left out of the case, that the poem was claimed for Mulgrave in the first edition of his works, and that the claim was repeated unchallenged in a second edition three years afterwards. The presence in the poem of a panegyric on Mulgrave himself is not at all inconsistent with this claim. It is a mere blind to divert suspicion.
On the other hand, the Satire was published in the State Poems with Dryden’s name as the author; this, too, while Dryden and Mulgrave were both alive. But it is proper that the reader, who sees many mysterious allusions to these State Poems, thickly sown amongst the critical notices of the literature of the Protectorate and the Restoration, should be apprised that the work is a vagrant miscellany of verses picked up from all manner of sources; very curious as a refugium for satirical lampoons that must, otherwise, have been lost, but of no value whatever as an authority. What amount of credit is due to its ascription of the Satire to Dryden, may be inferred from the somewhat startling fact, that in a subsequent edition it ascribes the same poem to the Earl of Mulgrave.
Another witness, of undoubted personal respectability, is quoted from memory, after a long lapse of years, as having asserted positively that Dryden was the sole author of the poem; but his evidence must be rejected on the ground that he states a circumstance in connection with the authorship which we know to be untrue.
Nearly half a century after Dryden’s death, his poems were collected, and the Essay on Satire was inserted amongst them as the joint production of Dryden and Mulgrave. Anything for a quiet life! Our national tendency to settle differences, avoid conflicts, and reconcile antagonisms by an easy compromise, is constantly carried into our literature: and here is a notable instance. The circumstantial evidence being loose and imperfect, and the internal evidence by no means satisfactory either way, it has been generally agreed from that time to the present to divide the responsibility by giving Mulgrave the crude first thoughts, and Dryden the shaping, and strengthening, and polishing, together with some of the touches on Shaftesbury, which closely resemble parts of his own portrait of him in Absalom and Achitophel, and the whole of the encomium on Mulgrave. This, of course, is mere surmise, over which every reader is entitled to exercise his own judgment. But it is the opinion of many excellent critics, that whatever revision, if any, Dryden may have bestowed on the poem, Mulgrave was its sole author.
The result is a strong probability that Dryden really was, as Mulgrave tells us, “punished for another’s rhymes.” Whether it was a part of the compact between poets and their patrons that the one should bear the odium and its consequences of the literary misdemeanours of the other, has not transpired; but in this affair it was evidently Dryden’s relations with Mulgrave that drew upon him the vengeance of the duchess and her friend; and to that account, therefore, must be set down the damage he incurred. Such is the moral of the transaction; and it is a moral which unlocks much of the obscure literary life of the seventeenth century.
Black Will and his confederates were never discovered, although all the usual machinery of the civil power was put in motion, and a reward of 50l. was offered for the discovery of the offenders. A proclamation in the London Gazette set forth, that “Whereas John Dryden, Esq., was on Thursday, the 8th inst., at night, barbarously assaulted and wounded in Rose Street, in Covent Garden, by divers men unknown;” adding, that any person who should make discovery “shall not only receive 50l., which is deposited in the hands of Mr. Blanchard, goldsmith, next door to Temple Bar, for the said purpose, but if he be a principal or an accessory in the said fact, his Majesty is graciously pleased to promise him his pardon for the same.” But the duchess and Rochester bribed higher than the king, and the criminals escaped justice.
The alley being dark and narrow, the hour late, few people abroad, and the attack sudden, Dryden was hurt before he could see his assailants, or offer any defence. He was then in the prime of life, approaching fifty, and in full possession of his physical powers. But he was not a man of active habits, and could at no time have made an effectual resistance against so ferocious an assault. He was seriously wounded, and might have lost his life, had he not cried out, “Murder!” so lustily, that the villains fled in alarm. At that moment poor Butler was lying on his death-bed in his garret, which looked out on the scene of the outrage; and Dryden’s cry of “Murder!” must have reached his ears. Similar cries were, perhaps, too frequent in the purlieus of the Strand and Drury Lane to excite much attention; but we may easily imagine how the voice calling for help at that hour of the night would have affected Butler had he known whose it was!
RELIQUES OF THE LOST.
“A large boat; within her were two human skeletons . . . a small Bible, interlined in many places, with numerous references written in the margin.”—Capt. McClintock’s Journal.
Our stout hearts brave the ice-winds bleak,
Our keen eyes scan the endless snow:
All sign or trace of those we seek
Has past and perish’d long ago.
O, flash of hope! O, joyous thrill!
Onward with throbbing hearts we haste,
For, looming through the ice-fog chill,
A lonely boat is on the waste!
Sad recompense of all our toil,
Wrung from the iron realms of frost,
A mournful, but a precious spoil,—
A reliquary of the lost.
Here lie the arms, the sail, the oar,
Dank with the storms of winters ten,
And by their unexhausted store
The bones that once were stalwart men.
Their last dark record none may learn:
Whether, in feebleness and pain,
Heartsick they watch’d for the return
Of those who never came again;
