"
"It is no shame," says Dryden himself, "to be a poet, though it is to
be a bad one."
[77] Gray, _ubi supra_, p. 38.
[78] Scott had never seen Pepys's Diary when he wrote this, or he
would have left it unwritten: "Fell to discourse of the last night's
work at Court, where the ladies and Duke of Monmouth acted the
'Indian Emperor,' wherein they told me these things most remarkable
that not any woman but the Duchess of Monmouth and Mrs. Cornwallis
did anything but like fools and stocks, but that these two did do
most extraordinary well: that not any man did anything well but
Captain O'Bryan, who spoke and did well, but above all things did
dance most incomparably."--14th January, 1668.
[79] See also that noble passage in the "Hind and Panther"
(1572-1591), where this is put into verse. Dryden always thought in
prose.
[80] Probably on the authority of this very epitaph, as if epitaphs
were to be believed even under oath! A great many authors live
because we read nothing but their tombstones. Oldham was, to borrow
one of Dryden's phrases, "a bad or, which is worse, an indifferent
poet."
[81] "He was of a nature exceedingly humane and compassionate easily
forgiving injuries, and capable of a prompt and sincere
reconciliation with them that had offended him.
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