The internal evidence, too, is strong that Dryden was the author of it. I
do not here refer to the {423} free, flexible, and idiomatic character of
the versification, so exactly like that of Dryden; but principally to the
description the _Essay upon Satire_ contains of the Earl of Mulgrave
himself, beginning,

"Mulgrave had much ado to scape the snare,
Though learn'd in those ill arts that cheat the fair;
For, after all, his vulgar marriage mocks,
With beauty dazzled Numps was in the stocks;"

And ending:

"Him no soft thoughts, no gratitude could move;
To gold he fled, from beauty and from love," &c.

Could Mulgrave have so written of himself; or could he have allowed Dryden
to interpolate the character. Earlier in the poem we meet with a
description of Shaftesbury, which cannot fail to call to mind Dryden's
character of him in _Absalom and Achitophel_; which, as we know, did not
make its appearance, even in its first shape, until two years after Dryden
was cudgelled in Rose Street as _the author_ of the _Essay upon Satire_.
Everybody bears in mind the triplet,

"A fiery soul, which working out its way,
Fretted his pigmy body to decay,
And o'er-inform'd the tenement of clay;"

And what does Dryden (for it must be he who writes) say of Shaftesbury in
the _Essay upon Satire_?