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Chancellor (New Year's Day 1662); Annus Mirabilis (winter of 1666), quatrains; Absalom and Achitophel, with its sequels, all in couplets, and all written and published between November 1681 and November 1682; Religio Laici, religiousphilosophical couplets (1682); Threnodia Augustalis, a Pindaric on the death of Charles II. (1685); The Hind and the Panther, an allegorical polemic in couplets on the quarrel between the Anglican and Roman Churches, with side-hits at the Protestant sects and obnoxious persons like Burnet (1687); Britannia Rediviva, also couplets (1688); Eleonora, an epicede on Lady Abingdon, written to order, but with splendid passages, in couplets (1692). The dates of the great translations and of the Fables (which included rehandlings of the Knight's, Nun's, Priest's, and Wife of Bath's Tales from Chaucer; of The Flower and the Leaf; and of the stories of Sigismonda, Honoria, and Cymon, from Boccaccio) have been given above. Dryden's minor poems, which are very numerous, are scattered over the whole forty years of his literary life, and in many places-his plays, those of others, the Miscellanies which he edited, and the various books for which, as compliments or commendations or otherwise, they were specially written.

It will have been observed from this catalogue— and indeed it is generally known-that the larger part of Dryden's poetical work is written in the heroic or decasyllabic couplet, to which he gave an entirely new stamp, and which, directly or through the refined but not in all ways improved form given to it by Pope, became the reigning metre of English verse for nearly a hundred and fifty years. And attention has been drawn already to the importance of his dramatic work in reference to this. That work falls into four classes-comedies or tragi-comedies, heroic plays, later blank-verse dramas, and operas.

Dryden's comedies have, in the general opinion, been ranked lowest among his works ; and with some excuse. His touch was scarcely light enough for the kind; and, perhaps here only, he never worked out a distinct form of his own. His comedies, tragi-comedies, and (in the useful French limitation of the word) dramas float between the humour-comedy of Jonson, the romanticprosaic comedy of Beaumont and Fletcher, and the brilliant new comedy of manners which, quite early in his career, Etherege aimed at, and which, late in that career, Congreve and Vanbrugh triumphantly achieved. This uncertainty of scheme and spirit is not helped by the very frequent coarseness of language and incident or by the indistinctness of comic character. But in one particular situation-the pair of light-o'-loves who flirt and bicker but are really very fond of each other-Dryden is not unsuccessful; while in one figure of an affected coquette, the Melantha of Marriage à la Mode (1672), he has borrowed little from any one else, and has lent a great deal to one of Congreve's masterpieces, Millamant. The drawbacks of his

comedy appear at once in his earliest play, The Wild Gallant (1663), and have not disappeared in his last, the tragi-comic Love Triumphant of 1694. Its merits appear chiefly in Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen (1667), where Nell Gwynne's acting undoubtedly helped, but by no means wholly created, the attractive part of Florimel, one of the flirts above mentioned; the also-mentioned Marriage à la Mode; The Spanish Friar (1681); and Amphitryon (1690). The blank-verse tragedies, which he produced after giving up rhyme, undoubtedly contain his noblest work in drama— the bold, but not wholly too bold, attempt on the subject of Antony and Cleopatra called All for Love, or the World Well Lost (1678) ; the carefully wrought and admirably written Don Sebastian (1690); and the fine rhetorical Cleomenes (1692), his last play but one. These, however, are inevitably brought into contrast with the Elizabethan masterpieces, and suffer accordingly. The operas, Albion and Albanius (1685) and King Arthur (1691), contain good work, especially in the lyric parts; but they are mainly curiosities, historically interesting as marking a transition from the masque. A curiosity, again, is the rhymed or 'tagged' dramatisation of Paradise Lost, called The State of Innocence (1674), which Dryden also called an opera, and which is said to have been good-naturedly though half-contemptuously authorised by Milton himself. Curiosities of a less agreeable kind occur in the Shakesperean alterations of The Tempest, after D'Avenant (1667), and of Troilus and Cressida (1679); but some of Dryden's drama is only 'curious' in a worse sense still.

