Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/177

Rh But while Dryden had abandoned rhyme, and accepted Shakespeare as a model and an exemplar, his taste in comedy had not proportionately improved.

In the same year in which "All for Love" was played with the highest success, he wrote a comedy entitled "Limberham, or the Kind Keeper," which is his most stupid and most objectionable play. His object was, it appears, to attack "the crying sin of keeping." But the satire was unfortunately as gross or grosser than the vices it sought to denounce—the remedy was worse than the disease; and "Limberham," after having been scarcely tolerated for three nights, was driven off the stage. It certainly deserved no better fate, for it is one tissue of obscenity from first to last. Every man is an adulterer, every woman an adulteress, the whole plot turns on the grossest immorality, and the scenes are laid in places which it is not decent to name; there is not a grace of sentiment, or a pulse of love to disguise or elevate the indecent intrigues. It is full of contretemps, surprises and escapes; there are a few smart and laughable witticisms, but not the slightest success in the delineation of character. Dryden endeavours to defend it in the following plausible way: "The crime for which it suffered was that which is objected against the Satires of Juvenal and the Epigrams of Catullus, that it expressed too much of the vice which it decryed. Your Lordship knows what answer was returned by the elder of those Poets, whom I last mentioned, to his accusers:

There is, however, a vast distinction, to which self-love blinded Dryden, between the healthy and earnest coarseness of Juvenal or the wit of Catullus, and the profane pruriency M 2