Only nine years earlier, a Church of England colony had been founded at Canterbury, in the South Island, and the town of Christchurch had been founded. It had enjoyed a great success, and by the year 1859, when Butler landed, almost all the sheep lands had been already taken up. At last he found an unoccupied run at the "back of beyond," and built a little homestead for himself, which he called Mesopotamia. It is needless to dwell on this episode of Butler"s life, further than to point out that it proved him capable of sustained physical industry and of considerable financial adroitness. The remainder of his career hardly suggests the possession of either. The New Zealand episode is sufficiently dealt with in Butler"s own book, _A First Year in Canterbury Settlement_, which, by the way, shows no trace of the author"s subsequent merit as a writer. In June, 1864, he sailed homeward from the port of Lyttelton, but not alone, and we now approach the strangest incident of his life.
It was to be expected that the 4,400 which Butler had received from his father in 1859 would by this time have dwindled to zero. Not at all; it had swelled to 8,000. But just before he left New Zealand a young man, called Charles Pauli, whom he had known but very slightly as a journalist in Christchurch, and who had no claim upon Butler of any sort or species, came to him and asked him to pay for his pa.s.sage back to England, and to advance him 200 a year for three years. "To me," wrote Butler in 1897, "in those days this seemed perfectly easy; and Pauli, I have not the smallest doubt, intended and fully believed--for his temperament was always sanguine--that he should be able to repay me."
Butler had very little insight into the "temperament" of Pauli, and the whole of the extraordinary story increases our conviction that this sardonic and sarcastic a.n.a.lyst of imaginary life was as powerless as a child in face of reality. The dreadful Pauli adventure, told for the first time by Mr. Festing Jones, in his deliberate, unimpa.s.sioned way, is the most amazing revelation of simplicity traded upon by fraud that it is possible to imagine.
There soon proved to be a complete absence of harmony in the tastes of Butler and Pauli, who had really nothing in common. Yet they settled together, when they arrived in London, in rooms in Clifford"s Inn, Fleet Street. There Butler lived for all the rest of his life, thirty-eight years; but presently Pauli went elsewhere. Then the relations of the two became incomprehensible. Pauli was very irritable, and constantly found fault with Butler. He refused to let Butler know his address, and yet was continually sponging upon him. He said that he could get no help from his own parents, and that Butler stood between him and starvation.
For three years Pauli did not attempt to work. At last, in 1867, he was called to the Bar. He lunched with Butler three times a week, when he always said that he was earning nothing. Butler"s own statement, written in 1898, the year after Pauli"s death, is as follows:
I have no means of ascertaining how much Pauli had from me between the years 1864 and 1881 (but it exceeded 3,500). I kept no accounts; I took no receipts from him; the understanding was that he would repay me when he came into his reversion.... In 1879 I only admitted to my father having helped Pauli from time to time; the fact was, I had done everything.... I had more than shared every penny I had with him, but I believed myself to be doing it out of income, and to have a right to do it.
Throughout the long periods in which Butler was hard pressed for sufficient money to exist--times in which there were painful and unseemly squabbles about an allowance between his father and himself--he was supporting Pauli, whose means of subsistence he took no pains to investigate, and who, in full cognition of Butler"s attenuated sources of income, punctually took half for himself. Mr. Festing Jones"s statement is amazing:
Pauli was called to the Bar in 1867, and took chambers in Lincoln"s Inn for his work. He told Butler where they were, so that he could write if he had any communication to make to him that would not wait till they met; but Butler was not to go there. Of course, he could have gone, but he did not. He could have found out in a hundred ways where Pauli lived if he had set about it; but, knowing that Pauli did not wish it, he did nothing.
At last, in 1897, after having shared his poverty with this strange friend for thirty-three years, Butler read in _The Times_ that Pauli was dead. Then, at last, he made inquiries, and found that for a great many years past Pauli"s income from the law had exceeded 700 a year, and for nearly twenty had been over 1,000. Pauli left 9,000, not a penny of it to Butler, whose parasite he had been for the greater part of his life, when every five-pound note was of consequence to Butler. One knows not which to be more astounded at--heartless greediness on the one side, or fatuous simplicity on the other. When all the evidence came out at last beyond all further concealment, Butler wrote: "I understand now why Pauli preserved such an iron silence when I implored him to deal with me somewhat after the fashion in which I had dealt with him." [That is to say, in telling him precisely what Butler"s exact financial position was.] "The iniquity of the whole thing, as it first struck me in full force, upset me."
