* * * * *
The poets, who must live by courts or starve,
Were proud so good a Government to serve,
And, mixing with buffoons and pimps profane,
Tainted the Stage for some small snip of gain."
Dryden least of all men should have stooped to this palliation, for he
had, not without justice, said of himself "The same parts and application
which have made me a poet might have raised me to any honors of the
gown." Milton and Marvell neither lived by the Court, nor starved.
Charles Lamb most ingeniously defends the Comedy of the Restoration as
"the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry," where there was no
pretence of representing a real world.[47] But this was certainly not so.
Dryden again and again boasts of the superior advantage which his age had
over that of the elder dramatists, in painting polite life, and
attributes it to a greater freedom of intercourse between the poets and
the frequenters of the Court.[48] We shall be less surprised at the
_kind_ of refinement upon which Dryden congratulated himself, when we
learn (from the dedication of "Marriage a la Mode") that the Earl of
Rochester was its exemplar: "The best comic writers of our age will join
with me to acknowledge that they have copied the gallantries of courts,
the delicacy of expression, and the decencies of behavior from your
Lordship.
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