■ l' V . ► ^ i^^u.v^ '.^ *-••?,» ;-.!.■ '.'.•• '''•■■ ' , Book __. (gnglist) Mtn of Cettn-0 EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY i;■r^: 14^ '*C> Cts* Issue .•rifrlit, ISf.o, KB W BB OIHERS July 29,. 1887 Subscription Price ]•'.■■ Year, 52 Number?, ^lo Ei/tered .it. ihe I'oBt-CiRce at New York, na Se'ioixl-ciass Mail Mailer €iigli5l) i}Xen of Cettcui EDITED r.Y JOHX MORLKY D R Y X) E M 13/ /NTSBrirv KCTEMiir^nKtfM*^ . -^ V. .*vj#te . "/^^/w^/ f?j yorn- ha:td ore ih? mtst /.■sefal, ■\/'U>' uU \ /v'.iItPER'S HANDY S.-EIUES. Latest Issues. No. \ CExxa, 109. Cashel Byron's Profession. A Novel By Georgk* Bernard Shaw .A 25 110. Britta. a Shetland Romance. By George Temple. Illii.TStrated, 2ii 1 11. A Child of the Revolution. A Novel. By the Author oJ " The Atelier du I'vs." I'luistrated .\ , 25 112. A Strange Inheritance, A Novel. By F. M. F, Sk-'-ne. , 25 113. LocKSLET Hall Sixty Years After, Etc. By i^'ved, j iui;.: Tennyson. ,.....,...>.'...,...... '.. . 114 REaiMESTAL Legends. 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Lamb Alfred Ainger. Bentley R. C. Jebb. Dickens A. W. Ward. Gray E. W. Gosse. Swift Leslie Stephen. Sterne H. D. Traill. Macaulay J. Cotter Morison. Fielding Ar .iu r^^o&o.i. Sheridan Mrs. Oliphant. Addison W. J. Courthope. Bacon R. W. Church. Coleridge H. D, Traill. • J. A. Symonds. Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. Any of the above works will he sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any pari of the United States, on receipt of the price. PKEFATORY NOTE. A WRITER on Biryden is more especially bound to acknowl- edge Kis indebtedness to his predecessors, because, so far as matters of fact are concerned, that indebtedness must necessarily be greater than in most other cases. There is now little chance ui fresh information being obtained about the poet, unless it be in a few letters hitherto undiscovered or withheld from publication. I have, therefore, to ac- knowledge my debt to Johnson, Malone, Scott, Mitford, Bell, Christie, the Rev. R. Hooper, and the writer of an ar- ticle in the Quarterly Revieio for 1878. Murray's "Guide to Northamptonshire " has been of much use to me in the visits I have made to Drj^den's birthplace, and the numer- ous other places associated with his memory in his native county. To Mr. J. Churton Collins I owe thanks for pointing put to me a Dryden house which, so far as he and I know, has escaped the notice of previous biogra- phers. Mr. W. Noel Sainsbury, of the Record Office, has supplied me with some valuable information. My friend Mr. Edmund W. Gosse has not only read the proof-sheets of this book with the greatest care, suggesting many things of value, but has also kindly allowed me the use of origi- il editions of many late seventeenth - century works, in- cluding most of the rare pamphlets against the poet in reply to his satires. vi PREFATORY NOTE. Except Scott's excellent but costly and bulky edition, there* is, to the disgrace of English booksellers or book- buyers, no complete edition of Dryden. The first issue of this in 1808 was reproduced in 1821 with no material al- terations, but both are ^very expensive, especially the sec- ond. A tolerably complete and not unsatisfactory Dryden may, however, be got together without much outlay b} any one who waits till he can pick up at the bookshops copies of Malone's edition of the prose works, and of Con- greve's original edition (duodecimo or folio) of the plays. By adding to these Mr. Christie's admirable Globe edition of the poems, very little, except the translations, will be left out, and not too much obtained in duplicate. This, of course, deprives the reader of Scott's life and note&,*^ which are very valuable. The life, however, has been re- printed, and is easily accessible. In the following pages a few passages from a course of lectures on " Dryden and his Period,'' delivered by me at the Royal Institution in the spring of 1880, have been incorporated. f CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAOK Before the Restoration 1 CHAPTER II. Early Literary Work 23 CHAPTER III. Period of Dramatic Activity 38 CHAPTER IV. Satirical and Didactic Poems 71 CHAPTER V. Life from 1680 to 1688 99 CHAPTER VL Later Dramas and Prose Works 113 CHAPTER VIL Period of Translation 135 CHAPTER VIIL The Fables 153 CHAPTER IX. Conclusion 177 D R Y D E N. CHAPTER I. BEFORE THE RESTORATION. John Dryden was born on the 9th of August, 1631, at the Vicarage of Aldwinkle All Saints, between Thrapston and Oundle. Like other small Northamptonshire villages, Aldwinkle is divided into two parishes. All Saints and St. Feter's, the churches and parsonage -houses being within bowshot of each other, and some little confusion has arisen from this. *it has, however, been cleared up by the indus- trious researches of various persons, and there is now no doubt about the facts. The house in which the poet was born (and which still exists, though altered to some extent internally) belonged at the time to his maternal grandfa- ther, the Rev. Henry Pickering. The Drydens and the Pickerings were both families of some distinction in the county, and both of decided Puritan principles ; but they were not, properly speaking, neighbours. The Drydens originally came from the neighbourhood of the border, and a certain John Dryden, about the middle of the sixteenth centurj, married the daughter and heiress of Sir John Cope, of Canons Ashby, in the county of Northampton. 1* 2 DRYDEN. [chap. Erasmus, the son of this John Dryden — the name is spelt as usual at the time in half-a-dozen different ways, and there is no reason for supposing that the poet invented the y, though before him it seems to have been usually Driden — was created a baronet, and his third son, also an Erasmus, was the poet's father. Before this Erasmus married Mary Pickering the families had already been connected, but they lived on opposite sides of the county. Canons Ashby being in the hilly district which extends to the borders of Oxfordshire on the south-west, while Tichmarsh, the headquarters of the Pickerings, lies on the extreme east on high ground, overlooking the flats of Huntingdon. The poet's father is described as " of Tich- marsh," and seems to have usually resided in that neighbour- hood. His property, however, which descended to our poet, lay in the neighbourhood of Canons Ashby at the village of Blakesley, which is not, as the biographers persistently repeat after one another, " near Tichmarsh'," but some for- ty miles distant to the straightest flying crow. Indeed, the connexion of the poet with the seat of his ancestors, and of his own property, appears to have been very slight. There is no positive evidence that he was ever at Canons Ashby at all, and this is a pity. For the house — still in the possession of his collateral descendants in the female line — is a very delightful one, looking like a miniature college quadrangle set down by the side of a country lane, with a background of park in which the deer wander, and a fringe of formal garden, full of the trimmest of yew- trees. All this was there in Dry den's youth, and, more- over, the place was the scene of some stirring events. Sir John Driden was a staunch parliamentarian, and his hou' .i lay obnoxious to the royalist garrisons of Towcester on the one side, and Banbury on the other. On at least one 1.] BEFORE THE RESTORATION. 