This "squalid and miserable story" is told with inexorable fullness by Mr. Festing Jones. What is very remarkable about it is the evidence it gives of Butler"s irregular penetration into character. He could be extremely acute in one direction and absolutely obtuse in another. The incredible indulgence which permitted him to be the dupe and victim of a scoundrel like Pauli for more than thirty years seems incompatible with the intense and suspicious a.n.a.lysis which he expended on the motives of his father. After all, when the worst of Canon Butler is admitted, he was a Christian and a gentleman by the side of the appalling Pauli. Yet Butler would sacrifice his father, and actually tell falsehoods, for the purpose of screening and enriching Pauli (see Vol. I., p. 114), of whose villainy he could at any moment have a.s.sured himself, and with whom he practically admits that he had nothing in common.
The Pauli episode is valuable in supplying light on certain defects in Butler"s intellectual composition. In measure, it tends to explain the inconsistencies, the irregularities of his mental life, and of his action as a scholar. He was the opposite of those who see life steadily, and see it whole. He had no wide horizons, but he investigated a corner or a section of a subject with a burning gla.s.s which left all other parts of the surface in darkness. There were Paulis on his mental horizon; there were in almost everything he approached pa.s.sages where his want of appreciation, his want (let us boldly say) of elementary insight, produced the oddest effect of imperfection. His literary judgments were _saugrenu_ to the last extreme. What are we to think of a man who lays if down that "Blake was no good because he learnt Italian to study Dante, and Dante was no good because he was so fond of Virgil, and Virgil was no good because Tennyson ran him; and as for Tennyson, well, Tennyson goes without saying"? There is no critical meaning in such outbursts; they would be almost imbecile in their aimless petulance if we did not understand that Virgil and Dante and Blake lay in the dark segment of Butler"s vision, and that he had not so much formed an adverse opinion of their merits as no opinion at all. If, as surprisingly he did on every occasion, he heaped contempt on Virgil, it was simply because he wanted to get Virgil well out of the way of Homer, on whom his enthusiasm was concentrated.
It was so in all things. Butler despised the great Venetian painters, not because he had devoted attention to their faults, but because they stood in the way of Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, to whom he had dedicated a frenzied cult. "t.i.tian, Leonardo, Raffaelle and Michel Angelo, well, to speak quite plainly, I like none of them," he wrote in the last year of his life. In music it was just the same. Butler attached himself, from early youth to the grave, to Handel in an almost maniacal infatuation. In order to clear a s.p.a.ce, as it were, round this solitary object of his worship, he covered Beethoven and Bach with contempt; and if anyone forced him to listen to the "Requiem" of Mozart, he stopped his ears and hummed "Loathsome urns, disclose your treasure,"
to drown the hideous Austrian discord. For Butler, "Bach wriggles; Wagner writhes." All the masterpieces of the world of music he sweeps together in a universal disapproval as "heartless failures," whereas of Handel"s least remarkable pa.s.sages he calls out, "Can human genius do more?" The result is that Butler is interesting and sometimes valuable when he praises; when he blames, he is sometimes amusing, but more often impertinent and tiresome. What is the point of calling Plato one of the "Seven Humbugs of Christendom," or of talking of "that d.a.m.ned Republic"?
To pretend to admire these peevish outbursts, however much we may be stimulated by the better sides of Butler"s intelligence, is abject.
No section of Mr. Resting Jones"s biography is more interesting than that in which, in the patient, judicious manner in which he so eminently excels, he depicts the relation of Butler to Miss Savage. Readers of _The Way of All Flesh_ are familiar with the figure of Alethea Pontifex, who occupies the position of heroine in that novel. It has long been known that this was the portrait of a friend whom Butler had studied, confided in, and deeply valued. In what degree it was an accurate portrait has not hitherto been known. I have no hesitation in saying that the chapters which deal with this situation--and they are executed with as much delicacy as realism--form the most unhackneyed and the most exciting section of Mr. Jones"s volumes. They illuminate in portions, and they leave darker than ever in other parts, the rugged surface of Butler"s extraordinary character; and I regret that exigencies of s.p.a.ce do not permit me to do justice to doc.u.ments so remarkable. But yet, something I must say.
