Dryden had been seized with a severe fit of illness while hastening to finish 'Cleomenes,' and he was compelled to call in the aid of a young friend, Southerne, to finish it for him. Southerne, Dryden's junior by twenty-eight years, had acquired sudden celebrity by his first play, 'The Loyal Brother, or the Persian Prince,' produced in 1682, when he was only twenty-three. It had been brought on the stage with a prologue and epilogue by Dryden; and Dryden again had written the prologue for Southerne's second play, 'The Disappointment, or the Mother in Fashion,' which had also been a success. A check came to Southerne's success in 1692, shortly after Dryden had honoured him by seeking his assistance for 'Cleomenes.' His fourth play, the 'Wives' Excuse,' was not well received on the stage, and Dryden now consoled his young friend by some lines of condolence and compliment. He ascribed the want of success to the story and the absence of a favourite actor:

'Yet those who blame thy tale commend thy wit,

So Terence plotted, but so Terence writ.

Like his, thy thoughts are true, thy language clean,

Even lewdness is made moral in thy scene.

The hearers may for want of Nokes repine,

But rest secure, the readers will be thine.
Nor was thy laboured drama damned or hissed,

But with a kind civility dismissed.'

One more play, 'Love Triumphant, or Nature will Prevail,' was produced by Dryden in the beginning of 1694, and he relinquished play-writing. 'Love Triumphant' was a failure. A letter written by one who was evidently a bitter enemy of Dryden, and who calls him 'huffing Dryden,' says that the play was 'damned by the universal cry of the town.'

'Don Sebastian' was dedicated to the Earl of Leicester, elder brother of Algernon Sydney; 'Amphitryon' to Sir William Leveson Gower of Trentham; 'King Arthur' to George Saville, Marquis of Halifax; 'Cleomenes' to Lawrence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, son of the Lord Chancellor Clarendon, and uncle to Queen Mary; and 'Love Triumphant' to the Earl of Salisbury. These were all friends

of the Revolution, and of William and Mary's government, who, Dryden is careful to say in each of his dedications, had continued kind to him in his adversity. He endeavoured, he says, 'to pitch on such men only as have been pleased to own me in this ruin of my small fortune, who, though they are of a contrary opinion themselves, yet blame me not for adhering to a lost cause and judging for myself, what I cannot choose but judge, so long as I am a patient sufferer and no disturber of the government.' To Lord Leicester, whose mansion was near his own residence in Gerrard Street, Dryden writes that 'his best prospect is on the garden of Leicester House,' and that its owner has more than once offered him his patronage, 'to reconcile him to a world of which his misfortunes have made him weary.' And in the last of these dedications, written in 1694, and addressed to the Earl of Salisbury, to whom he says that his wife was related, he writes, 'You have been pleased to take a particular notice of me even in this lowness of my fortunes, to which I have voluntarily reduced myself, and of which I have no reason to be ashamed.' Dryden held himself proudly in his enforced change of circumstances. King William's government could not favour him, even if there were the disposition to do so. His Toryism and his many gibes at the Dutch might have been, and probably would have been, generously forgiven; but he could not recant his new Roman Catholic religion and conform to the tests required for office. In his poem 'Eleonora,' written in 1691, in honour of the memory of the Countess of Abingdon, for which he received a very handsome pecuniary reward of five hundred guineas from the Earl, he speaks of himself as one

Who, not by cares or wants of age deprest,
Stems a wild deluge with a dauntless breast.'

Dryden had in 1692 produced, with aid from others, a translation of the Satires of Juvenal and Persius, to which he prefixed a 'Discourse on Satire,' addressed to the Earl of Dorset. Among those who aided him were his two elder sons, John and Charles. Dryden himself translated the first,

third, sixth, tenth, and sixteenth Satires of Juvenal, and the
whole of Persius. Dryden also wrote a life of Polybius for
a translation by Sir Henry Shere, given to the world in 1692.
A third volume of 'Miscellanies' was published, under Dryden's
editorship, in 1693, and a fourth in 1694. In the last volume
appeared Dryden's translation of the fourth Georgic of Virgil,
and his poem addressed to Sir Godfrey Kneller. This poem
has been always reprinted in an imperfect state; the omitted
passages are restored in the lately-published Globe edition.
One of the omitted passages, immediately following an
allusion to the first pair in Eden, is of autobiographical
interest:-
--

'Forgive the allusion; 'twas not meant to bite,
But Satire will have room, where'er I write.'