8 occasion a great fight took place, the parliamentariairA bar- ricading themselves in the church of Canons Ashby, with- in stone's throw of the house, and defending it and its tower for several hours before the royalists forced the place and carried thera off prisoners. This was in Dry- den's thirteenth year, and a boy of thirteen would have rejoiced not a little in such a state of things. But, as has been said, the actual associations of the poet lie elsewhere. They are all collected in the valley of the Nene, and a well-girt man can survey the whole in a day's walk: ( K is remarkable that Dryden's name is connected with fewer places than is the case with almost any other English poet, except, perhaps, Cowper.) If we leave out of sight a few visits to his father-in-law's seat at Charlton, in Wiltshire, and elsewhere, London and twenty miles of the Nene valley exhaust the list of his residences. This val- ley is not an inappropriate locale for the poet who in his faults, as well as his merits, was perhaps the most English of all English writers. It is not grand, or epic, or tragical ; but, on the other hand, it is sufficiently varied, free from the monotony of the adjacent fens, and full of historical and architectural memories. The river in which Dryden acquired, beyond doubt, that love of fishing which is his only trait in the sporting way known to us, is always pres- ent in long, slow reaches, thick w^ith water plants. The remnants of the great woods which once made Northamp- tonshire the rival of Nottingham and Hampshire are close at hand, and luckily the ironstone workings which have recently added to the wealth, and detracted from the beauty of the central district of the county, have not yet invaded Dryden's region, Tichmarsh and Aldwinkle, the places of his birth and education, lie on opposite sides of th§ river, about two miles from Thrapston. Aldwinkle is 4 DRYDEN. [chap. sheltered and low, and looks across to tlie rising ground on the summit of which Tichmarsh church rises, flanked hard by with a huge cedar -tree on the rectory lawn, a cedar-tree certainly coeval with Dry den, since it was plant- ed two years before his birth. A little beyond Aldwinkle, following the course of the river, is the small church of Pilton, where Erasmus Dryden and Mary Pickering were married on October 21, 1630. All these villages are em- bowered in trees of all kinds, elms and walnuts especially, and the river banks slope in places with a pleasant abrupt- ness, giving good views of the magnificent woods of Lil- ford, which, however, are new-comers, comparatively speak- ing. Another mile or two beyond Pilton brings the walk- er to Oundle, which has some traditional claim to the credit of teaching Dryden his earliest humanities ; and the same distance beyond Oundle is Cotterstock, where a house, still standing, but altered, was the poet's favourite sojourn in his later years. Long stretches of meadowy lead thence across the river into Huntingdonshire, and there, just short of the great north road, lies the village of Chesterton, the residence, in the late days of the seventeenth century, of Dryden's favourite cousins, and frequently his own. All these places are intimately connected with his memory, and the last named is not more than twenty miles from the first. Between Cotterstock and Chesterton, where lay the two houses of his kinsfolk which we know him to have most frequented, lies, as it lay then, the grim and shapeless mound studded with ancient thorn -trees, and looking down upon the silent Nene, which is all that re- mains of the castle of Fotheringhay. Now, as then, the great lantern of the church, with its flying buttresses and tormented tracery, looks out over the valley. There is no allusion that I know of to Fotheringhay in Dryden's I.] BEFORE THE RESTORATION. f. works, and, indued, there seems to have been a very natu- ral feeling among all seventeenth century writers on the court side that the less said about Mary Stuart the better. Fothcringhay waits until Mr. Swinburne shall complete the trilDgy begun in Chaistelard and continued in Bothwell, for an English dramatic poet to tread worthily in the steps of Montchrestien, of Vondel, and of Schiller. But Dryden must have passed it constantly ; when he was at Cotter- stock he must have had it almost under his eyes, and we know that he was always brooding over fit historical subjects in English history for the higher poetry. Nor is it, I think, an unpardonable conceit to note the domi- nance in the haunts of this intellectually greatest among the partisans of the Stuarts, of the scene of the great- est tragedy, save one, that befell even that house of the furies. (f- -There is exceedingly little information obtainable about Dryden's youth) The inscription in Tichmarsh Church, the work of his cousin Mrs. Creed, an excellent person whose needle and pencil decorated half the churches and half the manor-houses in that part of the country, boasts that he had his early education in that village, while Oun- dle, as has been said, has some traditional claims to a simi- lar distinction. From the date of his birth to his entry at Westminster School we have no positive information whatever about him, and even the precise date of the lat- ter is unknown.' He was a king's scholar, and it seems that the redoubtable Busby took pains with him — doubt- less in the well-known Busbeian manner — and liked his verse translations. From Westminster he went to Cam- bridge, where he was entered at Trinity on May 18th, 1650, matriculated on July 16th, and on October 2nd was elected to a Westminster scholarship. He was then nine- R DRYDEN. [chap. teeu, an instance, be it observed, among many, of the com- plete mistake of supposing that very early entrance into the universities was the rule before our own days. Of Dryden's Cambridge sojourn we know little more than of his sojourn at Westminster. He was in trouble on July 19th, 1652, w^hen he was discommonsed and gated for a fortnight for disobedience and contumacy. Shad well also says that while at Cambridge he " scurrilously traduced a nobleman," and was " rebuked on the head " therefor. But Shadwell's unsupported assertions about Dryden are unworthy of the slightest credence. He took his degree in 1654, and though he gained no fellowship, seems to have resided for nearly seven years at the university. (There has been a good deal of controversy about the feel- ings with which Dryden regarded his alma mater. It is certainly curious that, except a formal acknowledgment of having received his education from Trinity, there is to be found in his works no kind of affectionate reference to Cambridge, while there is to be found an extremely un- V kind reference to her in his very best manner. In one of his numerous prologues to the University of Oxford — the University of Cambridge seems to have given him no oc- casion of writing a prologue — occur the famous lines, " Oxford to him a dearer name shall be Than his own mother university ; Thebes did his green unknowing youth engage, He chooses Athens in his riper age." It has been souo-ht to diminish the force of this very left- handed compliment to Cambridge by quoting a phrase of Dryden's concerning the "gross flattery that universities will endure." But I am inclined to think that most uni- versity men will agree with me that this is probably a 1.] BEFORE THE RESTORATIOX. 