The Alethea of the novel was so far from being an exact portrait that the sitter, after studying every line and touch of it, is supposed, was supposed by Butler himself, not to have perceived that it was intended for her. This, however, we must regard as hardly possible in the case of one so pa.s.sionately clear-sighted, but there were many reasons why she should adopt such an att.i.tude. Eliza Mary Ann Savage was a governess, whom Butler met about 1870, when he and she were art students together at Heatherley"s. They were nearly of the same age, which at that time would be thirty-four. They were immediately drawn together by a singular parallelism in temper and sympathy. Miss Savage read the MS. of Erewhon, and minutely criticized it. From this time, 1871 to 1885, when she died, Butler submitted to her everything he wrote, and, obstinate as he was in the face of all other censures, invariably remodelled his work in accordance with her criticisms and suggestions. She supported him in all his enthusiasms, and shared all his prejudices. She was a very well-read woman, and was able to follow Butler into the remotest recesses of his studies. She responded to his lightest touch like a delicate musical instrument, and yet was rigid in opposing any divergence from what she conceived to be the normal line his talent ought to take. She was as stringently hostile to Christianity, as contemptuous of Darwin and Huxley, as infatuated about Handel, as haughtily an enfant terrible of the intelligence as he was, and the degree to which the admirers of Butler"s books are indebted to her can never be definitely known, but is certainly very great.
Alethea Pontifex, in _The Way of All Flesh_, is tall, handsome, with fine blue eyes. Miss Savage was short, insignificant, and plain, with brown eyes; she suffered from hip disease; physically, she was quite unattractive. This introduces into the real history an element of pathos and of pain which raises it to a far higher level of human interest than the novel has to offer us. To Miss Savage, in her isolated state, Butler was the whole world; and it is perfectly evident--Mr. Festing Jones need not hesitate so conscientiously in admitting it--that she was absorbingly, unalterably in love with Butler. She lived, quite unupbraiding, in the intermittent light of his countenance. For nearly twenty years they were, mentally, like a devoted husband and wife, yet the anomaly of their relations never struck Butler, to whom Miss Savage was a comrade of perfect sympathy, and no more. He did not observe, until Miss Savage was dead, that she had felt towards him otherwise than he felt towards her. He wrote, "I valued her, but she perfectly understood that I could do no more." Did she? Mr. Festing Jones prints a sonnet of Butler"s, written in 1901, which seems to me to be one of the most amazing pieces of self-revelation that I know:
And now, though twenty years are come and gone, That little lame lady"s face is with me still; Never a day but what, on every one, She dwells with me as dwell she ever will.
She said she wished I knew not wrong from right; It was not that; I knew, and would have chosen Wrong if I could, but, in my own despite, Power to choose wrong in my chilled veins was frozen.
"Tis said that if a woman woo, no man Should leave her till she have prevailed; and, true, A man will yield for pity if he can, But if the flesh rebels, what can he do?
I could not; hence I grieve my whole life long The wrong I did in that I did no wrong.
Such fragments of Miss Savage"s letters as Mr. Festing Jones prints show that she was an admirable correspondent. Butler put her letters together in a separate collection, edited, annotated, and ready for the Press.
This is to be published some day in a volume by itself, and will have a pathetic value. But I confess to a certain feeling of regret that the inner being of this obscure, pathetic, and self-sacrificing woman should be immolated any further on the altar of Butler"s egotism. My own instinct would be to say: Let poor Miss Savage, out of whose painful and imperfect existence so much "copy" has already been made, sleep on undisturbed under her mouldering headstone at Finchley. But Mr. Festing Jones knows best.
The most agreeable parts of this biography, at all events those which give us the most genial impression of Butler as a companion, deal with his repeated visits to Italy. These tours inspired, or were used to produce material for, a very pleasant section of his literary work. If we distinguish between the wit and picturesqueness of the ornament in Butler"s controversial writings, and the actual basal texture of those writings, I do not see how a reasonable criticism can any longer pretend to set high value on his angry denunciations of the whole Darwinian theory of evolution, or on his diatribes about Unconscious Memory. There is a terrible work of his, published in 1887, called _Luck or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification_; there is another, of 1882, called _Evolution, Old and New_. They are unreadable. His religious polemic was even more disagreeable than his scientific, and the lumbering sarcasm of the attack on Christianity, called _The Fair Haven_, is an epitome of all that is most unpleasing in the att.i.tude of Butler. Unctuous sarcasm so sustained as to deceive the very elect, and "affectation of the tone of indignant orthodoxy," have a tendency to grow rancid in the pa.s.sage of years, and to become exceedingly unappetizing. Samuel Butler, whose rashness was astounding, had the courage to call his h.o.m.onym of the _a.n.a.logy_ a "poor creature"! What would Joseph Butler, revisiting the glimpses of the moon, think of the author of _The Fair Haven_?
