[This Song and the following Answer to it are found in Covent Garden Drollery, 1672, and New Court Songs and Poems, by R. V., Gent., 1672, from the latter of which collections the following texts are taken. They were never published under Dryden's name during his lifetime. A parody of the second stanza of the Song appears in the third (1675) and later editions of The Rehearsal. The Key to that piece, published in 1704, states that the song ridiculed was "made by Mr. Bayes [Dryden] on the death of Captain Digby, son of George, Earl of Bristol, who was a passionate admirer of the Duchess Dowager of Richmond, called by the author Armida: he lost his life in a sea-fight against the Dutch, the twenty-eighth of May, 1672." The Song may probably be accepted as Dryden's work; the Answer has not so strong evidence in its favor, as it may easily be the work of an imi

[This worthless tragedy, the poorest of all Dryden's dramatic works, must have been performed before the end of 1672, since in a prologue included in Covent Garden Drollery (p. 33), printed in that year, there is an unmistakable reference to it:

But when fierce critics get them in their clutch,
They 're crueler then the tyrannic Dutch;
And with more art do dislocate each scene
Then in Amboyna they the limbs of men.

It was entered on the Stationers' Register June 26, 1673 (Malone, I, 1, 108), and published in the same year.

Amboyna was written for a political purpose, to stir up the national feeling against the Dutch, with whom England was then at war.

Interest's the god they worship in their state;

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And you, I take it, have not much of that. Well monarchies may own religion's name, But states are atheists in their very frame. They share a sin, and such proportions fall, That, like a stink, 't is nothing to 'em all. How they love England, you shall see this day;

No map shews Holland truer then our play: Their pictures and inscriptions well we know;

We may be bold one medal sure to show. View then their falsehoods, rapine, cruelty; And think what once they were, they still would be;

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But hope not either language, plot, or art; T was writ in haste, but with an English heart:

And least hope wit; in Dutchmen that would be

As much improper, as would honesty.

PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD SPOKEN BY MR. HART, AT THE ACTING OF THE SILENT WOMAN

[These are evidently the pieces to which Dryden refers in a letter to Lord Rochester, dated 1673 by Malone, from internal evidence: "I have sent your lordship a prologue and epilogue which I made for our players, when they went down to Oxford. I hear they have succeeded; and by the event your lordship will judge how easy 't is to pass any thing upon an university, and how gross flattery the learned will endure " (Malone, I, 2, 11-13). Both poems were first printed in Miscellany Poems, 1684.]