were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The men! oh, what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal cherubims! And young men glittering and sparkling angels! and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street were moving jewels: I knew not that they were born or should die. But all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the light of the day, and something infinite behind everything appeared, which talked with my expectation and moved my desire. The city seemed to stand in Eden or to be built in Heaven. The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes, and gold and silver were mine as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins, and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it. I knew no churlish proprieties nor bounds nor divisions; but all proprieties and divisions were mine, all treasures and the possessors of them. So that with much ado I was corrupted, and made to learn the dirty devices of this world-which I now unlearn, and become, as it were- --a little child again, that I may enter into the Kingdom of God.

CHAPTER IV

DRYDEN

In the army of letters John Dryden takes rank as a brilliant and successful soldier of fortune. When in 1657 he left Cambridge and went up to London he was frankly intent on making a career, and, if we may judge by events, little concerned whether it were Trojan or Tyrian, Cavalier or Roundhead, under whose colours he enlisted. His first considerable poem was an elegy on Cromwell, his next a panegyric on Charles II: brought up in a Puritan household, he soon became the most audacious of Restoration dramatists; a master of fence, he cut his way by sheer swordsmanship to the Laureate's office, and held it at the rapier's point against all comers. Buckingham attacked him, and the answer was the portrait of Zimri. Shadwell attacked him, and the answer was Mac Flecknoe. Rochester supported Elkanah Settle, and he crippled patron and protégé with one disdainful thrust. For nearly thirty years his chair at Wills's coffee-house was a dictator's throne, where wits and scholars crowded to pay him court, and where his lightest word could. make or destroy a reputation.

Macaulay accounts for his influence upon the age by saying that there was no one on whom the age exercised so great an influence: but this, though true, is only a part of the truth. The fact is that he united two types of character which are hardly ever seen in combination. In the first place he was a true genius-far greater than Boileau, with whom he is often compared-he had wit and oratory and a luminous good sense; he had a faultless ear and

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an unerring use of words; he mastered the heroic couplet as no man ever mastered it before or after him; his prose is of that highest art in which all art is concealed. In the second place and it is here that the influence of his age is apparent he was a born campaigner, quick to seize any vantage ground that occasion offered, and to use any tactics that were sanctioned by the laws of war. And these two sides reacted and alternated in the strangest manner throughout his career. In some points his conscience seems to have been as flexible as the patriotism of Captain Dugald Dalgetty: in others it was as rigorous as the justice of Cato the Censor. The Court wanted licentious comedies, and he wrote examples that are worse than Wycherley. It wanted sentimental tragedies, and he gave it the Conquest of Granada and the Indian Emperor. It wanted libretti for the composers of the Chapel Royal, and he carved it an opera out of Paradise Lost. Yet in all questions of literary form and method he was the most fearless and upright of controversialists; and, at a time when he needed friends, quarrelled with the most powerful of those that he possessed rather than surrender his doctrine of the preeminence of rhyme.

His chief strength lay in satire and in criticism. The former of these had already become a literary fashion: Donne was a mighty satirist, Cowley had a neat hand, and Cleveland a bitter tongue: Butler's Hudibras, which we now read in forlorn astonishment, so hit the taste of the town that it came near to winning its author the Laureateship. But above all these, as above all his rivals and opponents, Dryden rises supreme. His satire is strong, masculine, dignified: it neither scolds nor blusters, it cuts a clean stroke without venom and without malignity. If it is sometimes coarse it is far less so than the practice of the time admitted; it fights not like

a bravo but like a soldier, who in the midst of conflict has at heart the honour of his profession.

His criticisms may be said to have laid, in England, the foundations of a logical and reasoned method. Sidney's Apology is a noble panegyric: the pamphlets of Campion and Daniel contain some passages of brilliant skirmishing, but it is with Dryden's prefaces that our science of criticism really begins. Into these he poured all his treasures of wit and learning, all his persuasive wisdom, all his gift of lucid exposition. Sometimes he advocated a cause that has been given against him: to say this detracts nothing from the merit of his advocacy. Sometimes, as in the passage on translation here quoted, he seems to have said the last word that the subject admits-all that is left is to apply his maxims and develop his arguments. And all through he has a cordial and honest admiration for good work, even when it is of a kind that is different from his own. He rescued Chaucer from oblivion and restored him to his place among the great poets. He reverenced Shakespeare in an age which thought Othello a mean thing' and the Midsummer Night's Dream 'a most insipid, ridiculous play'. He paid royal homage to Milton while the Town wits were sneering at the old blind schoolmaster's tedious poem upon. the fall of man'. Grant that the other Dryden, dramatist and adapter, laid sacrilegious hands upon all three. Grant that even Dryden the critic was not faultless in his adjustment of praise and censure. It still remains true that he had a far deeper insight into poetry than any other critic of his time; and that his judgements, whether right or wrong, are the reasoned conclusions from principles which he believed to be just.

It is useless to inquire whether he could have made a lasting name as a dramatist. Of his twenty-seven plays one alone was 'written to please himself': all

the others were occasional pieces aimed at a popular taste, which has fortunately proved to be transitory. But in All for Love, his version of the Antony and Cleopatra story, there are undoubtedly some touches of greatness: the tragedy can still be read with pleasure, and might well be accorded another hearing on the stage. Of his Odes, the two finest are that on Alexander's Feast and that on St. Cecilia's Day: both stately examples of a form in which English verse and English music have equally excelled. That he falls below the first rank of poets is indisputable he lacks the fervour, the passion, the imaginative power which alone give access to the higher summits. But as a man of letters he occupies a wide domain, over which his supremacy can never be challenged. He summed up the seventeenth century; he prepared the way for the eighteenth ; and he has left behind him a monument which will last as long as our literature endures.

JOHN DRYDEN (1631-1700) began his literary career while still a boy at Westminster. His Tears of the Muses on the Death of Henry, Lord Hastings (1641) is in the artificial fashion of the day. Dryden's family were all 'Parliament men', and in 1658 he wrote his Heroic Stanzas on the death of Oliver Cromwell. His next work was Astraea Redux, celebrating the Restoration, followed by a Panegyric upon the coronation of Charles II. In 1662 he was made a member of the Royal Society, and in the next year his first play, The Wild Gallant, was acted. Dryden now turned his attention to the drama, and began to produce plays with extraordinary rapidity. When the theatres were closed (1665-6) on account of the plague, he retired to Wiltshire, where he wrote Annus Mirabilis and the Essay of Dramatic Poesy. In 1666 he returned to London, and it is said that he undertook to provide the King's Theatre with three plays a year. He also collaborated with Davenant in rewriting The Tempest and Macbeth, and turned Milton's Paradise Lost into an heroic opera. The best of his plays is All for Love, which is founded on Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. In 1670 he became