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 rece