Note 523 — Chapter IV · DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
Reading edition
It is well known that Thomas Heywood, the dramatist, had planned, if he did not actually execute, a Lives of the Poets very much earlier, and some sanguine souls have hoped that it may yet turn up. But the famous passage about poets’ nicknames, as well as the whole cast of Heywood’s work, suggests that, though biography may have lost something, criticism has not lost much.