The heroic play deserves separate treatment for many reasons the chief being its pre-eminent serviceableness in perfecting his verse, its odd historical isolation as a kind immensely popular for a time and then chiefly laughed at, and its close connection with the admirable Essay of Dramatic Poesy. He did not exactly invent it; it is one of those literary kinds which, in a famous phrase, were never directly invented by any one, but 'growed.' The heroic play has something to do with the long-winded but universally read French novels of the Scudéry class; something with the French tragedy of Corneille and his earlier contemporaries; much with the out-at-heel degradation of blank-verse in the last plays written immediately before the closing of the theatres in 1642; much also with the growing distaste for remote imaginative conceit and emotion, the growing fancy for sharp intellectual rally and repartee. The first example of it in its high-flown sentiment, rhetorical style, and non-natural situation is D'Avenant's Siege of Rhodes, which, safeguarded by its title of 'opera,' actually preceded the Restoration and the reopening of the theatre generally (1656). It was written for nearly forty years after that date. But its flourishing time was from 1665 to 1680, and all its best examples were mainly or wholly Dryden's work. He it was who first

achieved the hectoring, ringing tenor of its couplet tirades, and the sharp battledore-and-shuttlecock (so admirably ridiculed by Butler and in the Rehearsal, and always on the point of burlesquing itself) of its single-line interchanges of speech. The Indian Queen, which he wrote in collaboration with his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, appeared as early as January 1664; The Indian Emperor, by himself, and far superior, followed in 1665. But he made much farther advances to the eccentric perfection which the thing admitted in Tyrannic Love, or the Royal Martyr (1669), on the story of St Catharine, and the two parts of The Conquest of Granada (1670), all three of which are triumphs of preposterous situation and sentiment, carried off by the most extraordinary bravado of poetical rhetoric, which not seldom becomes, for moments, actual poetry of a high class. His last, and in some ways his greatest, heroic or rhymed tragedy was Aurengzebe (1675), a play interesting because of its contemporary if remote subject, and though not possessing the furia and sweep of its two predecessors, including passages (one especially) which display at nearly their best Dryden's masterly fashion of writing and his criticismnot subtle or profound, but strong and true and everlasting-of life.

The transition to his prose is all the easier because, as was noted above, the first considerable example of that prose, the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, is in part a defence of rhymed plays. Congreve represents Dryden as acknowledging indebtedness to Tillotson; but Dryden was too proud a man to be a vain one, and it is very difficult to trace the indebtedness chronologically as well as æsthetically. It is certain that for years past there had been, unconsciously or consciously, both a vague desire for and actual attempts at a style less gorgeous but more generally useful than the styles of Milton, Taylor, and Browne, less intricate and cumbrous than that of Clarendon, easier and more conversational than that of Hobbes. Beginnings of such a style are found as far back as Jonson; Cowley's essays mark a great advance in it. But these essays were not published early. The real bringers of it about were a group of men-Tillotson, Temple, Halifax, South, Dryden himself, and one or two more-who were all born about the year 1630. For the perfecting of such a style the essay, with its freedom from stiff rhetorical rules of argument and its wide liberty, offered special advantages; and Dryden, who, if he did not require, always preferred, a model, found in Corneille's examens of his own plays one for the adjustment of the essay to purposes of literary criticism. Most of the long succession of essays, prefaces, and so forth with which he followed up the Essay of Dramatic Poesy itself are, like it, devoted to literary subjects, with, naturally enough, a strong admixture of political and other polemic, in the period from the Popish Plot to the Revolution. But whatever the

