though, in some times and circumstances, far worse poems than his Heroic Stanzas on the death of Oliver Cromwell have made a man's fortune. But there was not in Dryden the making of a regular place-man. He was too shy, to begin with; probably too much of a man of letters by taste and predestination, in the second place; and (though he has been accused of want of high-mindedness) almost certainly too fastidious, in the third. He had not the slightest objection to flatter-hardly anybody in that day and long afterwards had. But those who have taken the trouble to know Dryden thoroughly cannot imagine him either calmly embezzling, as most public servants then did, or unblushingly bargaining (as Pepys, who did not embezzle, bargained) with contractors and suitors and understrappers for palm-grease and 'pots of wine.'

Fortunately, however, literature was once more becoming something of a refuge for the destitute; and Dryden, though of no imperative or precocious literary tendencies, was, as was soon to be seen, endowed with a multifarious craftsmanship such as hardly any other writer has ever possessed. His enemies later accused him of doing hack-work for the booksellers, especially Herringman, who certainly published most of his early pieces. Anyhow, soon after the return of Charles, he produced palinodes to the Heroic Stanzas (which, however, are themselves rather pro-Cromwellian than anti-royalist) in Astræa Redux, the Poem on the Coronation, and. one to Clarendon-all couched in a splendid massive heroic couplet which owed very little to any forerunner. And when the taste of everybody, from the king to the rabble, for the newly revived drama had shown itself, he set to work manfully to achieve success in this no less profitable than popular kind. He was not at first very successful, but after a time his plays added very largely to his income. Their literary value will best be considered together and later. But for a period they drew him away from poetry proper, his last effort in poetry of any consequence for nearly fifteen years being the fine Annus Mirabilis (1666), in which he celebrated the Fire of London and the Dutch War.

Although his relations do not appear to have done much for his worldly prosperity, it must have been partly due to his connection that—as it seems pretty early-he had access to various sides of the great world.' He was an early member of the Royal Society, which was fashionable as well as scientific; he must soon after the Restoration have made acquaintance with Sir Robert Howard, son of the royalist Earl of Berkshire; and now, on 1st December 1663, he married Lady Elizabeth, Sir Robert's sister. The usual books contain aspersions on this lady's character and temper, and expressions adverse to the happiness of the marriage, which, it may be well to say bluntly, rest upon no positive evidence whatsoever.

For some sixteen or seventeen years after his marriage Dryden's life was one of hardly chequered good fortune, and was chiefly passed in London, though he spent the Plague-time and a little longer (1665-66) at Charlton, his father-in-law's seat in Wiltshire; and there composed not merely Annus Mirabilis, but the masterly Essay of Dramatic Poesy, which is a landmark alike in English criticism and English prose style. As his family increased so did his means. He held for some years a lucrative share in the King's Playhouse, was made (1670) poet-laureate in succession to D'Avenant, and historiographer-royal in succession to Howell, with a joint salary of £200, and later had additional pensions and small appointments. These, with his own little means, may have at one time given him the value of some £2000 a year of modern money. He knew many distinguished persons from the king downwards. He had for a time no great share of literary quarrels it appears that the famous squib of the Rehearsal (see infra) in 1671, as it certainly did not in the least affect the public taste for the heroic style of play, so it affected his own composure very little. Only towards the close of the period he had the unpleasant experience of being waylaid and cudgelled by bravoes hired (as it was believed, though never proved) by the malignant and cowardly Rochester, who had been a friend and patron of Dryden, but had taken a spite against him as more closely attached to Rochester's enemy, Mulgrave. Lady Elizabeth bore him three sons, two of whom were sent to their father's own old school (the third went to the Charterhouse), and of whom both parents appear to have been exceedingly fond. But it was somewhat later than this that Dryden settled in the well-known house in Gerrard Street, Soho, where he died; his longest residence during this time appears to have been in Fetter Lane. He knew Milton personally, and had a great admiration for him; while Milton, though denying him 'poetry' (of course in the classical sense of 'invention'), seems to have thought about as well of him as the difference of the two in politics, religion, morals, and poetical theory (not to mention the elder poet's arrogant and ungracious temper) could let us expect.

