chiefly excited the ire of the duchess; but we suspect it must have been the last line. She might have submitted to the other articles of defamation from prudential motives; but to be told at nine-and-twenty, in the full-bloom of her influence and her beauty, that she was foolish, old, and ill-bred, was past endurance. Could any ordinary woman forgive this? As for Nelly, she did not care a straw for such attacks, and took her revenge in shouts of laughter. The revenge of the duchess was not quite so merry. She held counsel with Rochester about the authorship. He was a judge of styles, and he fixed the responsibility on Dryden.
It was not his critical instinct alone that led him to this conclusion. He had a “grudge” against the Laureate, as the newspaper hinted, and here was an opportunity to gratify it. The whole story of Rochester’s baseness in this matter would carry us far beyond our immediate subject, so we must come to the issue at once. Rochester had formerly been Dryden’s “patron.” In those days men of letters had patrons, and wore them on their title-pages as dogs wear collars. Whatever obligations lay between them in that relation, Dryden had closed a few years before by a handsome dedication, in which he likened Rochester to the gods. Being thus fairly off with the old love, he considered himself at liberty to be on with a new one, and so transferred his attachment to the Earl of Mulgrave. This was the mortal offence. Between Rochester and Mulgrave there raged a feud. They had had a quarrel, and Mulgrave had posted Rochester as a coward, because he refused to fight him. No doubt Mulgrave was right; for, although Rochester began life bravely enough, there never was a greater coward at heart. He was so perpetually haunted by the fear of seeing the ghost of his friend Montague, who was killed in the Dutch war, that he is said to have given himself up to dissipation to escape the horrors of solitude. He appears to have been thoroughly conscious of his infirmity; and the resentment he felt at its exposure was bitter in proportion. A man who has had his unmanly qualities laid bare, is apt to imagine personalities where none is intended; and when Dryden took up with Mulgrave for his patron, it seemed to Rochester as if he espoused his quarrel. This was not to be forgiven; and Rochester, who once extolled Dryden’s genius to the skies, now set the meanest of the herd of playwrights above him. He stopped at nothing to drag down his reputation. Ill-will begets ill-will. Dryden speaks unfavourably of Rochester; the whisper goes round, and Rochester, in correspondence with a private friend, announces his determination, should Dryden attack him with his pen, to “leave the repartee to Black Will, with a cudgel.” Soon after this out creeps the “Essay on Satire,” in which everybody is abused except Mulgrave, upon whom the author bestows a masked panegyric. The exception is suspicious; and Rochester, putting all these circumstances together, believes he has detected the cloven foot. “The author is apparent, Mr. ,” he writes to his friend, “his patron, Lord , having a panegyric in the midst.” He communicates his conviction to the duchess; a counsel of war is held; and it is decided that Dryden shall be handed over to “Black Will with a cudgel.”
Had Dryden written the satire, the “repartee” might, or might not, be justifiable; but, in any case, the Duchess of Portsmouth and Lord Rochester were the last persons who should have taken the law into their own hands. They must have had treacherous memories when they sat in judgment upon Dryden. They must have forgotten what flattering lines Dryden wrote upon Louise do Quérouaille when she came to England—he who, to the last drop of his pen, knew how to write so emotionally on “the power of beauty;” and, above all, they must have forgotten the scurrilous and profligate verses written by Rochester to the same lady. They must have agreed to a wide act of oblivion, very wonderful to think of in relation to the unutterable obscenity of Rochester, before they could have joined in a conspiracy against the Laureate. But such combinations are always unfathomable.
But what if Dryden were not the author of what is now known in our literature as the Rose Alley Satire? Can it be possible that the Rose Alley Ambuscade, as the dastardly attack is called in some lines falsely ascribed to Prior,
A crab-tree cudgel in a narrow street,
was plotted against an innocent man, and fell upon the wrong shoulders? The evidence is entirely circumstantial. Let us glance at it.
In less than three years after the assault, Lord Mulgrave published, anonymously, an Essay upon Poetry, containing the following reference to the transaction:
The laureate here may justly claim our praise,
Crowned by Mac Fleckno with immortal bays;
Though praised and punish’d for another’s rhymes,
His own deserve that glorious fate sometimes.
The allusion is fully explained by a note to this passage in a subsequent edition, informing us that what is meant by “another’s rhymes,” is “a copy of verses called the Essay on Satire, for which Mr. Dryden was both applauded and beaten, though not only innocent, but ignorant of the whole matter.” It would seem from this statement, under the hand of Mulgrave, that, whoever was the author, Dryden was not. Who, then, was the author? It would be as good as the detection of the concealed mischief-maker in a comedy to be able to answer off-hand—Mulgrave himself. But we cannot exactly do that, although we can go very near it, as the remaining shreds of evidence will show
In the note just quoted, we have Mulgrave’s testimony that Dryden did not write the Satire; and in the first collected edition of Mulgrave’s own works, published two years after his death, we have his widow’s testimony that he wrote it himself in 1675. The testimony, to be sure, is not worth much. We have no means of determining whether it comes from the widow direct, or from the unknown editor to whom she delegated the getting-up of the edition, in the lavish gorgeousness of which she was much more interested than in its literary trustworthiness. Worth much or little, however, here is a fact which cannot be