subject, the style is the same, or rather it adjusts itself to almost any subject with slight variations. Fault has been found with it (by Coleridge) for not possessing a 'stricter and purer grammar;' but this comes from the mistaken notion that English grammar has a 'sealed pattern' lying somewhere stored up and not to be varied from, instead of being, as it really is, in the main an induction from the practice of the best writers. At first he was perhaps a little too colloquial; but as this fault grew upon his contemporaries he himself corrected it. He was at first also too much given to the use of foreign words; but though he, wisely, never gave this up, he used it later with an equally wise moderation. His diction has the same clear-cut force and form that it possesses in poetry; and the mould of his sentences, with its not excessive or monotonous antithesis, its easy swing and vibration, and the clenching stroke at the end, reminds one in no unpleasant way of his management of the couplet. The great character of his prose throughout is its combination of ease that is never (or hardly ever) slipshod with weight which is still more rarely 'loaded' or clumsy. Here, as in verse, he improved continually to the last; and his prose Preface to the Fables, with its opening epistle to the Duke of Ormond, is as much a 'diploma-piece' of his style in this harmony as the verses to the Duchess (given at page 801) are of his fashion of poetry. In both he was for his time a perfect master of the game; and in such mastery he is very unlikely to be excelled at any time, whatsoever may be the changes that come over English literature.

1. Dryden's Poems.-The first group of illustrative extracts are from Dryden's poetry other than dramatic, the second from his dramas, the third from his prose.

Character of Shaftesbury.
Of these the false Achitophel was first;
A name to all succeeding ages curst :
For close designs and crooked counsels fit,
Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit,
Restless, unfixed in principles and place,
In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace:
A fiery soul, which, working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy body to decay,
And o'er-informed the tenement of clay.
A daring pilot in extremity;

Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high,
He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit,
Would steer too nigh the sands to boast his wit.
Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide;
Else why should he, with wealth and honour blest,
Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?
Punish a body which he could not please,
Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease?
And all to leave what with his toil he won,
To that unfeathered two-legged thing, a son;
Got while his soul did huddled notions try,
And born a shapeless lump, like anarchy.

In friendship false, implacable in hate;
Resolved to ruin or to rule the state:
To compass this, the triple bond he broke,
The pillars of the public safety shook,
And fitted Israel for a foreign yoke :

Then, seized with fear, yet still affecting fame,
Usurped a patriot's all-atoning name.
So easy still it proves, in factious times,
With public zeal to cancel private crimes.
How safe is treason, and how sacred ill,
Where none can sin against the people's will!
Where crowds can wink, and no offence be known,
Since in another's guilt they find their own!
Yet fame deserved no enemy can grudge;
The statesman we abhor, but praise the judge.
In Israel's courts ne'er sat an Abbethdin-
With more discerning eyes, or hands more clean,
Unbribed, unsought, the wretched to redress,
Swift of despatch, and easy of access.

Oh! had he been content to serve the crown
With virtues only proper to the gown,
Or had the rankness of the soil been freed
From cockle that oppressed the noble seed,
David for him his tuneful harp had strung,
And heaven had wanted one immortal song.
But wild ambition loves to slide, not stand,
And Fortune's ice prefers to Virtue's land.
Achitophel, grown weary to possess
A lawful fame and lazy happiness,
Disdained the golden fruit to gather free,
And lent the crowd his arm to shake the tree.

(From Absalom and Achitophel.)

It is significant that Dryden avoids the spelling Ahithophel, which the Authorised Version had long made the stereotyped English spelling, and clings to Achitophel, the spelling not merely of the Latin Vulgate but of the (Catholic) Douay version. Abbethdin, 'father of the house of justice,' was the Hebrew title of a Jewish supreme judge.

The Duke of Buckingham.

Some of their chiefs were princes of the land :
In the first rank of these did Zimri stand;
A man so various that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome:
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
Was everything by starts, and nothing long ;
But, in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon;
Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.
Blest madman, who could every hour employ
With something new to wish or to enjoy!
Railing and praising were his usual themes,
And both, to shew his judgment, in extremes;
So over-violent, or over-civil,

That every man with him was god or devil.
In squandering wealth was his peculiar art;
Nothing went unrewarded but desert :
Beggared by fools, whom still he found too late,
He had his jest, and they had his estate;
He laughed himself from court, then sought relief
By forming parties, but could ne'er be chief;
For, spite of him, the weight of business fell
On Absalom and wise Achitophel :
Thus, wicked but in will, of means bereft,
He left not faction, but of that was left.

(From Absalom and Achitophel.)