The frenzy of the Popish Plot, and the welter of conspiracy and partisanship into which it threw the nation, had the most important effects upon Dryden's life and literary career. At first it seemed rather doubtful what part he might take. He had had (or had been thought to have) some connections with Shaftesbury; he brought out, as late as 1681, The Spanish Friar as 'a Protestant play.' But it must be remembered that for some time the king himself either did not dare or did not choose to take any strong part against the plotmongers, and that it was only when they made a dead-set at his brother's succession, and almost directly threatened his own crown,

that he threw away the scabbard. Charles has been traditionally said to have given Dryden hints both for Absalom and Achitophel itself and for The Medal. He was quite clever enough; but though extreme originality was not Dryden's forte, he was himself more than capable of seizing the obvious handles presented. The results at any rate were, on the one hand, the production -in the original Absalom and Achitophel, in Dryden's contribution to its Second Part, in The Medal, and in the episodic or retaliatory lampoon of MacFlecknoe addressed to Shadwell-of such a series of political satires as the world had never seen. Dryden's long practice in verse, and especially in the casuistical declamation of the heroic play (see infra), had supplied him with weapons of unparalleled sharpness and power; his temperament, neither phlegmatic nor sentimental, gave him exactly the cool command of vigorous method which the satirist requires. On the other hand, the series identified him irrevocably with the Tory party, and drew upon him all the fury and all the venom of the Whigs.

A more remarkable change (for he had been a royalist for twenty years, and there is no evidence that he had ever been at heart a Republican) seems about the same time to have come over Dryden's mind. Hitherto he had been, at least in expression, by no means precise either in morals or religion. That curious depravation in both, which Pepys exhibits to us more especially in himself and in Lord Sandwich, had no doubt taken place in Dryden likewise; and while great part of his dramatic work exhibits (to put it in the most favourable way) complete complaisance to the least respectable desires of the frequenters of the playhouse in language and choice of subject, his references to religion are, if not directly freethinking, anything but reverent or devout. In the very remarkable poem of Religio Laici (1682), written almost concurrently with the satires, all this is changed, and changed in a manner for which it is impossible to suspect or even suggest any unworthy motive. Dryden appears here as a philosophical but orthodox Anglican, with just a desire for some more authoritative decision on doubtful points of faith and practice than the Anglican creed provides.

Such an attitude if feigned could have 'curried favour' with no person and no party at that time; but if not feigned, it clears away much if not all suspicion from Dryden's change of faith shortly after the accession of James II. This change was of course made the occasion of the most violent attacks on him at the time-attacks which have been more recently revived by Macaulay and others, sometimes with the assistance of false (at best mistaken) assertions as to the rewards he received. All that can be said truly is that Dryden is not the only person who has succumbed (especially after a youth of somewhat reckless living and thinking) to the attractions of an infallible

Church; that the alleged lowness of his moral tone has been greatly exaggerated in order to disprove the possibility of his sincerity; that as a matter of fact he gained nothing (he simply did not lose) by his change; and that when the fresh change came it struck him impavidum and unflinching. It is simply absurd to suppose that a party in the dire straits for literary talent in which the Whigs were then would not have welcomed Dryden even if they had despised him; in fact, they could not have helped themselves. Had Dryden chosen to take the oaths, William might, even without 'Dutch rudeness,' have turned his back on him, and the wits might have emptied their quivers ; but the Treasury could not have kept back his pay.

The reign of James, with the almost infrahuman folly of the king made disastrous to himself and to all connected with him, was not, even while it lasted, particularly fortunate for Dryden. The only wages of what some are pleased to call his apostasy were troublesome commissions from the court-a translation of the Life of St Francis Xavier; an ill-starred attempt to urge Romanism on the people by help of the papers of the dead king, which brought upon him a severe castigation from the practised hand of Stillingfleet; &c. The better, though not wholly good, polemical poem of The Hind and the Panther could not possibly have owed anything to the dull brain of James as its forerunners had perhaps owed something to the bright one of Charles; and the laureate's poem on the birth of the Prince of Wales, with some fine passages, was the least good of all the serious efforts of his maturity. On the other hand, when the wreck came it was, as far as place and pension went, total. For the last twelve years of his life Dryden had nothing to rely upon but his insignificant private fortune, the liberality of patron-friends like Dorset-who, in spite of all political differences, stuck to his old companion on the voyage down the river (see pages 781 and 813), when they talked of the English drama to the accompaniment of the Dutch gunsand the profits of his literary exertions. latter were meagre, rather in proportion to the merit of the work than to the standards and necessities of the time. His latest attempts at drama are, in at any rate some cases, better literature than all save the best of his earlier; but they were much less successful. This was partly, no doubt, owing to the fact that even Dryden's iron craftsmanship could not in old age work against the grain (and such work, he himself acknowledged, drama had always been to him) as it had worked in youth; but partly also to the other facts that the public taste was changing, and that the interests, court and other, which had once been on his side were now against him.