There is nothing of this incongruity in the books which are founded on memories of Italian travel. Here the charm of Butler"s style is expended, with a thousand oddities and playfulnesses, on subjects which blossom in its atmosphere. It is very strange that _Alps and Sanctuaries_ (1882), and _Ex Voto_ (1888), should share the neglect which was so unbrokenly the fate of Butler"s publications, for these were charming and original to a high degree, and they ill.u.s.trate, without any disadvantage, the whimsical penetration of his mind and the playful melody of his style at its best. _The Auth.o.r.ess of the Odyssey_ (1897), which h.e.l.lenists found it impossible to take as a serious contribution to scholarship, was another of these by-products of travel in Sicily, and contained very numerous pages, which, whether convincing or no, were exceedingly picturesque and entertaining. No cultivated man or woman will, in the future, visit Trapani or ascend to the platforms of Mount Eryx without remembering how Butler was taken to the grotto where Ulysses hid his treasure, or how the Sicilian descendants of the Cyclopes treated him as a royal personage.
Not much new light is thrown on the purely literary characteristics of Butler by Mr. Festing Jones"s biography. He has not dwelt at length on the individual works, nor at all on the general position of their author among his contemporaries. He left himself no s.p.a.ce to go into such questions, being fully occupied with the task of interpreting and illuminating the personal characteristics of his subject. He is an unflinching portraitist, and in a painting of Oliver Cromwell from the life would be sure to do full justice to the wen. The rugged surface of Samuel Butler lends itself to such realism--and I will not say that Mr.
Jones does not approach the confines of the superfluous in the excessive minuteness of his notes. We are a.s.sured that Butler took eight handkerchiefs and three pairs of socks with him when he went abroad, and that he very wisely carried diarrha pills in the handle half of his Gladstone bag. When Butler bought himself a new wash-hand basin, in 1887, the fact is duly recorded. We are told that once, in 1886, he swept every corner of every room of his lodgings with tea-leaves, and that it made him perspire freely. That there will be readers who do not care how many times Butler brushed his hair every day, nor on what occasion he wore "the high hat which appears in the corner of the picture in his room," I am not inclined to deny, but I am not of them.
These little things, recounted with Mr. Festing Jones"s humorous serenity, are my delight. If some contemporary had recorded the fact that Shakespeare habitually soaked the crust of his manchet in his last mouthful of sack, or that he wore out his left shoe faster than his right, how grateful we should be for the information. Only, there must come into our consideration: Are Butler and Shakespeare figures of equal significance, apart from their shoes and their hair-brushes?
There is less room for divergence of judgment on the question of the way in which Mr. Jones has revealed the moral and social characteristics of his hero. Here he could hardly be excessive. The amiability, the ruggedness, the nervous instability, the obstinacy as of a rock, the tenderness and the sardonic bitterness which made up so strange an amalgam, are all frankly revealed. It is for us to arrange them, if we can, into a consistent portrait of a most inconsistent figure. Here is, taken at random, an entry of Butler"s own, which gives a good example of several of his characteristics:
17th April 1895. I travelled from Patros to Athens with a young Turk, about thirty years old, and his dog--an English terrier. We were alone in the carriage the greater part of the time, and I suppose the poor dog was bored; at any rate, after a while, he made up to me. He licked me all over my face, and then began to pretend that my coat pocket had got a rat in it which he must catch. I was so flattered at being made up to by anyone or anything who seemed to tell me I was a nice person, that I let him go on and hunt for rats all over me, till at last his master interposed in beautiful English, and then we talked. He was a Secretary to the Turkish Legation, and was very clever and nice.
The incident could hardly be more trifling, but it is inimitably told; and it reveals not merely a mastery of minute description, but the self-tormenting temperament of a man of extraordinary talent who, for some unfathomable reason, though love was in his heart, was for ever out of harmony with the world, and suspicious of those whom he would fain have ingratiated. Those are the main lineaments which Mr. Festing Jones"s biography reveals, and they are those of a miniaturist touching his ivory with a fastidious brush, and of a "born orphan" who could not find a home in the wilderness of jarring humanity.
