Note 1167 — Chapter III
Reading edition
Johnson was moved to pronounce Dryden the most excessive of the writers of his day in the "meanness and servility of hyperbolical adulation," excepting only Aphra Behn in respect of her address to "Eleanor Gwyn." But Malone vindicates the poet by citing rather worse samples, in particular Joshua Barnes's "Ode to Jefferies" (Life, in vol. i of Prose Works of Dryden, 1800, pp. 244-47). They all indicate the same corruption of judgment and character, special to the royalist atmosphere.