" It is probable that the rhyming peer was dissatisfied with
Dryden's unusual economy of adulation; at least he disappointed some
expectations which the poet and bookseller seem to have entertained of
his liberality.[7] This dedication indicates, that a quarrel was
commenced between our author and the critic Rymer. It appears from a
passage in a letter to Tonson, that Rymer had spoken lightly of him in
his last critique (probably in the short view of tragedy), and that the
poet took this opportunity, as he himself expresses it, to snarl again.
He therefore acquaints us roundly, that the corruption of a poet was the
generation of a critic; exults a little over the memory of Rymer's
"Edgar," a tragedy just reeking from damnation; and hints at the
difference which the public is likely to experience between the present
royal historiographer and him whose room he occupied. In his epistle to
Congreve, alluding to the same circumstance of Rymer's succeeding to the
office of historiographer, as Tate did to the laurel, on the death of
Thomas Shadwell, in 1692, Dryden has these humorous lines:
"O that your brows my laurel had sustained!
Well had I been deposed, if you had reigned:
The father had descended for the son;
For only you are lineal to the throne.
Thus, when the state one Edward did depose,
A greater Edward in his room arose:
But now not I, but poetry, is cursed;
For Tom the second reigns like Tom the first.
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