The works of John Dryden, now first collected in eighteen volumes. Volume 08

Chapter XXXV: Epilogue: TO

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THE PILGRIM.

Perhaps the parson stretched a point too far,
When with our theatres he waged a war.
He tells you, that this very moral age
Received the first infection from the stage;
But sure, a banished court, with lewdness fraught,
The seeds of open vice, returning, brought.
Thus lodged, (as vice by great example thrives,)
It first debauched the daughters and the wives.
London, a fruitful soil, yet never bore
So plentiful a crop of horns before.
The poets, who must live by courts, or starve,
Were proud, so good a government to serve;
And, mixing with buffoons and pimps prophane,
Tainted the stage for some small snip of gain:
For they, like harlots, under bawds profest,
Took all the ungodly pains, and got the least.
Thus did the thriving malady prevail;
The court its head, the poets but the tail.
The sin was of our native growth, 'tis true;
The scandal of the sin was wholly new.
Misses there were, but modestly concealed;
Whitehall the naked Venus first revealed,
Who standing as at Cyprus in her shrine,
The strumpet was adored with rites divine.
Ere this, if saints had any secret motion,
'Twas chamber-practice all, and close devotion.
I pass the peccadillos of their time;
Nothing but open lewdness was a crime.
A monarch's blood was venial to the nation,
Compared with one foul act of fornication[77].
Now, they would silence us, and shut the door
That let in all the bare-faced vice before.
As for reforming us, which some pretend, }
That work in England is without an end; }
Well may we change, but we shall never mend. }
Yet, if you can but bear the present stage,
We hope much better of the coming age.
What would you say, if we should first begin }
To stop the trade of love behind the scene, }
Where actresses make bold with married men? }
For while abroad so prodigal the dolt is,
Poor spouse at home as ragged as a colt is.
In short, we'll grow as moral as we can,
Save, here and there, a woman or a man;
But neither you, nor we, with all our pains,
Can make clean work; there will be some remains,
While you have still your Oates[78] and we our Haines[79].

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 77: The rigour of the republicans against female frailty, was of a piece with their general hypocrisy. It was, however, carried much farther in Scotland, where open adultery was declared by statute a capital crime. That act is still unrepealed, and may remind the reader of a verse I have somewhere read:

Beware, ye knights on British ground,
Beware, ye dames so free;
Full many a neck so straight and round
On gallows stretched might be.]

[Footnote 78: The infamous Oates fared, at the Revolution, not so well as he wished, though much better than he deserved. James II. by the extreme cruelty of the punishment, which Jefferies doomed, and he suffered to be inflicted, contrived to excite the public commiseration even in favour of this miscreant, whose forsworn tongue had occasioned more murders than the dagger of the most sanguinary bravo. After the Revolution he obtained a pardon, or rather remission of his inhuman sentence, to be imprisoned during life, and pilloried five times every year. He was also admitted to the comforts of a pension of L.400 a-year. But, although he bestirred himself to obtain a reversal of his judgement for perjury, and wrote an abusive pamphlet, entitled, a "Picture of the late King James," and dedicated to King William, that cool-headed monarch, and his sagacious council, would never restore him to a capacity of bearing evidence. The Earl of Danby, now Duke of Leeds, who had experienced the danger of his swearing capacity, would consent to the reversal in no other sense, than that, having been condemned to be scourged from Newgate to Tyburn, he should now be scourged back from Tyburn to Newgate. Dryden, therefore, without fear of offence, might venture a stroke of satire at this once formidable person.]

[Footnote 79: The allusion seems to be partly to Bryan Haines, the Tory evidence against Shaftesbury and College, a fellow almost as infamous as Oates; but chiefly, by way of equivoque, to the wicked wag Jee Haines, the comedian, who, amongst other pranks, chose, during the reign of James II., to become Roman Catholic. Whether he took this step from any serious prospect of advantage, or to throw ridicule on the new converts, is somewhat dubious; at least his apostacy was not founded upon conviction for, after the Revolution, he abjured the errors of Popery, spoke a penitentiary prologue, and reconciled himself to the church and theatre of England.]

THE END OF THE EIGHTH VOLUME.

Edinburgh:
Printed by James Ballantyne & Co.

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The works of John Dryden, now first collected in eighteen volumes. Volume 08Chapter XXXV: Epilogue: TO

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