A NOTE ON CONGREVE
Congreve"s princ.i.p.al Continental critic has remarked that literary history has behaved towards him in a very stepmotherly fashion (_sehr stiefmutterlich_). There is no other English poet of equal rank of the last two centuries and a half whose biography has been so persistently neglected. When, in 1888, I wrote my _Life of Congreve_ I had had no predecessor since John Oldmixon, masquerading under the pseudonym of "Charles Wilson," published that farrago of lies and nonsense which he called _Memoirs of The Life, Writings and Amours of William Congreve, Esq._, in 1730. In this kingdom of the blind, however one-eyed, I continue to be king, since in the thirty-three years succeeding the issue of my biography no one has essayed to do better what I did as well as I could. The only exception is the _William Congreve, sein Leben und seine l.u.s.tspiele_, published in 1897 by Dr. D. Schmid, who was, I believe, and perhaps still is, a professor in the University of Graz in Austria. I darted, full of antic.i.p.ation, to the perusal of Dr. Schmid"s volume, but was completely disappointed. He reposes upon me with a touching uniformity; he quotes me incessantly and with courteous acknowledgment; but I am unable to discover in his whole monograph one grain of fact, or correction of fact, not known to me in 1888.
In spite of this, I have always believed that someone with more patience and skill than I possess would be able to add much to our knowledge of a man who lived with the Pope and Swift and Addison of whom we know so much. The late George A. Aitken, who seemed to carry about with him a set of Rontgen rays which he applied to the members of the Age of Anne, would have been the man to do it. Not very long before his lamented death I urged the task upon Aitken; but his mind was set on other things, on Prior in particular. I do not know why it is that Congreve, one of the great dramatists of the world, perhaps our greatest social playwright, seems to lack personal attractiveness. It is a scandal that he has never been edited. His plays are frequently, but always imperfectly, reprinted, and without any editorial care. I was rejoiced to see that Mr. Montague Summers, than whom no one living is more competent to carry out such a labour, proposed to edit Congreve"s plays.
But even he did not intend to include the poems, the novel, or the letters; and I have heard no more of his project. To the book collector the folio publications of Congreve in verse are precious and amusing, but they have never attracted the notice of a bibliographer. Scholarship has, indeed, been _stiefmutterlich_ towards Congreve, as the Austrian critic said.
My excuse for recalling this subject is the fact that I am able, through the kindness of Mr. Thos. J. Wise, to announce the existence of a work by Congreve hitherto unknown and unsuspected in its original form. In the matchless library of Mr. Wise there lurks an anonymous quarto of which the complete t.i.tle is: "_An Impossible Thing._ A Tale. London: Printed: And Sold by J. Roberts in Warwick-Lane, MDCCXX." This was shown by Mr. Wise to several of our best authorities, who combined in the conjecture that it must be a hitherto unknown work by Prior. Yet since the poet"s death--and this shows how little anybody reads Congreve--the contents of Mr. Wise"s quarto have appeared in each successive edition of the Poems. But before this was perceived the truth had dawned upon Mr. Wise, who, turning over the _Historical Account of the English Poets_, a publication by Curll in 1720, found that the following entry occurs in the "Corrigenda":
Mr. Congreve. This Gentleman has lately oblig"d us with two Tales from Fontaine, ent.i.tled,
I. The Impossible Thing.
II. The Man That lost his Heifer.
These form his pamphlet of the same year, 1720. When Mr. Wise was kind enough to point this out to me it was only left for me to add that the anonymous _Historical Account_ was the work of Giles Jacob, the friend whose notes on Congreve"s life form the nucleus of all we know about him. Thus the authorship of the two poems was proved. And it was only after that proof that I turned to the index of the old editions and found there the two poems, lurking unsuspected. I blush to recall the painful incident.
However, the separate publication of the two poems in a quarto of 1720 is a wholly unrecorded fact, and important to bibliographers. _The Peasant in Search of his Heifer_ is added apparently as an after-thought, to fill up the sheet. _An Impossible Thing_ opens with these lines:
To thee, Dear d.i.c.k, this Tale I send, Both as a Critick and a Friend.
I tell it with some Variation (Not altogether a Translation) From _La Fontaine_; an Author, _d.i.c.k_, Whose Muse would touch thee to the quick.
The Subject is of that same kind To which thy Heart seems most inclin"d.
How Verse may alter it, G.o.d knows; Thou lov"st it well, I"m sure, in Prose.
So without Preface, or Pretence, To hold thee longer in Suspense, I shall proceed, as I am able, To the Recital of my Fable.
