Note 341 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS; (continued 3)

Dryden was very coarsely satirised in the political poems of his own day; and among the rest, in “The Session of the Poets,”—a general onslaught directed against the writers of the time, which furnishes us with many examples of unjust criticism on these literary men, entirely originating in political feeling. One example may suffice;

“Then in came Denham, that limping old bard, Whose fame on the Sophy and Cooper’s-hill stands, And brought many stationers, who swore very hard That nothing sold better except ’twere his lands. But Apollo advised him to write something more, To clear a suspicion which possessed the Court, That Cooper’s-hill, so much bragg’d on before, Was writ by a vicar, who had forty pounds for’t.”