Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/189

Rh leave me unprotected, I shall suffer all the rudeness to which his resentment can prompt his tongue."

"It was probably," says Scott, "during the course of these bickerings with his publisher, that Dryden, incensed at some refusal of accommodation on the part of Tonson, sent him three well-known coarse and forcible satirical lines, descriptive of his personal appearance:

Tell the dog,' said the poet to the messenger, 'that he who wrote these can write more.' But Tonson, perfectly satisfied with this single triplet, hastened to comply with the author's request, without requiring any further specimen of his poetical powers."

During these few years, though he was between the age of fifty and sixty, Dryden's intellect appears to have been in its greatest vigour. His was not that precocious genius which displays a promising blossom, and yields no fruit. One of his smallest successors has said of him in a couplet not, for Eusden, unusually limping:

and his sun having shone brightly in its meridian, set also in lustre. The account he gives of his faculties a few years before his death is interesting. In one of his letters he writes: "By the mercy of God I am already come within twenty years of his number (speaking of an old gentleman of fourscore and eight), a cripple in my limbs, but what decay is in my mind my readers must determine. I think myself as vigorous as ever in the faculties of my soul, excepting only my memory, which is not impaired to any great degree; and if I lose not more of it, I have no great reason to complain. What judgment I had increases rather than diminishes; and thoughts, such as