was highly successful, owing much to the comic talents of Nokes the actor, of whose playing in this piece Cibber has left us some account.
Next followed "Evening Love, or the Mock Astrologer." It was to see this play that Pepys tells us, "my wife and Deb went, thinking to spy me there, but did not." Pepys himself went on the afternoons of the 20th and 22nd, and pronounces it "very smutty, and nothing so good as 'The Maiden Queen' and 'The Indian Emperor.'" Evelyn condemns it more strongly, "as a foolish plot and very profane." "It affected me," he says, "to see how much the stage was degenerated and polluted by the licentious times." Herringman, the printer and publisher with whom we have before said Dryden once lodged, informed Pepys that Dryden himself admitted that this was but a fifth-rate play. Poor as it is, it has not even the praise of originality, for it is chiefly borrowed from a play of Corneille, who borrowed his from Calderon.
He next wrote "The Royal Martyr," which he dedicates to the Duke of Monmouth, in a preface in which he lauds the Duke's personal charms. "Youth, beauty, and courage (all which you possess in the height of their perfection), are the desirable gifts of Heaven; and Heaven is never prodigal of such treasures but to some uncommon purpose. So goodly a fabrick was never framed by an Almighty Architect for a vulgar guest. He shewed the value which he set upon your mind when he took care to have it so nobly and so beautifully lodged. To a graceful fashion and deportment of body you have joined a winning conversation, and an easy greatness derived to you from the best and best beloved of Princes. And with a great power of obliging, the world has observed in you a desire to oblige, even beyond your power. This, and all that I can say on so excellent and large a
