Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/171

Rh subject, is only History; in which Fiction has no part; I can employ nothing of poetry in it, any more than I do in that humble protestation which I make to continue ever your Grace's most obedient and most devoted servant."

Dryden having now by his plays, poems, and prose writings acquired much popularity, produced those two very remarkable dramas, the first and second parts of "The Conquest of Granada." He prefaced them by an essay on heroic plays, in which he defends the stilted and bombastic style of these dramas, and endeavours to support his view by parallels from Homer, and criticisms from Horace. He concludes with a confident allusion to his success. "But I have already swept the stakes; and with the common good-fortune of prosperous gamesters, can be content to sit quietly; to hear my fortune cursed by some, and my faults arraigned by others; and to suffer both without reply." When he wrote this, he did not know that "The Rehearsal" was in preparation.

He was now in the zenith of his fame. Among noble friends and patrons, he numbered the Duke of Ormond, Lord Rochester, the Duke of Newcastle, Lord Clifford, the Earl of Dorset and Sir Charles Sedley. It was at this time that he spent in noble society those convivial nights which he alludes to in the dedication of "The Assignation," when writing to Sir C. Sedley, and speaking of the Roman poets of the Augustine age, he says: "They imitated the best way of living, which was to pursue an innocent and inoffensive pleasure; that which one of the ancients called Eruditam Voluptatem. We have like them, our genial nights; where our discourse is neither too serious nor too light; but always pleasant, and for the most part instructive: the raillery neither too sharp upon the present, nor too censorious on the absent; and the cups only such as will raise the