ontaneous and enthusiastic tributes to the prowess of his heroes, which the vulgar receive them for. Hear the painful truth, as revealed by the Scholiast.[2] Pytheas of AEgina had conquered in rough-and-tumble fight all antagonists in the Pancratium. Casting about for the best means of perpetuating his fame, he found the alternative to lie between a statuette to be erected in the temple of the hero-god, or one of the odes of the learned Theban. Choosing the latter, he proceeded to the poet's shop, cheapened the article, and would have secured it without hesitation, had not the extortionate bard demanded the sum of three drachmas,[3] nearly equal to half a dollar, for the poem, and refused to bate a fraction. The disappointed bargainer left, and was for some days decided in favor of the brazen image, which could be had at half the price. But reflecting that what Pindar would give for his money was a draft upon universal fame and immortality, while the statue might presently be lost, or melted down, or its identity destroyed, his final determination was in favor of the ode,--a conclusion which time has justified. Nor was the Bard of the Victors ashamed of his mercenary Muse. In the Second Isthmian Ode, we find an elaborate justification of his practice of praising for pay,--a practice, he admits, unknown to primitive poets, but rendered inevitable, in his time, by the poverty of the craft, and the degeneracy of the many, with whom, in the language of the Spartan sage, "money made the man." With this Pindaric precedent, therefore, for selling Pindaric verses, it is no wonder, if the children of the Muse, in an age still more degenerate than that of their great original, found ample excuse for dealing out their wares at the best market. When such as Dryden and Pope lavished in preface and dedication their encomiums upon wealth and power, and waited eagerly for the golden guineas the bait might bring them, we have no right to complain of the Tates and Eusdens for prostituting their neglected Muses for a splendid sum certain _per annum_. Surely, if royalty, thus periodically and mercenarily eulogized, were content, the poet might well be so. And quite as certainly, the Laureate stipend never extracted from poet panegyric more fulsome, ill-placed, and degrading, than that which Laureate Dryden volunteered over the pall of Charles II.[4]
Tate had been known as a hanger-on at the court of Charles, and as a feeble versifier and pamphleteer of the Tory school, before an alliance with Dryden gave him a certain degree of importance. The first part of "Absalom and Achitophel," in 1681, convulsed the town and angered the city. Men talked for a time of nothing else. Tate, who was in the secret of its authorship, talked of it to Dryden, and urged an extension of the poem. Were there not enough of Shaftesbury's brisk boys running at large who deserved to be gibbeted? Were there not enough Hebrew names in the two books of Samuel to name each as appropriately as those already nomenclatured? But Dryden was indisposed to undertake a continuation which must fall short of what had been executed in the exact proportion that the characters left for it were of minor consequence. He recommended the task to Tate. Tate, flattered and nothing loath, accordingly sent to the press the second part of "Absalom and Achitophel," embodying a contribution from Dryden of two hundred lines, which are as plainly distinguishable from the rest as a patch of cloth of gold upon cloth of frieze. The credit of this first alliance proved so grateful to Nahum, that he never after ventured upon literary enterprise without the aid of a similar coalition. His genius was inherently parasitic. In conjunction with Tory and Jesuit, he coalesced in the celebration of Castlemaine's gaudy reception at Rome.
