[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.

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.]

PROLOGUE

WHAT Greece, when learning flourish'd, only knew,

Athenian judges, you this day renew.
Here too are annual rites to Pallas done,
And here poetic prizes lost or won.
Methinks I see you, crown'd with olives, sit,
And strike a sacred horror from the pit.
A day of doom is this of your decree,
Where even the best are but by mercy
free:

A day, which none but Jonson durst have
wish'd to see.

Here they, who long have known the useful stage,

10

Come to be taught themselves to teach the age.

As your commissioners our poets go,
To cultivate the virtue which you sow;
In your Lyceum first themselves refin'd,
And delegated thence to humankind.
But as embassadors, when long from home,
For new instructions to their princes come;
So poets, who your precepts have forgot,
Return, and beg they may be better taught:
Follies and faults elsewhere by them are