He does proceed, not without considerable indelicacy, but in excellent running verse. The "d.i.c.k" who was to enjoy it I conjecture--and in this Mr. Austin Dobson confirmed me--to have been Richard Shelton, who is connected with Prior"s _Alma and A Case Stated_. Prior and Congreve have so much in common that it is tantalizing not to be able to persuade them to throw light upon one another; they were haunting the same coffee-houses when Swift was writing to Stella in 1710.
The discovery, after 200 years, of a unique copy of an unsuspected separate publication by Congreve confirms a suspicion of mine that other such pamphlets may exist. The earliest attempt at a bibliography was made by Giles Jacob, evidently under the poet"s own eye, in 1720. Jacob gives a list of poems, with which "the ingenious Mr. Congreve, besides his excellent Dramatick Works, has oblig"d the Publick," but he adds no dates. Of these poems the first is _An Epistle to the Right Honourable Charles Lord Halifax_, and the six next are odes of each of which we possess the text in folio form. But of the _Epistle to Halifax_ no separate edition is known, and it appears first in the octavo of 1710.
But I cannot help suspecting that Giles Jacob possessed, or could refer to, a folio sheet of (probably) 1694, the year in which Halifax, to reward Congreve for the dedication of _The Double Dealer_, is supposed to have appointed him a Commissioner for licensing hackney coaches. But I have shown how confused is all the evidence with regard to Congreve"s offices, which roused Thackeray to such superfluous indignation. Perhaps the shilly-shallying of Charles Montague had something to do with the suppression of an original folio of the _Epistle_, if it ever existed.
In any case, a single sheet with, or more likely without, the signature of Mr. Congreve is worth looking out for.
As thirty-three years have pa.s.sed since my _Life of Congreve_ was published I venture to take occasion to mention here one or two slight matters which I should like any possessors of that volume to interpolate. If I had the opportunity to issue a new edition I should further enlarge on a matter which I did make prominent, the very leading part which the veteran Dryden took in advancing the fortunes of his young and hitherto unknown rival. The episode is a charming one, and I have now some instances of it which escaped me in 1888. As is known, Congreve came up from the country some time in 1692. He was introduced by Southerne to Dryden, who took a great fancy to him at once. Dryden was preparing a composite translation of _Juvenal_, and he gave the young man the Eleventh Satire to turn. Next came Dryden"s Persius, to which Congreve prefixed a splendid poem of compliment: the triumph of _The Old Bachelor_ followed in January. All this, and more, I worked out; but one very interesting evidence of Dryden"s a.s.siduous kindness escaped me. In 1705 was published as a folio pamphlet the _Ode on Mrs.
Arabella Hunt singing_, and I supposed that this was the original appearance of this pindaric, which is one of Congreve"s best. But my attention has been arrested by observing that 1705 was the year in which Arabella Hunt died, and also that so early as 1693 Dryden published this ode in his _Third Miscellany_. The Arabella Hunt ode therefore belongs to the beginning, and not, as I supposed, to the close, of Congreve"s brief poetic career. It is a beautiful thing:
Let all be hushed, each softest motion cease; Be every loud tempestuous thought at peace; And every ruder gasp of breath Be calm, as in the arms of Death,
and ends with a Keats-like couplet:
Wishing forever in that state to lie, For ever to be dying so, yet never die.
It is now plain that this ode was published as a book at the death of the singer, but had been composed at least twelve years earlier. Another instance of Dryden"s connexion with Congreve, which I observed too late to record it, is the fact that the latter contributed a song to the _Love Triumphant_ of the former in 1694. In the dedication of that play Dryden speaks of "my most ingenious friend, Mr. Congreve," who has observed "the mechanic unities" of time and s.p.a.ce strictly. _Love Triumphant_ was Dryden"s last play, and its failure was complete. A spiteful letter-writer of the time gloats over its d.a.m.nation because it will "vex huffing Dryden and Congreve to madness." All this confirms the idea that the elder poet"s complaisance in the younger was matter of general knowledge, and Dryden"s withdrawal from the ungrateful theatre must have been a blow to Congreve, who, however, practically stepped at once into Dryden"s shoes.
Another biographical crumb. Charles Hopkins, one of the poet-sons of Ezekiel Hopkins, the once-famous Bishop of Derry, was a _protege_ of Dryden, and in 1697 brought out his second play, _Boadicea_, which he dedicated to Congreve in a long poem, from which we learn that Hopkins was an intimate friend and disciple of the author of _The Double Dealer_.
You taught me first my Genius and my Power, Taught me to know my own, but gave me more.