These

Fortunately he had another string to his bow. The standard of English learning, both in the classical and in the modern languages, was falling;

but, partly from this very cause, there was a greater appetite than ever for translations. For translation or at least for a peculiar kind of version which ranged from tolerably free translation to the loosest possible paraphrase-Dryden's genius, both creative and critical, was peculiarly suited. He had indeed, by one of his characteristic processes of critical evolution, arrived at a regular theory of it which was perhaps better justified by his practice than in itself. According to this theory the translator frankly disclaims all literal fidelity, and endeavours to rearrange or recreate the work in his hands, so as to produce something that seems to him to stand in the same relation to the language of the time and the probable readers of his own day as that in which the original stood in regard to those to whom it was addressed. He had, in the early volumes of a series of Miscellanies, begun this process on divers classical authors, almost as soon as the time of his first great satires. In this latest period he carried it out, partially or exclusively, in three works of importance-a translation of Juvenal and Persius, executed partly by himself, partly by others; the famous version of Virgil; and his last and greatest book of verse, the Fables, of which the most considerable portions were what he called 'translations' of Chaucer and Boccaccio. The Virgil is believed to have brought him in as much as 1200; the Fables were sold for the far more inadequate initial price of two hundred and fifty guineas. Moreover, during nearly the whole of his later literary life Dryden derived an income-small and uncertain in amount, but no doubt useful to him—from the supply of prologues and epilogues, according to the demand of the time, for plays other than his own As these pieces were specially addressed ad vulgus, some of the less estimable features of his language and sentiment appear in them; but hardly any part of his work shows more triumphantly his almost miraculous power of literary adjustment, the trumpet-ring and echo of his verse, and the clear, shrewd, solid strength of his sense and thought. Although in these years his literary primacy was not really disputed by any competent judgment, he naturally had his share, and more than his share, of the controversial amenities of the roughest and fiercest period of political strife in English history; while very late in his life (1698) he was assailed from another side and in the house of his political friends, having to bear no small part of the brunt of Jeremy Collier's famous onslaught on the Profaneness and Immorality of the Stage. He had not merely the good sense but (as everything tends to show) the sincere good feeling to plead guilty, at most claiming extenuating circumstances.

Otherwise the last years of his life were fairly happy. All his family survived him-though all followed him at no great distance of time, death being in the case of his wife and youngest son preceded by impaired sanity. Some of his connec

tions, both of the older and newer generations, were his fast friends to the last. However much he might be abused by mere snarlers or by political and religious partisans, everybody felt-and he knew that everybody felt-that he had succeeded to much more than the position of Ben Jonson as not merely official but actual head of English poetry and English literature; while all the best of the younger men of letters (except Swift, his kinsman, and the recipient of an imagined affront) were his hearty admirers. It was while the Fables were still in the first flush of success that he died (from mortification of the toe caused by gout) on 1st May 1700, and was splendidly buried in Westminster Abbey. Even those who, like Macaulay earlier and Mr Leslie Stephen later, have taken, for political or other reasons, an unfairly low view of Dryden's moral character, admit his possession of not a few moral virtues-modesty; absence of jealousy, conceit, or arrogance; family affection. Others, acknowledging that some of the degradation of a rather degraded time affected him, regard him as on the whole in need of very little whitewashing even morally. His intellectual and literary greatness, if not always fully or properly recognised, had scarcely ever been denied by any competent authority.

His position can spare the aid of the historic estimate, but is largely heightened, widened, and strengthened thereby. In himself, and without any account taken of independence of his predecessors or influence on those who came after him, Dryden is a dramatist of singular variety, volume, and (at his best) vigour; a prose-writer forcible, agreeable, and adequate to his subject as are few; a poet wanting only in the highest and rarest atmosphere of poetry; and in all these departments a master at once of the formal and the material constituents of literature. Hardly any one, except Lucretius, can argue in verse as he can; no one has a securer and defter grasp of the weapons of satire; in declamation (an inferior kind, no doubt) he has hardly a superior. Whether we look at the variety of his gifts or at the excellences of their individual expression, his contribution to English literature approves itself at once. But when we supplement this mere 'tasting' by an orderly examination of the state of that literature before and after his time, enjoyment becomes definite appreciation. We no longer, in a phrase of his own, 'like grossly,' but accurately, and with discrimination of what he did.

In every one of the three departments it is allimportant to notice that Dryden by no means displaced or rejected the great Elizabethan work, preference (and just preference) of which has made some judges unjust to him. If one or two men of the 'giant race,' such as Milton and Browne, survived till he was no longer young, they were but survivals; and even as such they passed away before he reached his own perfection. As a poet he is to be compared not with Milton, hardly

even with Cowley, but with D'Avenant on the one hand and Chamberlayne on the other; as a prosewriter and a dramatist hardly with any one of his forerunners, seeing that he represents in each class a new style rising on the already broken-down ruins of the past. Practically, with a decision and unanimity rare at such crises, the Restoration turned over a new leaf in all three volumes; and it was of the utmost importance that such a master as Dryden was there to set the copy on the blanks.