1 unique instance of a member of the one university going- out of his way to flatter the other at the expense of his wn. Dryden was one of the most accomplished flatter- ^ii> that ever lived, and certainly had no need save of de- lib.^ rate choice to resort to the vulgar expedient of insult- ing one person or body by way of praising another. What his cause of dissatisfaction was it is impossible to say, but the trivial occurrence already mentioned certainly will not account for it. "*If, however, during these years we have little testimo- ny About Dryden, we have three documents from his own hand which are of no little interest. Although Dryden was one of the most late-writing of English poets, he had got into print before he left Westminster. A promising pupil of that school, Lord Hastings, had died of small-pox, and, according to the fashion of the time, a tombeau, as it would have been called in France, was published, containing elegies by a very large number of authors, ranging from Westminster boys to the already famous names of Waller and Den ham. Somewhat later an epistle commendatory was contributed by Dryden to a volume of religious verse by his friend John Hoddesdon. Later still, and probably after he had taken his degree, he wrote a letter to his cousin, Honor Driden, daughter of the reigning baronet of Canons Ashby, which the young lady had the grace to keep. All these juvenile productions have been very severely judged. As to the poems, the latest writer on the subject, a writer in the Quarterly Review^ whom I cer- tainly do not name otherwise than honoris causa, pro- nounces the one execrable, and the other inferior to the juvenile productions of that miserable poetaster, Kirke White. It seems to this reviewer that Dryden had at this time " no ear for verse, n command of poetic diction, 8 DRYDEN. [chap. no sense of poetic taste." As to the letter, even Scott describes it as " alternately coarse and pedantic." I am in hopeless discord with these authorities, both of who^*t- I respect. Certainly neither the elegy on Lord Hastinsii, nor the complimentary poem to Hoddesdon, nor the letter to Honor Driden, is a masterpiece. But all three show, as it seems to me, a considerable literary faculty, a remark- able feeling after poetic style, and above all the peculiar virtue which was to be Dry den's own. They are all sat- urated with conceits, and the conceit was the reigning delicacy of the time. Now, if there is one thing more characteristic and more honourably characteristic of Dry- den than another, it is that he was emphatically of his time. No one ever adopted more thoroughly and more unconsciously the motto as to Spartam nactus es. He tried every fashion, and where the fashion was capable of being brought sub specie ceternitatis he never failed so to bring it. Where it was not so capable he never failed to abandon it and to substitute something better. A man of this tem- perament (which it may be observed is a mingling of the critical and the poetical temperaments) is not likely to find his way early or to find it at all without a good many preliminary wanderings. But the two poems so severely condemned, though they are certainly not good poems, are beyond all doubl possessed of the elements of goodness. I doubt myself whether any one can fairly judge them who has not passed through a novitiate of careful study of the minor poets of his own day. By doing this one acquires a certain faculty of distinguishing, as Theophile Gautier once put it in his own case, " the sheep of Hugo from the goats of Scribe." I do not hesitate to say that an intelligent reviewer in the year 1650 would have rank- ed Dry den, though perhaps with some misgivings, among r.] BEFORE THE RESTORATION. 9 the sheep. The faults are simply an exaggeration of the prevailing style, the merits are different. As for the epistle to Honor Driden, Scott must surely have been thinking of the evil counsellors who wished him to bowdlerise glorious John, when he called it "coarse." There is nothing in it but the outspoken gallantry of an age which was not afraid of speaking out, and the prose style is already of no inconsiderable merit. It should be observed, however, that a most unsubstantial romance has been built up on this letter, and that Miss Honor's father, Si#» John Dj-iden, has had all sorts of anathemas launched at him, in the Locksley Hall style, for damming the course of t»"ue love. There is no evidence whatever to prove this crime against Sir John. It is in the nature of mankind almost invariably to fall in love with its cousins, and — fortunately according to some physiologists — by no means invariably to marry them. That Dryden seriously aspired to feis cousin's hand there is no proof, and none that her father refused to sanction the marriage. On the contrary, his foes accuse him of being a dreadful flirt, and of mak- ing " the young blushing virgins die " for him in a miscel- laneous but probably harmless manner. All that is posi- tively known on the subject is that Honor never married, that tlie cousins were on excellent terms some half-century after this fervent epistle, and that Miss Driden is said to have treasured the letter and shown it with pride, which is much more reconcilable with the idea of a harmless flirta- tion than of a great passion tragically cut short. At the time of the writing of this epistle Dryden was, indeed, not exactly an eligible suitor. His father had just died— 1654— and had left him two-thirds of the Blakesley estates, with a reversion to the other third at the death of his mother. The land extended to a couple of hundred B ^ 10 DRYDEX. [chap. acres or thereabouts, and the rent, which with characteris- tic generosity Dryden never increased, though rents went up in his time enormously, amounted to 60^. a year. Dry- den's two-thirds were estimated by Malone at the end of the last century to be worth about 120/. income of that day, and this certainly equals at least 200/. to-day. With this to fall back upon, and with the influence of the D;'i- den and Pickering families, any bachelor in those days might