On what evidence does the statement rest, that the Earl of Mulgrave was the
author of the _Essay upon Satire_, and that Dryden merely corrected and
polished it? As at present advised, I have considerable doubt upon the
point: and although, in modern editions of Dryden's _Works_, I find it
headed _An Essay upon Satire, written by Mr. Dryden and the Earl of
Mulgrave_, yet in the _State Poems_, vol. i. p. 179., originally printed in
the lifetime of Dryden, it is attributed solely to him--"_An Essay upon
Satyr._ By J. Dryden, Esq." This gets rid of the assertion in the note of
"D.," in the Aldine edition of Dryden (i. 105.), that "the Earl of
Mulgrave's name has been _always_ joined with Dryden's, as concerned in the
composition." Was it not first published without notice that any other
person was concerned in it but Dryden?
The internal evidence, too, is strong that Dryden was the author of it. I
do not here refer to the {423} free, flexible, and idiomatic character of
the versification, so exactly like that of Dryden; but principally to the
description the _Essay upon Satire_ contains of the Earl of Mulgrave
himself, beginning,
"Mulgrave had much ado to scape the snare,
Though learn'd in those ill arts that cheat the fair;
For, after all, his vulgar marriage mocks,
With beauty dazzled Numps was in the stocks;"
And ending:
"Him no soft thoughts, no gratitude could move;
To gold he fled, from beauty and from love," &c.
Could Mulgrave have so written of himself; or could he have allowed Dryden
to interpolate the character. Earlier in the poem we meet with a
description of Shaftesbury, which cannot fail to call to mind Dryden's
character of him in _Absalom and Achitophel_; which, as we know, did not
make its appearance, even in its first shape, until two years after Dryden
was cudgelled in Rose Street as _the author_ of the _Essay upon Satire_.
Everybody bears in mind the triplet,
"A fiery soul, which working out its way,
Fretted his pigmy body to decay,
And o'er-inform'd the tenement of clay;"
And what does Dryden (for it must be he who writes) say of Shaftesbury in
the _Essay upon Satire_?
"As by our little Machiavel we find,
That nimblest creature of the busy kind:
His limbs are crippled, and his body shakes,
Yet his hard mind, which all this bustle makes,
No pity on its poor companion takes."
If Mulgrave wrote these lines, and Dryden only corrected them, Dryden was
at all events indebted to Mulgrave for the thought of the inequality, and
disproportion between the mind and body of Shaftesbury. Moreover, we know
that Pope expunged the assertion subsequently made, that Dryden had been
"punished" (not _beaten_, as "D." quotes the passage) "for another's
rhimes," when he was bastinadoed, in 1679, at the instigation of Rochester,
for the character of him in the _Essay upon Satire_.
It might suit Mulgrave's purpose afterwards to claim a share in this
production; but the evidence, as far as I am acquainted with it, seems all
against it. There may be much evidence on the point with which I am not
acquainted, and perhaps some of your readers will be so good as to point it
out to me. The question is one that I am, at this moment, especially
interested in.