This," said
Dryden, "is Tonson: you will take care not to depart before he goes
away: for I have not completed the sheet which I promised him; and if
you leave me unprotected, I shall suffer all the rudeness to which his
resentment can prompt his tongue."[14] But whatever occasional subjects
of dissension arose between Dryden and his bookseller appears always to
have brought them together, after the first ebullition of displeasure
had subsided. There might, on such occasions, be room for acknowledging
faults on both sides; for, if we admit that the bookseller was penurious
and churlish, we cannot deny that Dryden seems often to have been
abundantly captious, and irascible. Indeed, as the poet placed, and
justly, more than a mercantile value upon what he sold, the trader, on
his part, was necessarily cautious not to afford a price which his
returns could not pay; so that while, in one point of view, the author
sold at an inadequate price, the purchaser, in another, really got no
more than value for his money. That literature is ill recompensed, is
usually rather the fault of the public than the bookseller, whose trade
can only exist by buying that which can be sold to advantage. The
trader, who purchased the "Paradise Lost" for ten pounds, had probably
no very good bargain.[15]

However fretted by these teasing and almost humiliating discussions,
Dryden continued steadily advancing in his great labour; and about three
years after it had been undertaken, the translation of Virgil, "the most
noble and spirited," said Pope, "which I know in any language," was
given to the public in July 1697. So eager was the general expectation,
that the first edition was exhausted in a few months, and a second
published early in the next year. "It satisfied," says Johnson, "his
friends, and, for the most part, silenced his enemies." But, although
this was generally the case, there wanted not some to exercise the
invidious task of criticism, or rather of malevolent detraction. Among
those, the highest name is that of Swift; the most distinguished for
venomous and persevering malignity, that of Milbourne.

In his Epistle to Prince Posterity, prefixed to the "Tale of a Tub,"
Swift, in the character of the dedicator, declares, "upon the word of a
sincere man, that there is now actually in being a certain poet called
John Dryden, whose translation of Virgil was lately printed in a large
folio, well-bound, and, if diligent search were made, fo