Still first to fly where sensual joys invade.
This was wrought, partly by the religious manners of Mary; partly by the cold and unsocial temper of William, who shunned excess, not perhaps because it was criminal, but because it was derogatory; partly by the political fashion of the day, which was to disown the profligacy that marked the partisans of the Stuarts; but, most of all, by the general increase of good taste, and the improvement of education. All these contributed to the encouragement of Dryden's great undertaking, which promised to rescue Virgil from the degraded version of Ogilby, and present him in a becoming form to a public, now prepared to receive him with merited admiration.
While our author was labouring in this great work, and the public were waiting the issue with impatience and attention, a feud, of which it is now impossible to trace the cause, arose between the bard and his publisher. Their union before seems to have been of a nature more friendly than interest alone could have begotten; for Dryden, in one letter, talks with gratitude of Tonson's affording him his company down to Northamptonshire; and this friendly intimacy Jacob neglected not to cultivate, by those occasional compliments of fruit and wine, which are often acknowledged in the course of their correspondence. But a quarrel broke out between them, when the translation of Virgil had advanced so far as the completion of the seventh Aeneid; at which period Dryden charges Tonson bitterly, with an intention, from the very beginning, to deprive him of all profit by the second subscriptions; alluding, I presume, to the price which the bookseller charged him upon the volumes delivered to the subscribers. The bibliopolist seems to have bent before the storm, and pacified the incensed bard, by verbal submission, though probably without relaxing his exactions and drawbacks in any material degree. Another cause of this dissension appears to have been the Notes upon "Virgil," for which Tonson would allow no additional emolument to the author, although Dryden says, "that to make them good, would cost six months' labour at least," and elsewhere tells Tonson ironically, that, since not to be paid, they shall be short, "for the saving of the paper." I cannot think that we have sustained any great loss by Tonson's penurious economy on this occasion. In his prefaces and dedications, Dryden let his own ideas freely forth to the public; but in his Notes upon the Classics, witness those on "Juvenal" and "Persius," he neither indulged in critical dissertations on particular beauties and defects, nor in general remarks upon the kind of poetry before him; but contented himself with rendering into English the antiquarian dissertations of Dacier and other foreign commentators, with now and then an explanatory paraphrase of an obscure passage. The parodies of Martin Scriblerus had not yet consigned to ridicule the verbal criticism, and solemn trifling, with which the ancient schoolmen pretended to illustrate the classics. But beside the dispute about the notes in particular, and the various advantages which Dryden suspected Tonson of attempting in the course of the transaction, he seems to have been particularly affronted at a presumptuous plan of that publisher (a keen Whig, and secretary of the Kit-cat club) to drive him into inscribing the translation of Virgil to King William. With this view, Tonson had an especial care to make the engraver aggravate the nose of Aeneas in the plates into a sufficient resemblance of the hooked promontory of the Deliverer's countenance;[12] and, foreseeing Dryden's repugnance to this favourite plan, he had recourse, it would seem, to more unjustifiable means to further it; for the poet expresses himself as convinced that, through Tonson's means, his correspondence with his sons, then at Rome, was intercepted.[13] I suppose Jacob, having fairly laid siege to his author's conscience, had no scruple to intercept all foreign supplies, which might have confirmed him in his pertinacity. But Dryden, although thus closely beleaguered, held fast his integrity; and no prospect of personal advantage, or importunity on the part of Tonson, could induce him to take a step inconsistent with his religious and political sentiments. It was probably during the course of these bickerings with his publisher, that Dryden, incensed at some refusal of accommodation on the part of Tonson, sent him three well-known coarse and forcible satirical lines, descriptive of his personal appearance: