It is remarkable that some of the worst plays in the English language have been ornamented with engravings. A few years after the appearance of Settle’s tragedy (Empress of Morocco, the first play that was ever sold for two shillings, or printed with cuts), Noah’s Ark, an opera, was embellished with similar decorations; and in the following century, Scanderbeg, a tragedy, was recommended to the public by the same ornamental appendages.
It is a singular circumstance that in writing the elegy on the Countess of Abingdon, called Eleonora, Dryden did not know that she died very suddenly at a ball in her own house in the midst of a gay assemblage of both sexes; a fact of which, had he been apprised, he would not have neglected to avail himself. He had never seen the lady; and wrote the poem at the solicitation of a nobleman with whom he was not personally acquainted.
A long note is given to Spenser in Winstanley’s notice of him (1687) relative to his death, interment, and tomb, or rather supposed tombs. Camden, Fenton, Charles Fitz Geoffry, Sir Aston Cockaine, Sheppard (in his Epigrams, 1651), Warner, and Sir James Ware, are quoted, all varying in their testimonies as to facts. It seems there was no tomb erected for above twenty years after his death, and then by the Countess of Dorset. Discrepancies also existed as to his death, some making it 1598, some 1599. In 1802 Malone discovered the truth in the
