Words or promises went very easily from him,[1] and his memory was only good in such matters as affection or caprice might chance to determine. Had he been less "unthinking," we should have had an epic from the muse of Dryden, "but being encouraged only with fair words from King Charles II.," writes the great poet, "my little salary ill paid, and no prospect of a future subsistence, I was thus discouraged in the beginning of my attempt." If we lost King Arthur, we gained Absalom and Achitophel. Thus discouraged, Dryden took to temporary subjects, nor let us regret the chance that drove him from his heroic poem.
Among the most reprehensible of the minor frailties of his life, for which he must be considered personally responsible, was his squandering on his mistresses the 70,000l. voted by the House for a monument to his father, and his thrusting the Countess of Castlemaine into the place of a Lady of the Bedchamber to his newly-married wife. The excuse for the former fault, that his father's grave was unknown, was silly in the extreme, and has since been proved to be without foundation; while his letter in reply to the remonstrance of Lord Clarendon, not to appoint his mistress to a place of
- ↑ Burnet, ii. 466.
