st and Sir Thomas Ogle, in a tavern in Bowstreet, and having
become furious with intoxication, they not only exposed themselves,
by committing the grossest indecencies in the balcony, in the sight
of the passengers; but, a mob being thus collected, Sedley stripped
himself naked, and proceeded to harangue them in the grossest and
most impious language. The indignation of the populace being
excited, they attempted to burst into the house, and a desperate
riot ensued, in which the orator and his companions had nearly paid
for their frolic with their lives. For this riot they were indicted
in the Court of Common Pleas, and heavily fined; Sedley in the sum
of L. 500. When the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Robert Hyde, to repress
his insolence, asked him if he had ever read the "Complete
Gentleman?" Sedley answered, that he had read more books than his
lordship; a repartee which exhibits more effrontery than wit. The
culprits employed Killigrew and another courtier to solicit a
mitigation of the fine; but, in the true spirit of court
friendship, they begged it for themselves, and extorted every
farthing.

6. Our author here shortly repeats what he has said at more length in
his Defence of the Epilogue to the second part of the Conquest of
Granada.

7. The pedant Mr Malone conjectures to be Matthew Clifford, Master of
the Charter-house, one of the Duke of Buckingham's colleagues in
writing "The Rehearsal." But the _pedant_ is obviously the same
with the Fastidious Brisk _of Oxford_, mentioned in the following
sentence, which can hardly apply to Clifford, who was educated at
Cambridge. One Leigh is said by Wood to have written the Censure of
the Rota; and as he was educated at Oxford and the book printed
there, he may be "the contemptible pedant," though his profession
was that of a player in the duke's company.

8. Fungoso and Sir Fastidious Brisk are two characters in "Every Man
Out of his Humour;" the former of whom is represented as copying
the dress and manners of the latter. Dryden seems only to mean,
that one of those pamphleteers was the servile imitator of the
other.

PROLOGUE.

Prologues, like bells to churches, toll you in
With chiming verse, till the dull plays begin;
With this sad difference though, of pit and pew,
You damn the poet, but the priest damns you:
But priests can