Shaftesbury's Address to Monmouth. Auspicious prince, at whose nativity Some royal planet ruled the southern sky, Thy longing country's darling and desire, Their cloudy pillar and their guardian fire; Their second Moses, whose extended wand Divides the seas, and shews the promised land; Whose dawning day in every distant age Has exercised the sacred prophet's rage: The people's prayer, the glad diviner's theme, The young men's vision, and the old men's dream ; Thee saviour, thee, the nation's vows confess, And, never satisfied with seeing, bless: Swift unbespoken pomps thy steps proclaim, And stammering babes are taught to lisp thy name: How long wilt thou the general joy detain, Starve and defraud the people of thy reign? Content ingloriously to pass thy days,

Like one of virtue's fools that feeds on praise; Till thy fresh glories, which now shine so bright, Grow stale, and tarnish with our daily sight; Believe me, royal youth, thy fruit must be Or gathered ripe, or rot upon the tree : Heaven has to all allotted, soon or late, Some lucky revolution of their fate; Whose motions, if we watch and guide with skill, (For human good depends on human will,) Our fortune rolls as from a smooth descent, And from the first impression takes the bent; But if unseized, she glides away like wind, And leaves repenting folly far behind. Now, now she meets you with a glorious prize, And spreads her locks before you as she flies! Had thus old David, from whose loins you spring, Not dared, when fortune called him to be king, At Gath an exile he might still remain, And heaven's anointing oil had been in vain. Let his successful youth your hopes engage, But shun the example of declining age; Behold him setting in his western skies, The shadows lengthening as the vapours rise. He is not now as when on Jordan's sand The joyful people thronged to see him land, Covering the beach and blackening all the strand! (From Absalom and Achitophel) Jordan's sand is simply for the English coast, and refers to nu incident in Hebrew history.

Ode to the Memory of Mrs Anne Killigrew. Thou youngest virgin-daughter of the skies,

Made in the last promotion of the blest ;
Whose palms, new-plucked from Paradise,
In spreading branches more sublimely rise,
Rich with immortal green above the rest :
Whether, adopted to some neighbouring star,
Thou roll'st above us, in thy wandering race,
Or, in procession fixed and regular,
Mov'st with the heaven-majestic pace;

Or, called to more superior bliss,
Thou tread'st, with seraphims, the vast abyss:
Whatever happy region be thy place,
Cease thy celestial song a little space;

Thou wilt have time enough for hymns divine,
Since Heaven's eternal year is thine.
Hear, then, a mortal Muse thy praise rehearse,
In no ignoble verse :

But such as thy own voice did practise here, When thy first-fruits of poesy were given, To make thyself a welcome inmate there; While yet a young probationer, And candidate of heaven.

If by traduction came thy mind,
Our wonder is the less to find

A soul so charming from a stock so good;
Thy father was transfused into thy blood:
So wert thou born into the tuneful strain,
An early, rich, and inexhausted vein.

But if thy pre-existing soul

Was formed at first with myriads more,

It did through all the mighty poets roll, Who Greek or Latin laurels wore,

And was that Sappho last, which once it was before.
If so, then cease thy flight, O heaven-born mind!
Thou hast no dross to purge from thy rich ore :
Nor can thy soul a fairer mansion find
Than was the beauteous frame she left behind.
Return to fill or mend the quire of thy celestial
kind. . .

O gracious God! how far have we
Profaned thy heavenly gift of Poesy!
Made prostitute and profligate the Muse,
Debased to each obscene and impious use,
Whose harmony was first ordained above
For tongues of angels, and for hymns of love!
Oh wretched we! why were we hurried down
This lubric and adulterate age,

(Nay, added fat pollutions of our own,)

To increase the steaming ordures of the stage? What can we say to excuse our second fall? Let this thy vestal, Heaven, atone for all; Her Arethusian stream remains unsoiled, Unmixed with foreign filth and undefiled;

Her wit was more than man; her innocence child. . .

...