be considered provided with prospects; but exacting parents might consider the total inadequate to the support of a wife and family. Sir John Driden iS said, though a fanatical Puritan, to have been a man of no very strong intellect, and he certainly did not feather his nest in the way which was open to any defender of the liberties of the people. Sir Gilbert Pickering, who, in consequence of the intermarriages before alluded to, was doubly Dry- den's cousin, was wiser in his generation. He was one of the few members of the Long Parliament who judiciously attached themselves to the fortunes of Cromwell, and was plentifully rewarded with fines, booty, places, and honours, by the Protector. When Dryden finally left Cambridge in 1657, he is said to have attached himself to this kins- man. And at the end of the next year he wrote his re- markable Heroic Stanzas on Cromwell's death. This' poem must have at once put out of doubt his literary merits. There was assuredly no English poet then living, except Milton and Cowley, who could possibly have writ- ten it, and it was sufiiciently different from the style of either of those masters. Taking the four -line stanza, which Davenant had made popular, the poet starts with a bold opening, in which the stately march of the verse is not to be disguised by all the frippery of erudition which loads it : J.] BEFORE THE RESTORATION. 11 " And now 'tis time ; for their officious haste, Who would before have borne him to the sky, Like eager Romans, ere all rites were past, Did let too soon the sacred eagle fly." The whole poem contains but thirty -seven of these stanzas, but it is full of admirable lines and thoughts. No doubt there are plenty of conceits as well, and Dryden would not have been Dryden if there had not been. But at the same time the singular justness which always marked his praise, as well as his blame, is as remarkable in the matter of the poem, as the force and vigour of the diction and versification are in its manner. To this day no better eulogy of the Protector has been written, and the poet with a remarkable dexterity evades, without directly de nying, the more awkward points in his hero's career and character. One thing which must strike all careful readers of the poem is the entire absence of any attack on the royalist party. To attempt, as Shadwell and other libellers attempted a quarter of a century later, to construe a fa- mous couplet — " He fought to end our fighting, and essayed To staunch the blood by breathing of the vein — " into an approval of the execution of Charles I., is to wrest the sense of the original hopelessly and unpardonably. Cromwell's conduct is contrasted with that of those who " the quarrel loved, but did the cause abhor," who " first sought 'to inflame the parties, then to poise," &c., i. e., with Essex, Manchester, and their likes ; and it need hardly be said that this contrast was ended years before there was any question of the king's death. Indeed, to a careful reader nowadavs tViA TT^^^oic Stanzas read much more like hedge between the parties than 12 DRYDEN. [chap. like an attempt to gain favour from the roundheads by uncompromising advocacy of their cause. The author is one of those " sticklers of the war "■ that he himself de- scribes. It is possible that a certain half-heartedness may have been observed in Dryden by those of his cousin's party. It is possible, too, that Sir Gilbert Pickering, like Thack- eray's Mr. Scully, vras a good deal more bent on making use of his young kinsman than on rewarding him in any permanent manner. At any rate, no kind of preferment fell to his lot, and the anarchy of the " foolish Ishbosheth " soon made any such preferment extremely improbable. Before long it would appear that Dryden had definitely given up whatever position he held in Sir Gilbert Pick- ering's household, and had betaken himself to literature. The fact of his so betaking himself almost implied adhe- rence to the royalist party. In the later years of the Com- monwealth, English letters had rallied to a certain extent from the disarray into which they were thrown by the civil war, but the centres of the rally belonged almost ex- clusively to the royalist party. Milton had long forsworn pure literature, to devote himself to official duties with an occasional personal polemic as a relief. Marvell and Wither, the two other chief lights of the Puritan party, could hardly be regarded by any one as men of light and loading, despite the really charming lyrics which both of them had produced. All the other great literary names of the time were, without exception, on the side of the exile. Hobbes was a royalist, though a somewhat singular one ; Cowley was a royalist ; Herrick was a royalist, so was Denham ; so was, as far as he was anything, the unstable Waller. Moreover, the most practically active aut " ^ the day, the one man of letters who combined the i] BEFORE THE RESTORA'^riON. W' of oi'2;anizing literary effort with the power of himself producing literary work of merit, was- one of the staunchest' of the kino-'s friends. Sir William jDavenant, without -anf- political concession, had somehow o'btained leave from th4^ republican government to reintrod;ace theatrical entertain-' ments of a kind, and moderate ra'yalists, like Evelyn, \titli' an interest in literature and the arts and sciences, were re^I turning to their homes and looking out for the good time'"' ] coroino-. That Dryden, upder these circumstances, having^/ at ihe time a much more vivid interest in literature thaTi*| in politics, and belonging as he did rather to the Presby-*l terian faction, who were everywhere returning to the r6y*{{h o^ , ** Peace was the prize of all his toil and care, Which war had banished, and did now restore : Bologna's walls so mounted in the air To seat themselves more surely than before." An impartial contemporary critic, if he could have an- ticipated the methods of a later school of criticism, might have had some difficulty in deciding whether the masterly plainness, directness, and vigour of the best lines here ought 28 DRYDEN. [chap. or oQglit not to excuse the conceit about the palms and the weights, and the fearfully far-fetched piece of fancy histo- ry about Bologna. Such a critic, if he had had the better part of discretion, would have decided in the affirmative. There were not three poets then living who could have written the best lines of the Heroic Stanzas, and what is more, those lines were not in the particular manner of either of the poets who, as far as general poetical merit goes, might have written them. But the Restoration, which for reasons given already I must hold to have been genuinely welcome to Dryden, and not a mere occasion of profitable coat-turning, brought forth some much less am- biguous utterances. Astrcea Redux (1660), a panegyric on the coronation (1661), a poem to Lord Clarendon (1662), a few still shorter pieces of the complimentary kind to Dr. Charleton (1663), to the Duchess of York (1665), and to Lady Castlemaine (166-?), lead up to An- nus Mirahilis at the beginning of 1667, the crowning ef- fort of Drj'^den's first poetical period, and his last before the long absorption in purely dramatic occupations which lasted till the Popish Plot and its controversies evoked from him the expression of hitherto unsuspected powers. These various pieces do not amount in all to more than two thousand lines, of which nearly two-thirds belong to Annus Mirahilis. But they were fully sufficient to show that a new poetical power had arisen in the land, and their qualities, good and bad, might have justified the anticipa- tion that the writer would do better and better work as he grew older. All the pieces enumerated, with the exception of Annus Mirahilis, are in the heroic couplet, and their versification is of such a kind that the relapse into the quatrain in the longer poem is not a little surprising. But nothing is more characteristic of Dryden than the extreme- u.] EARLY LITERAEY WORK. 29 ly tentative character of his work, and he had doubtless not yet satisfied himself that the couplet was suitable for nar- rative poems of any length, notwithstanding the mastery over it which he must have known himself to have attain- ed in his short pieces. The very first lines of Astrcea Re- dux show this mastery clearly enough. " Now with a general peace the world was blest, While ours, a world divided from the rest, A dreadful quiet felt, and worser far Than arms, a sullen interval of war." Here is already the energy divine for which the author was to be famed, and, in the last line at least, an instance of the varied cadence and subtly - disposed music which were, in his hands, to free the couplet from all charges of monotony and tameness. But almost immediately there is a falling off. The poet goes off into an unnecessary simile preceded by the hackneyed and clumsy " thus," a simile quite out of place at the opening of a poem, and disfigured by the too famous, " an horrid stillness first in- vades the ear," which if it has been extravagantly blamed — and it seems to me that it has — certainly will go near to be thouo-ht a conceit. But we have not long to wait for another chord that announces Dryden : " For his long absence Church and State did groan. Madness the pulpit, faction seized the throne. Experienced age in deep despair was lost ^ To see the rebel thrive, the loyal crost. Youth, that with joys had unacquainted been, Envied grey hairs that once good days had seen. We thought our sires, not with their own content, Had, ere we came to age, our portion spent." Whether the matter of this is suitable for poetry or not is 80 DRYDEN. [chap. one of those questions on which doctors will doubtless disagree to the end of the chapter. But even when we look back through the long rows of practitioners of the couplet who have succeeded Drjden, we shall, I think, hardly find one who is capable of such masterly treatment of the form, of giving to the phrase a turn at once so clear and so individual, of weighting the verse with such dignity, and at the same time winging it with such lightly flying speed. The poem is injured by numerous passages in- troduced by the usual " as " and " thus " and " like," which were intended for ornaments, and which in fact simply disfigure. It is here and there charged, after the manner of the day, with inappropriate and clumsy learning, and with doubtful Latinisms of expression. But it is redeemed by such lines as — " When to be God's anointed was his crime ;" as the characteristic gibe at the Covenant insinuated by the description of the Guisean League — " As holy and as Catholic as ours ;" as the hit at the " Polluted nest Whence legion twice before was dispossest ;" as the splendid couplet on the British Amphitrite — " Proud her returning prince to entertain With the submitted fasces of the main." Such lines as these must have had for the readers of 1660 the attraction of a novelty which only very careful stu- dents of the literature of the time can understand now. The merits of Astrcea Redux must of course not be judged by the reader's acquiescence in its sentiments. But let II.] EARLY LITERARY WORK. 31 any one read the following passage without thinking of the treaty of Dover and the closed exchequer, of Madam Carwell's twelve thousand a year, and Lord Russell's scaf- fold, and he assuredly will not fail to recognise their beauty : " Methinks I see those crowds on Dover's strand, Who in their haste to welcome you to land Choked up the beach with their still-growing store, And made a wilder torrent on the shore : While, spurred with eager thoughts of past delight. Those who had seen you court a second sight, Preventing still your steps, and making haste To meet you often wheresoe'er you past. How shall I speak of that triumphant day When you renewed the expiring pomp of May ? A month that owns an interest in your name ; You and the flowers are its peculiar claim. That star, that at your birth shone out so bright It stained the duller sun's meridian light. Did once again its potent fires renew, Guiding our eyes to find and worship you." The extraordinary art with which the recurrences of the you and your — in the circumstances naturally recited with a little stress of the voice — are varied in position so as to give a corresponding variety to the cadence of the verse, is perhaps the chief thing to be noted here. But a compari- son with even the best couplet verse of the time will show many other excellences in it. I am aware that this style of minute criticism has gone out of fashion, and that the variations of the position of a pronoun have terribly little to do with " criticism of life ;'^, but as I am dealing with a great English author whose main distinction is to have reformed the whole formal part of English prose and Eng- glish poetry, I must, once for all, take leave to follow the only road open to me to show what he actually did. 32 DRYDEN. [cfiAP. The otlier smaller conplet-poems which have been men- tioned are less important than Astrcea Hedux, not mevelj in point of size, but because they are later in date. The piece on the coronation, however, contains lines and pas- sages equal to any in the longer poem, and it shows very happily the modified form of conceit which Dry den, throughout his life, was fond of employing, and which, employed with his judgment and taste, fairly escapes the charges usually brought against " Clevelandisms," while it helps to give to the heroic the colour and picturesqueness which after the days of Pope it too often lacked. Such is the fancy about the postponement of the ceremony — " Had greater haste these sacred rites prepared, Some guilty months had in our triumph shared. But this untainted year is all your own, Your glories may without our crimes be shown." And such an exceedingly fine passage in the poem to Clarendon, which is one of the most finished pieces of Dryden's