in them is the last thing to which I shall pretend." He was
really as well as ostentatiously a playwright; the age demanded
comedies, and he endeavoured to supply the kind of comedy that the age
demanded. His first attempt was unsuccessful. Bustle, intrigue and
coarsely humorous dialogue seemed to him to be part of the popular
demand; and, looking about for a plot, he found something to suit him in
a Spanish source, and wrote _The Wild Gallant_. The play was acted in
February 1663, by Thomas Killigrew's company in Vere Street. It was not
a success, and Pepys showed good judgment in pronouncing the play "so
poor a thing as ever I saw in my life." Dryden never learned moderation
in his humour; there is a student's clumsiness and extravagance in his
indecency; the plays of Etheredge, a man of the world, have not the
uncouth riotousness of Dryden's. Of this he seems to have been
conscious, for when the play was revived, in 1667, he complained in the
epilogue of the difficulty of comic wit, and admitted the right of a
common audience to judge of the wit's success. Dryden, indeed, took a
lesson from the failure of _The Wild Gallant_; his next comedy, _The
Rival Ladies_, also founded on a Spanish plot, produced before the end
of 1663, and printed in the next year, was correctly described by Pepys
as "a very innocent and most pretty witty play," though there was much
in it which the taste of our time would consider indelicate. But he
never quite conquered his tendency to extravagance. _The Wild Gallant_
was not the only victim. _The Assignation, or Love in a Nunnery_,
produced in 1673, shared the same fate; and even as late as 1680, when
he had had twenty years' experience to guide him, _The Kind Keeper, or
Mr Limberham_ was prohibited, after three representations, as being too
indecent for the stage. Dislike to indecency we are apt to think a
somewhat ludicrous pretext to be made by Restoration playgoers, and
probably there was some other reason for the sacrifice of _Limberham_;
still there is a certain savageness in the spirit of Dryden's indecency
which we do not find in his most licentious contemporaries. The
undisciplined force of the man carried him to an excess from which more
dexterous writers held back.

After the production of _The Rival Ladies_ in 1663, Dryden assisted Sir
Robert Howard in the composition of a tragedy in heroic verse, _The
Indian Queen_, produced with great splendour in January 1664. He married
Lady