who thus retorted upon him in the preface to the Fables:--
"As for the City Bard, or Knight Physician, I hear his quarrel to me is,
that I was the author of 'Absalom and Achitophel,' which he thinks, is
a little hard on his fanatic patrons in London.
"But I will deal the more civilly with his two poems, because nothing
ill is to be spoken of the dead; and, therefore, peace be to the manes
of his 'Arthurs.' I will only say, that it was not for this noble knight
that I drew the plan of an epic poem on King Arthur, in my preface to
the translation of Juvenal. The guardian angels of kingdoms were
machines too ponderous for him to manage; and therefore he rejected
them, as Dares did the whirl bats of Eryx, when they were thrown before
him by Entellus: yet from that preface, he plainly took his hint; for he
began immediately upon the story, though he had the baseness not to
acknowledge his benefactor, but, instead of it, to traduce me in a
libel."
Blackmore, who had perhaps thought the praise contained in his two last
couplets ought to have allayed Dryden's resentment, finding that they
failed in producing this effect, very unhandsomely omitted them in his
next edition, and received, as will presently be noticed, another
flagellation, in the last verses Dryden ever wrote.
But a more formidable champion than Blackmore had arisen, to scourge the
profligacy of the theatre. This was no other than the celebrated Jeremy
Collier, a nonjuring clergyman, who published, in 1698, "A Short View of
the Immorality and Profaneness of the Stage.
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