldst be seen, as well as read,
Copy one living author, and one dead.
The standard of thy style let Etherege be;
For wit, the immortal spring of Wycherly.
Learn, after both, to draw some just design,
And the next age will learn to copy thine.

drolling, or laughing levity took such full possession of him, that I can only refer the idea of him to your imagination. In some of his low characters, that became it, he had a shuffling shamble in his gait, with so contented an ignorance in his aspect, and an awkward absurdity in his gesture, that, had you not known him, you could not have believed that naturally he could have had a grain of common-sense." Our author insinuates that the audience had been so accustomed to the presence of this facetious actor, that they could not tolerate a play where his low humour was excluded.

Alluding to the character of Mrs. Friendall in "The Wives' Excuse." [The wife in the play, Mrs. Friendall.—D.]

25

30

EPISTLE THE ELEVENTH.

ΤΟ

HENRY HIGDEN, Esq.

ON HIS TRANSLATION OF

THE TENTH SATIRE OF JUVENAL.

He

HENRY HIGDEN was a member of the honourable society of the Middle Temple, and during the reigns of James II. and William III. held some rank among the wits of the age. wrote a play called "Sir Noisy Parrot ; or, The Wary Widow," represented in 1693, which seems to have been most effectually damned; for in the preface the author complains that "the theatre was by faction transformed into a bear-garden, hissing, mimicking, ridiculing, and cat-calling." I mention this circumstance, because amongst the poetical friends who hastened to condole with Mr. Higden on the bad success of his piece, there is one who attributes it to the influence of our author over the inferior wits at Will's Coffee-House.* But it seems more generally admitted, as the cause of the

* From spawn of Will's, these wits of future tense,
He now appeals to men of riper sense;

And hopes to find some shelter from the wrath

Of furious critics of implicit faith;

Whose judgment always ebbs, but zeal flows high,

Who for these truths upon the Church rely.

Will's is the mother-Church: from thence their creed,
And as that censures, poets must succeed.

Here the great patriarch of Parnassus sits,
And grants his bulls to the subordinate wits.
From this hot-bed with foplings we 're opprest,
That crowd the boxes, and the pit infest;
Who their great master's falling spittle lick,
And at the neighbouring playhouse judge on tick.
Thus have I seen from some decaying oak,

A numerous toad-stool brood his moisture suck,

And as the reverend log his verdure sheds,

The fungous offspring flourishes and spreads.

Verses prefixed to "Sir Noisy Parrot," 4to, 1693.

downfall of "The Wary Widow," that the author, being a man of convivial temper, had introduced too great a display of good eating and drinking into his piece; and that the actors, although Mr. Higden complains of their general negligence, entered into these convivial scenes with great zeal, and became finally incapable of proceeding in their parts. The prologue was written by Sir Charles Sedley, in which the following lines seem to be levelled at Dryden's critical prefaces:

But against old, as well as new, to rage,

Is the peculiar phrenzy of this age;

Shakespeare must down, and you must praise no more

Soft Desdemona, or the jealous Moor.

Shakespeare, whose fruitful genius, happy wit,

Was framed and finished at a lucky hit;

The pride of nature, and the shame of schools,
Born to create, and not to learn from rules,
Must please no more. His bastards now deride
Their father's nakedness, they ought to hide;
But when on spurs their Pegasus they force,
Their jaded muse is distanced in the course.

If the admirers of Dryden were active in the condemnation of Higden's play, the offence probably lay in these verses.

It seems likely that Higden's translation of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal, which I have never seen, was printed before Dryden published his own version, in 1693; consequently, before the damnation of "The Wary Widow,” acted in the same year, which seems to have been attended with a quarrel between Dryden and the author. It is therefore very probable that this Epistle should have stood earlier in the arrangement; but, having no positive evidence, the Editor has not disturbed the former order. [The book was published in 1687. Scott was therefore right in guessing an earlier date.-ED.]

The circumstance is noticed by one of Higden's poetical comforters:-
Friend Harry, some squeamish pretenders to thinking,

Say, thy play is encumbered with eating and drinking;
That too oft, in conscience, thy table 's brought out,
And unmerciful healths fly like hail-shot about.
Such a merry objection who ere could expect,
That does on the town or its pleasures reflect?
Is a treat and a bottle grown quite out of fashion,
Or have the spruce beaus found a new recreation?
At a tavern I'm certain they seldom find fault,
When flask after flask in due order is brought:
Why then should the fops be so monstrous uncivil,
As to damn at a play, what they like at the Devil?
Begging pardon of this apologist, who subscribes himself Tho. Palmer,
there is some difference between the satisfaction of eating a good dinner at
a tavern, and seeing one presented on the stage.