early versification — " Our setting sun from his declining seat Shot beams of kindness on you, not of heat : And, when his love was bounded in a few That were unhappy that they might be true, Made you the favourite of his last sad times ; That is, a sufferer in his subjects' crimes : Thus those first favours you received were sent, Like Heaven's rewards, in earthly punishment. Yet Fortune, conscious of your destiny, Even then took care to lay you softly by, And wrapt your fate among her precious things, Kept fresh to be unfolded with your King's. Shown all at once, you dazzled so our eyes As new-born Pallas did the god's surprise; II.] EARLY LITERARY WORK. 33 When, springing forth from Jove's new-closing wound, She struck the warUke spear into the ground ; Which sprouting leaves did suddenly enclose. And peaceful olives shaded as they rose." For once the mania for simile and classical allusion has not led the author astray here, but has furnished him with a very happy and legitimate ornament. The only fault in the piece is the use of " did," which Dryden never wholly discarded, and which is perhaps occasionally allow- able enough. The remaining poems require no very special remark, though all contain evidence of the same novel and un- matched mastery over the couplet and its cadence. The author, however, was giving himself more and more to the dramatic studies which will form the subject of the next chapter, and to the prose criticisms which almost from the first he associated with those studies. But the events of the year 1666 tempted him once more to indulge in non- dramatic work, and the poem of Annus Mirabilis was the result. It seems to have been written, in part at least, at Lord Berkshire's seat of Charlton, close to Malmesbury, and was prefaced by a letter to Sir Robert Howard. Dry- den appears to have lived at Charlton during the greater part of 1665 and 1666, the plague and fire years. He had been driven from London, not merely by dread of the pestilence, but by the fact that his ordinary occupation v>'as gone, owing to the closing of the play-houses, and he evidently occupied himself at Charlton with a good deal of literary work, including his essay on dramatic poetry, his play of the Maiden Queen^ and Annus Mirabilis itself. This last was published very early in 1667, and seems to have been successful. Pepys bought it on the 2nd of Feb- ruary, and was fortunately able to like it better than he did 34 DRYDEN. [chap. Hudibras. " A very good poem," the Clerk of the Acts of the Navy writes it down. It may be mentioned in passing that during this same stay at Charlton Dryden's eldest son Charles was born. Annus Mirahilis consists of 304 quatrains on the Gon- dibert model, reasons for the adoption of which Dryden gives (not so forcibly, perhaps, as is usual with him) in the before-mentioned letter to his brother-in-law. He speaks of rhyme generally with less respect than he was soon to show, and declares that he has adopted the quatrain because he judges it *' more noble and full of dignity " than any other form he knows. The truth seems to be that he was still to a great extent under the influence of Davenant, and that Gondibert as yet retained sufficient prestige to make its stanza act as a not unfavourable advertisement of poems written in it. With regard to the nobility and dignity of this stanza, it may safely be said that Annus Mira- bilis itself, the best poem ever written therein, killed it by exposing its faults. It is, indeed, at least when the rhymes of the stanzas are unconnected, a very bad metre for the purpose ; for it is chargeable with more than the disjoint- edness of the couplet, without the possibility of relief; while, on the other hand, the quatrains have not, like the Spenserian stave or the ottava rima, sufficient bulk to form units in themselves, and to include within them varieties of harmony. Despite these drawbacks, however, Dryden produced a very fine poem in Annus Mirabilis, though I am not certain that even its best passages equal those cited from the couplet pieces. At any rate, in this poem the characteristics of the master in what may be called his poetical adolescence are displayed to the fullest extent. The weight and variety of his line, his abundance of illus- tration and fancy, his happy turns of separate phrase, and n.] EARLY LITERARY WORK. ..^ his singular faculty of bending to poetical uses the most refractory names and things, all make themselves fully felt here. On the other hand, there is still an undue tendency to conceit and exuberance of simile. The famous lines — "These fight like husbands, but like lovers those; These fain would keep, and those more fain enjoy ;" are followed in the next stanza by a most indubitably " metaphysical " statement that " Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall, And some by aromatic splinters die." at This cannot be considered the happiest possible means of informing us that the Dutch fleet was laden with spices and magots. Such puerile fancies are certainly unworthy of a poet who could tell how " The mighty ghosts of our great Harrys rose And armed E(^wards looked with anxious eyes ;" and who, in the beautiful simile of the eagle, has equalled the Elizabethans at their own weapons. I cannot think, however, admirable as the poem is in its best passages (the description of the fire, for instance), that it is technically the equal of Astrcea Redux. The monotonous recurrence of the same identical cadence in each stanza — a recurrence which even Dryden's art was unable to prevent, and which can only be prevented by some such interlacements of rhymes and enjambements of sense as those which Mr. Swinburne has successfully adopted in Laus Veneris — in- jures the best passages. The best of all is undoubtedly the following : "In this deep quiet, from what source unknown. Those seeds of fire their fatal birth disclose ; And first few scattering sparks about were blown. Big with the flames that to our ruin rose. DRYDEN. [chap. " Then in some close-pent K^qin jit crept along, And, smouldering as it went, in silence fed ; Till the infant monster, with devouring strong. Walked boldly upright with exalted head. " Now, like some rich and mighty murderer, Too great for prison which he breaks with gold, Who fresher for new mischiefs does appear, And dares the world to tax him with the old. " So 'scapes the insulting fire his narrow jail. And makes small outlets into open air ; There the fierce winds his tender force assail, And beat him downward to his first i-epair. " The winds, like crafty courtesans, withheld His flames from burning but to blow them more ; And, every fresh attempt, he is repelled With faint denials, weaker than before. " And now, no longer letted of his prey, • He leaps up at it with enraged desire, O'erlooks the neighbours with a wide survey. And nods at every house his threatening fire. " The ghosts of traitors from the Bridge descend, With bold fanatic spectres