Sheridan must, nevertheless, have felt that he was in error with regard to these old authors. In his "Trip to Scarborough," which is an entire recasting of Vanbrugh's "Relapse," he makes Loveless (Smith) say, "It would surely be a pity to exclude the productions of some of our best writers for want of a little wholesome pruning, which might be effected by any one who possessed modesty enough to believe that we should preserve all we can of our deceased authors, at least, till they are outdone by the living ones."
Dryden said of Congreve's "Double Dealer," that though it was censured by the greater part of the town, it was approved of by those best qualified to judge. The people who had a sense of decency were derided by Dryden; they were angry, he insinuated, only because the satire touched them nearly. Applying the grossest terms to women, in a letter to Walsh, he protests that they are incensed because Congreve exposes their vices, and that the gallants are equally enraged because their vices, too, are exposed; but even if it were true that Congreve copied from nature, it is also true that he laughs _with_ his vicious and brilliant bad men and women, makes a joke of vice, and never attempts to correct it.
Dryden, as an erst Westminster boy and Cambridge man, may have felt some annoyance on the exposure of his false quantity in the penultimate of "Cleomenes," but to a pert coffee-house fop, who presumed to review his tragedy of that name, he could deliver a crushing reply. In that play Cleomenes virtuously resists the blandishments of Cassandra. "Had I been left alone with a young beauty," said a stripling critic to glorious John, "I would not have spent my time like your Spartan." "That, sir," said Dryden, "perhaps is true; but give me leave to tell you, you are no hero!" Good as this is, Lee said even a better thing to the coxcomb who visited him in Bedlam, during Lee's four years sojourn there. "It is an easy thing," observed this fellow, "to write like a madman." "No," answered Lee, "it is not an easy thing to write like a madman; but it is very easy to write like a fool."
Dryden, however, could criticise himself with justness. He confessed that he was not qualified to write comedies. He saw, too, the defects in his tragedies. He was ashamed of his "Tyrannic Love," and laughed at the rant and fustian of his Maximin. He allowed that in his "Conquest of Granada" the sublimity burst into burlesque, and he could censure the extravagance of Almanzor as freely as he did the bombast of Maximin. Still he was uneasy under censure; he was disappointed at the reception given to his "Assignation," and complained bitterly of the critics, especially of Settle. His best defender was Charles II. Some courtiers ventured to wonder at the King going so often to see "The Spanish Friar," as the piece was a wholesale robbery. "Odds fish!" exclaimed Charles, "select me another such a comedy,[65] and I'll go and see it as often as I do 'The Spanish Friar.'" "All for Love" is Dryden's most carefully written play, and the author repeatedly declared that the scene in Act I., between Anthony and Ventidius, was superior to anything he had ever composed.
