violated truth to make the satire more pungent. He says, in the piece
abovementioned,

Others to some saint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.

Which is not strictly true. There are high authorities in favour of many
of his Comedies, and the best wits of the age gave their testimony for
them: They have in them fine strokes of humour, the characters are often
original, strongly mark'd, and well sustained; add to this, that he had
the greatest expedition in writing imaginable, and sometimes produced
a play in less than a month. Shadwell, as it appears from Rochester's
Session of the Poets, was a great favourite with Otway, and as they
lived, in intimacy together, it might perhaps be the occasion of
Dryden's expressing so much contempt for Otway; which his cooler
judgment could never have directed him to do.

Mr. Shadwell died the 19th of December 1692, in the fifty-second year
of his age, as we are informed by the inscription upon his monument in
Westminster Abbey; tho' there may be some mistake in that date; for it
is said in the title page of his funeral sermon preached by Dr. Nicholas
Brady, that he was interred at Chelsea, on the 24th of November, that
year. This sermon was published 1693, in quarto, and in it Dr. Brady
tells us, 'That our author was 'a man of great honesty and integrity,
an inviolable fidelity and strictness in his word, an unalterable
friendship wherever he professed it, and however the world maybe
mistaken in him, he had a much deeper sense of religion than many who
pretended more to it. His natural and acquired abilities, continues the
Dr. made him very amiable to all who knew and conversed with him, a very
few being equal in the becoming qualities, which adorn, and fit off a