to rejoice ; About the fire into a dance they bend And sing their sabbath notes with feeble voice." The last stanza, indeed, contains a fine image finely ex- pressed, but I cannot but be glad that Dryden tried no more experiments with the recalcitrant quatrain. Annus Mirahilis closes the series of early poems, and for fourteen years from the date of its publication Dryden was known, with insignificant exceptions, as a dramatic writer only. But his efforts in poetry proper, though they had riot as yet resulted in any masterpiece, had), as I have 11.] EARLY LITERARY WORK. 31 endeavoured to point out, amply entitled him to the posi- tion of a great and original master of the formal part of poetry, if not of a poet who had distinctly found his way. He had carried out a conception of the couplet which was almost entirely new, having been anticipated only by some isolated and ill - sustained efforts. He had manifested an equal originality in the turn of his phrase, an extraordina- ry command of poetic imagery, and, above all, a faculty of handling by no means promising subjects in an indispu- tably poetical manner. Circumstances which I shall now procd^d to describe called him away from the practice of pure poetry, leaving to him, however, a reputation, amply deserved and acknowledged even by his enemies, of pos- sessing unmatched skill in versification. Nor were the studies upon which he now entered wholly alien to his proper function, though they were in some sort a bye- work. They strengthened his command over the lan- guage, increased his skill in verse, and, above all, tended by degrees to reduce and purify what was corrupt in his phraseology and system of ornamentation. Fourteen years of dramatic practice did more than turn out some admira- ble scenes and some even more admirable criticism. They acted as a filtering reservoir for his poetical povyers, so that the stream which, when it ran into them, w^as the turbid and rubbish - laden current . of Annus Mirahilis^ flowed out as impetuous, as strong, but clear and with- out base admixture, in the splendid verse of Absalom and Achitophel. CHAPTER III. PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. There are not many portions of English literature which have been treated with greater severity by critics than the Restoration drama, and of the Restoration dramatists few have met with less favour, in proportion to their general literary eminence, than Dryden. Of his comedies, in par- ticular, few have been found to say a good word. His sturdiest champion, Scott, dismisses them as "heavy ;" Haz- litt, a defender of the Restoration comedy in general, finds little in them but " ribaldry and extravagance ;" and 1 have lately seen them spoken of with a shudder as "horrible." The trao'edies have fared better, but not much better ; and thus the remarkable spectacle is presented of a general condemnation, varied only by the faintest praise, of the work to which an admitted master of English devoted, almost exclusively, twenty years of the flower of his man- hood. So complete is the oblivion into which these dramas have fallen, that it has buried in its folds the always charm- ing and sometimes exquisite songs which they contain. Except in Congreve's two editions, and in the bulky edi- tion of Scott, Dry den's theatre is unattainable, and thus the majority of readers have but little opportunity of correct- ing, from individual study, the unfavourable impressions derived from the verdicts of the critics. For mvself, I am CHAP. III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 39 very far frotn considering Dryden's dramatic work as on a level with his purely poetical work. But, as nearly always happens, and as happened, by a curious coincidence, in the case of his editor, the fact that he did something else much better has ohscured the fact that he did this thing in not a few instances very well. Scott's poems as poems are far inferior to his novels as novels ; Dryden's plays are far in- ferior as plays to his satires and his fables as poems. But both the poems of Scott and the plays of Dryden are a great deal better than the average critic admits. That dramatic work went somewhat against the grain with Dryden, is frequently asserted on his own authority, and is perhaps true. He began it, however, tolerably early, and had finished at least the scheme of a play (on a sub- ject which he afterwards resumed) shortly after the Resto- ration. As Soon as that event happened, a double in- centive to play-writing began to work upon him. It was much the most fashionable of literary occupations, and also much the most lucrative. Dryden was certainly not indif- ferent to fame, and, though he was by no means a covetous naan, he seems to have possessed at all times the perfect readiness to spend whatever could be honestly got which frequently distinguishes men of letters. He set to work accordingly, and produced in 1663 the Wild Gallant. We do not pos-soss this play in the form in which it was first acted and damned. Afterwards Lady Castlemaine gave it her protection; the author added certain attractions ac- cording to the taste of the time, and it was both acted and published. It certainly cannot be said to be a great suc- cess even as it is. Dryden had, like most of his fellows, atten^pted the Comedy of Humours, as it was called at the +ime, and as it continued to be, and to be called, till th« mot^ polished comedy of manners, or artificial comedy, 40 DRYDEN. [chap. succeeded it, owing to the success of Wycherley, and still more of Congreve. The number of comedies of this kind written after 1620 is ver}'^ large, while the fantastic and poetical comedy of which Shakspeare and Fletcher had al- most alone the secret had almost entirelv died out. The merit of the Comedy of Humours is the observation of actual life which it requires in order to be done well, and the consequent fidelity .with which it holds up the muses' looking-glass (to use the title of one of Randolph's plays) to nature. Its defects are its proneness to descend into farce, and the temptation which it gives to the writer to aim rather at mere fragmentary and sketchy delineations than at finished composition. At the Restoration this school of drama was vigorously enough' represented by Davenant himself, by Sir Aston Cokain, and by Wilson, a writer of great merit who rather unaccountably abandoned the stage very soon, while in a year or two Shadwell, the actor Lacy, and several others were to take it up aiid carry it on. It had frequently been combined with the embroil- ed and complicated plots of the Spanish comedy of intrigue, the adapters usually allowing these plots to conduct them- selves much more irregularly than was th^ case in the originals, while the deficiencies were made u^^W' supposed to be made up, by a liberal allowance of " hurnours.'' The danger of this sort of work was perhaps never better illiils- trated than by Shadwell, when he boasted in one of