It was also extremely fortunate that he was not a precocious writer, and that he was (beyond almost all other men of letters in any way his equals) in the habit of reconstructing his theory and practice from time to time. But, like all great poets, he was born with certain secrets which he did not indeed discover or apply very early, but which gave an unmistakable impress to his work when, and almost before, it became mature. In poetry the chief of these was the mastery of a singularly strong and nervous line, which, by the agency partly of the new-stopped or mainly-stopped couplet, was girded up from the flaccid looseness into which both the blank-verse practice of the later dramatists and the luxuriantly overlapped couplet of the poets from Wither to Chamberlayne, had plunged the decasyllable. Something of this appears even in the Heroic Stanzas, but it is much more conspicuous in the three couplet poems above referred to and in Annus Mirabilis. Up, however, to the date of the latter Dryden's versification worked a little stiffly. It still needed expletives like 'do' and 'did;' still had recourse to effective but obvious tricks, such as the scattering of identical emphatic | words like 'you' and 'your' in different places of the line. His fifteen years' practice in dramacouplet at first, then blank-verse-relieved him of this; and when he reappeared with Absalom and Achitophel there was hardly a formal blemish left on his verse-for the uses of the triplet and the Alexandrine, to which he resorted to avoid monotony, cannot be called blemishes. In the twenty years that remained to him he improved even on this standard; he certainly adjusted it to wider ranges of subject than political and controversial matters could afford. And while the exquisite lines to the Duchess of Ormond in his latest volume take up the device of 'you' which has been noticed in him forty years before, they employ it, in common with other devices, after such a fashion of combined grace and grandeur as nothing but the very topmost summits of poetic workmanship can excel.

Nor, though the couplet is Dryden's chief medium, is it by any means the only one of which he is a master. His Pindarics'-the irregularly rhymed stanzas which Cowley had made fashionable -are, not merely in the universally known Alexander's Feast, but in the partly better Ode on Mrs Anne Killigrew and other places, the finest of their kind. His lighter lyrics (in his playsongs chiefly), though they never have the sweetest

or airiest charm of those of the poets of Charles the First's time, or even that of the best pieces of Dorset and Rochester, Sedley and Afra Behn, have been as a rule much undervalued; and he gave no small assistance to the reintroduction of the triple-foot, anapæstic or dactylic, into English poetry for purposes superior to those of doggerel and ballad.

The diction and the subjects of this verse were of equal importance. As far as the latter head is concerned, Dryden's accomplishment in verseargument was of course not unmixedly beneficial to English literature. It made poetry attempt as a main business what is really a main business of prose; and it gave, if not countenance, yet pretext to a deplorable family of verse didactics. But it was in itself too consummate not to 'conquer time' (as Landor put it), and it by no means prevented the poet from doing much besides arguing. Dryden's narration is admirable, his discourse in non-argumentative ways superb; and his description has since the days of Wordsworth been unduly depreciated. He cannot (or at least he does not) attempt to describe with the elaboration of the modern word-painter; but he is equal to the images he attempts to reproduce, and his single epithets are often admirably luminous and suggestive.

Undoubtedly, however, his great claim, next to his versification, lies in his diction. He rejects the euphuistic promiscuousness of his forerunners without falling into the mere vulgarity of some of his immediate contemporaries, or into the grayness and lack of colour of standard eighteenth-century English. He has not the slightest horror either of a new word or of a foreign word or of an archaic word, yet by a half-instinctive process of selection he has arranged a vocabulary which, though no doubt there can never be any final standard of English, perhaps approaches that ideal as near as any that can be mentioned. So at least thought Charles James Fox, who, when he undertook his History of James II., resolved to use no word which was not to be found in Dryden. But Dryden's practice belies Fox's theory.

The combination of these gifts with a far smaller portion of the true 'poetic fire' than has been assigned to Dryden by all but one-sided criticism would have sufficed to secure an altogether unusually high level of merit. It is not even true that (as Landor qualifies the praise given above by saying) he is never tender or sublime.' He is not often tender, but he is sometimes; he is sublime not seldom. But the intellectual and artistic qualities of his verse are no doubt on the whole above the emotional. His best poems have been glanced at already, but a short catalogue of all the more important, with dates and a brief note of the subject, &c., of each, may be useful. Heroic Stanzas, quatrains on Cromwell's death (1658); Astræa Redux, on the king's return, and, like the two following, in heroic couplets (1660); Panegyric on the Coronation (1661); To My Lord