When in mid-air the golden trump shall sound,

To raise the nations underground;

When in the valley of Jehosophat

The judging God shall close the book of Fate;

And there the last assizes keep

For those who wake, and those who sleep;
When rattling bones together fly

From the four corners of the sky;

When sinews o'er the skeletons are spread,

Those clothed with flesh, and life inspires the dead;
The sacred poets first shall hear the sound,
And foremost from the tomb shall bound,
For they are covered with the lightest ground;
And straight, with inborn vigour, on the wing,
Like mountain larks, to the new morning sing.
There thou, sweet saint, before the quire shall go,
As harbinger of heaven, the way to shew,
The way which thou so well hast learned below.

a

(Miss) Anne Killigrew, daughter of a prebendary of Westminster (who was the brother of the two dramatists; see Vol. II.), died of smallpox in 1685, aged twenty-five. She painted pictures, and a volume of her poems was published after her death. The traducian or derivative theory of the origin of the individual soul is opposed to the creationist view. Jehosophat is neither the Vulgate nor the Douay spelling (Josaphat), nor yet that of the A.V. (Fehoshaphat).

Satire on Shadwell.

All human things are subject to decay;
And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey.
This Flecknoe found, who, like Augustus, young
Was called to empire, and had governed long,
In prose and verse was owned, without dispute,
Through all the realms of Nonsense absolute.
This aged prince, now flourishing in peace,
And blest with issue of a large increase,
Worn out with business, did at length debate
To settle the succession of the state;
And pondering which of all his sons was fit
To reign and wage immortal war with Wit,
Cried: "Tis resolved; for Nature pleads that he
Should only rule who most resembles me.
Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dulness from his tender years:
Shadwell alone of all my sons is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence;
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.
Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,
Strike through, and make a lucid interval;
But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray;
His rising fogs prevail upon the day.
Besides, his goodly fabric fills the eye,
And seems designed for thoughtless majesty:
Thoughtless as monarch oaks that shade the plain,
And, spread in solemn state, supinely reign.
Heywood and Shirley were but types of thee,
Thou last great prophet of tautology!
Even I, a dunce of more renown than they,
Was sent before but to prepare thy way.'

(From Mac-Flecknoe.)

For Flecknoe and Shadwell, see page 784 of this volume and the first section of Vol. II.; and for Heywood and Shirley, unkindly comprehended in the same condemnation, pages 431 and 484.

To my dear Friend, Mr Congreve, on his Comedy called 'The Double Dealer.'

Well then, the promised hour is come at last,

The present age of wit obscures the past :
Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ,
Conquering with force of arms and dint of wit:
Theirs was the giant race before the flood;

And thus, when Charles returned, our empire stood.
Like Janus, he the stubborn soil manured,
With rules of husbandry the rankness cured;
Tamed us to manners, when the stage was rude,
And boisterous English wit with art endued.
Our age was cultivated thus at length,

But what we gained in skill we lost in strength.
Our builders were with want of genius curst;
The second temple was not like the first;
Till you, the best Vitruvius, come at length,
Our beauties equal, but excel our strength.
Firm Doric pillars found your solid base,
The fair Corinthian crowns the higher space;
Thus all below is strength, and all above is grace.
In easy dialogue is Fletcher's praise;
He moved the mind, but had not power to raise.
Great Jonson did by strength of judgment please,
Yet, doubling Fletcher's force, he wants his ease.
In differing talents both adorned their age,
One for the study, t'other for the stage.

But both to Congreve justly shall submit,
One matched in judgment, both o'ermatched in wit.
In him all beauties of this age we see,
Etherege his courtship, Southern's purity,

The satire, wit, and strength of manly Wycherly.
All this in blooming youth you have achieved;
Nor are your foiled contemporaries grieved.
So much the sweetness of your manners move,
We cannot envy you, because we love.
Fabius might joy in Scipio, when he saw
A beardless Consul made against the law,
And join his suffrage to the votes of Rome,
Though he with Hannibal was overcome.
Thus old Romano bowed to Raphael's fame,
And scholar to the youth he taught became.
O that your brows my laurel had sustained!
Well had I been deposed, if you had reigned:
The father had descended for the son;
For only you are lineal to the throne.
Thus, when the state one Edward did depose,
A greater Edward in his room arose :
But now, not I but poetry is curst;

For Tom the second reigns like Tom the first.
But let them not mistake my patron's part,
Nor call his charity their own desert.
Yet this I prophesy-Thou shalt be seen,
Though with some short parenthesis between,
High on the throne of wit, and, seated there,
Not mine-that's little-but thy laurel wear.
Thy first attempt an early promise made,
That early promise this has more than paid.
So bold, yet so judiciously you dare,
That your least praise is to be regular.