There is in this poem an admirable description of a perfect portrait :

'Likeness is ever there, but still the best,

Like proper thoughts in lofty language drest.'

Dryden's new friendship with Southerne has been mentioned. Through Southerne he became acquainted with another young dramatist, Congreve, who was also early famous. Congreve's first play, 'The Old Bachelor,' was brought out in 1693; Dryden had seen it in manuscript, and declared that he never saw such a good play, and he aided to adapt it for the stage. Congreve was at this time but twentythree years old. A second play was produced by him within a twelvemonth, 'The Double Dealer,' which did not attain the brilliant success that had attended Congreve's first effort. Dryden, who the year before had consoled Southerne under a similar disappointment, now addressed to Congreve a poem, which was prefixed to 'The Double Dealer' when published. The poem is headed, 'To my dear friend, Mr. Congreve.' He anticipates in this poem a brilliant future for Congreve, designates him as the fittest of living writers for the laureateship which he himself had lost, and ends in well-known beautiful lines by bequeathing to Congreve the care of his own reputation :

In him all beauties of this age we see,
Etherege his courtship, Southern's purity,
The satire, wit, and strength of Wycherly.
All this in blooming youth you have achieved,
Nor are your foiled contemporaries grieved;
So much the sweetness of your manners move,
We cannot envy you, because we love.

Already I am worn with cares and age,
And just abandoning the ungrateful stage;
Unprofitably kept at Heaven's expense,
I live a rent-charge on His providence.
But you, whom every Grace and Muse adorn,
Whom I foresee to better fortune born,
Be kind to my remains; and oh, defend,
Against your judgment, your departed friend.
Let not the insulting foe my fame pursue,
But shade those laurels which descend to you:
And take for tribute what these lines express,
You merit more, nor could my love do less.'

An air of insincerity is given to the prophecy of the laurel for Congreve by a similar compliment addressed a few years later to another young dramatist, George Granville, who was rich and of noble family, and became afterwards Secretary of State and a peer, with the title of Lord Lansdowne, and who was a beneficent friend of Dryden in his last years. A poem addressed to Mr. Granville in 1690, 'on his excellent tragedy, called "Heroic Love," contains these lines :

'But since 'tis Nature's law in love and wit,

That youth should reign, and withering age submit,

With less regret those laurels I resign,
Which, dying on my brows, revive on thine.

Thine be the laurel then: thy blooming age
Can best, if any can, support the stage c.'

Dryden renounced the drama in 1694, in order to devote himself to the translation of Virgil, a work which occupied him almost exclusively for the next three years. The translation was published by subscription in 1697, and it was a success both pecuniarily and in respect of fame. Writing to his sons a few months after the publication, he says, 'My Virgil succeeds in the world beyond its desert or my reputation,' and he goes on to say that the profits might have been more had his conscience allowed him to comply with the wish of his publisher Tonson, and dedicate the work to the King. The publisher had been so bent on gaining his point in this matter that he caused the engraving of Æneas to be altered into some likeness of William, in the hope that Dryden might relent at the last moment. But this wily stratagem failed, and Dryden's Virgil appeared with three separate dedications; of the Pastorals to Lord Clifford, the son of his early patron, the Lord Treasurer; of the Georgics to the Earl of Chesterfield; and of the Æneid, to his old and kind friend Mulgrave, now Marquis of Normanby. The Virgil was published by subscription. There were two sets of subscribers: one of five guineas each, and the other of two guineas. There were 102 of the first class, and 250 of the second. The profit to Dryden was twelve or thirteen hundred pounds. It is extremely difficult to arrive at a definite notion of the exact arrangements between Dryden and Tonson as to profits, and Malone and other biographers have expended much ingenuity

• George Powel, one of the principal actors at Drury Lane Theatre, irritated by taunts at the Drury Lane company in Dryden's poem to Granville, twitted Dryden with his giving to Granville laurels which he had given away before, both to Congreve and Southerne. (Preface to The Fatal Discovery, or Love in Ruins,' 1698, quoted by Malone, vol. i. part i. p. 311.)