Ah, how severe your malice was that day!
To damn, at once, the poet and his play:
But why was your rage just at that time shown,
When what the author writ was all his own?
Till then, he borrowed from romance, and did translate;
And those plays found a mere indulgent fate."
[27] "For my own part, I, who am the least among the poets, have yet the
fortune to be honoured with the _best patron_, and the best friend; for
(to omit some great persons of our court, to whom I am many ways
obliged, and who have taken care of me during the exigencies of a war.)
I have found a better Maecenas in the person of my Lord Treasurer
Clifford, and a more elegant Tibullus in that of Sir Charles Sedley."--
_Dedication to the Assignation_.
[28] In his Dedication of the Pastorals of Virgil to Hugh Lord Clifford,
he says: "I have no reason to complain of fortune, since, in the midst
of that abundance, I could not have chosen better than the worthy son of
so illustrious a father. He was the patron of my manhood, when I
flourished in the opinion of the world, though with small advantage to
my fortune, till he awakened the remembrance of my royal master. He was
that Pollio, or that Varus, _who introduced me to Augustus_."
[29] The elder Richardson has told a story, that Lord Buckhurst,
afterwards Earl of Dorset, was the first who introduced the "Paradise
Lost," then lying like waste paper in the bookseller's hands, to the
notice of Dryden.
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