[more.

Time, place, and action may with pains be wrought,
But genius must be born, and never can be taught.
This is your portion, this your native store;
Heaven, that but once was prodigal before,
To Shakespeare gave as much; she could not give him
Maintain your post: that's all the fame you need ;
For 'tis impossible you should proceed.
Already I am worn with cares and age,
And just abandoning the ungrateful stage :
Unprofitably kept at Heaven's expense,
I live a rent-charge on His providence ;
But you, whom every Muse and Grace adorn,
Whom I foresee to better fortune born,
Be kind to my remains; and oh, defend,
Against your judgment, your departed friend!
Let not the insulting foe my fame pursue,
But shade those laurels which descend to you:
And take for tribute what these lines express:
You merit more, nor could my love do less.

Tom the First and Tom the Second are apparently Thomas Shadwell and Thomas Rymer of the Fadera, also a dramatist, and the worst of all actual and possible critics.

On Milton.

Three poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.
The first in loftiness of thought surpassed;
The next in majesty; in both the last.
The force of Nature could no farther go;
To make a third, she joined the former two.

On Cromwell.

His grandeur he derived from Heaven alone, For he was great ere Fortune made him so;

And wars, like mists that rise against the sun,
Made him but greater seem, not greater grow.
Nor was he like those stars which only shine
When to pale mariners they storms portend;
He had his calmer influence, and his mien
Did love and majesty together blend.

(From Heroic Stanzas.)

Reason and Religion.

Dim as the borrowed beams of moon and stars
To lonely, weary, wandering travellers,
Is Reason to the soul; and as on high
Those rolling fires discover but the sky,
Not light us here; so Reason's glimmering ray
Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way,

But guide us upward to a better day.
And as those nightly tapers disappear,
When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere;
So pale grows Reason at Religion's sight ;
So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light.

(From Religie Laici.)

It is worth noting the rhyming of stars with travellers.

Hind and Panther Described.

A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged,
Fed on the lawns, and in the forest ranged;
Without unspotted, innocent within,

She feared no danger, for she knew no sin.
Yet had she oft been chased with horns and hounds,
And Scythian shafts, and many winged wounds
Aimed at her heart; was often forced to fly,
And doomed to death, though fated not to die.
The Panther, sure the noblest next the Hind,
And fairest creature of the spotted kind;
Oh, could her inborn stains be washed away,
She were too good to be a beast of prey!
How can I praise or blame, and not offend,
Or how divide the frailty from the friend?
Her vaults and virtues lie so mixed, that she
Nor wholly stands condemned nor wholly free.
Then like her injured Lion, let me speak;
He cannot bend her, and he would not break.
Unkind already, and estranged in part,
The Wolf begins to share her wandering heart.
Though unpolluted yet with actual ill,

She half commits who sins but in her will.
If, as our dreaming Platonists report,
There could be spirits of a middle sort,
Too black for heaven, and yet too white for hell,
Who just dropped half-way down, nor lower fell;
So poised, so gently she descends from high,
It seems a soft dismission from the sky.

(From The Hind and the Panther, Part i.)

The Swallow.

The swallow, privileged above the rest
Of all the birds as man's familiar guest,
Pursues the sun in summer, brisk and bold,
But wisely shuns the persecuting cold ;
Is well to chancels and to chimneys known,
Though 'tis not thought she feeds on smoke alone.
From hence she has been held of heavenly line,
Endued with particles of soul divine:

This merry chorister had long possessed

Her summer seat, and feathered well her nest,

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