his prefaces that " four of the humours were entirely new," and appeared to consider this a sufficient claim' to respect- ful reception. Dryden in his first play fell to the fullest extent into the blunder of this combined Spanish-English style, though on no subsequent occasion did he i^epeat the mistake. By degrees the example and influence 6i Moliere sent complicated plots and " humours " alik^ oil III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 41 of fashion, though the national taste and temperament ■were too strongly in favour of the latter to allow them to be totally banished. In our very best plays of the so-call- ed artificial style, such as Love for Love^ and the master- pieces of Sheridan, character sketches to which Ben Jonson himself would certainly not refuse the title of humours appear, and contribute a large portion of the interest. Dryden, however, was not likely to anticipate this better time, or even to distinguish himself in the older form of the humour-comedy. He had little aptitude for the odd and.i^uaint, nor had he any faculty of devising or picking up strokes of extravagance, such as those which his enemy Shadwell could command, though he could make no very good use of them. The humours of Trice and Bibber and Lord Nonsuch in the Wild Gallant are forced and too often feeble, though there arc flashes here and there, especially in the part of Sir Timorous, a weakling of the tribe of Aguecheek; but in this first attempt, the one situation and the one pair of characters which Dryden was to treat with tolerable success are already faintly sketched. In Constance and Loveby, the pair of light- hearted lovers who carry on a flirtation without too much modesty certainly, and with a remarkable absence of re- finement, but at the same time with some genuine affec- tion for one another, and in a hearty, natural manner, make their first appearance. It is to be noted in Dryden's favour that these lovers of his are for the most part free from the charge of brutal heartlessness and cruelty, which has been justly brought against those of Etherege, of Wycherley, and, at least in the case of the Old Bachelor, of Congreve. The men are rakes, and rather vulgar rakes, but they are nothing worse. The women have too many of the characteristics of Charles the Second's maids of D 3 42 DRYDEN. [chap. honour ; but they have at the same time a certain health- iness and sweetness of the older days, which bring them, if not close to Rosalind and Beatrice, at any rate pretty near to Fletcher's heroines, such as Dorothea and Mary. Still, the Wild Gallant can by no possibility be called a good play. It was followed at no long interval by the Rival Ladies, a tragicomedy, which is chiefly remarkable for containing some heroic scenes in rhyme, for imitating closely the tangled and improbable plot of its Spanish original, for being tolerably decent,, and I fear it must be added, for being intolerably dull. The third venture was in every way more important. The Indian Emper- or (1665) was Dry den's first original play, his first heroic play, and indirectly formed part of a curious literary dis- pute, one of many in which he was engaged, but which in this case proved fertile in critical studies of his best brand. Sir Robert Howard, Dryden's brother-in-law, had, wHh the assistance of Dryden himself, produced a play called the Ijadiaji^^^ueen, and to this the Indian Emper- or was nominally a sequel. But as Dryden remarks, with ^ a quaintness which may or may not be satirical, the con- clusion of the Indian Queen " left but little matter to build upon, there remaining but two of the considerable characters alive." The good Sir Robert had indeed heap- ed the stage with dead in his last act in a manner which' must have confirmed any French critic who saw or read the play in his belief of the bloodthirstiness of the Eng- lish drama. The field was thus completely clear, and Dryden, retaining only Montezuma as his hero, used his own fancy and invention without restraint in constructing the plot and arranging the characters. The play was ex- tremely popular, and it divides with Tyrannic Love and the Conquest of Granada the merit of being the best of all in.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 43 EngHsli heroic plays. The origin of that singular growth has been already given, and there is no need to repeat the story, while the Conquest of Granada is so much more the model play of the style, that anything like an analysis of a heroic play had better be reserved for this. The Indian Emioeror was followed, in 1667, by the Maiden Queen, a tragicomedy. The tragic or heroic part is very inferior to its predecessor, but the comic part has merits which are by no means inconsiderable. Celadon and Florimel are the first finished specimens of that pair of practitioners of light-o' love flirtation which was Dryden's sole contribu- tion of any valye to the comic stage. Charles gave the play particular commendation, and called it " his play," as Dryden takes care to tell us. Still, in the same year came Sir Martin Marall, Dryden's second pure comedy. But it is in no sense an original play, and Dryden was not even the original adapter. The Duke of Newcastle, famous equally for his own gallantry in the civil war, and for the oddities of his second duchess, Margaret Lucas, translated VEtourdi, and gave it to Dryden, who perhaps combined with it some things taken from other French plays, added not a little of his own, and had it acted. It was for those days exceedingly successful, running more than thirty nights at its first appearance. It is very coarse in parts, but amusing enough. The English blunderer is a much more contemptible person than his French original. He is punished instead of being rewarded, and there is a great dd'al of broad farce brought in. Dryden was about this time frequently engaged in this doubtful sort of collabo- ration, and the very next play which he produced, also a result of it, has done his reputation more harm than any other. 'This was the disgusting burlesque of the Tempest, which, happily, there is much reason for thinking belongs 44 DRYDEN. [chap. almost wholly to Davenant. Besides degrading in every way the poetical merit of the poem, Sir William, from whom better things might have been expected, got into his head what Dryden amiably calls the " excellent con- trivance " of giving Miranda a sister, and inventing a boy (Hippolito) who has never seen a woman. The excellent contrivance gives rise to a good deal of extremely charac- teristic wit. But here, too, there is little reason for giving Dryden credit or discredit for anything more than a cer- tain amount of arrangement and revision. His next ap- pearance, in 1668, with the Mock Astrologer was a more independent one. He was, indeed, as wa^ very usual with him, indebted to others for the main points of his play, which comes partly from Thomas Corneille's Feint Astro- logue, partly from the Depit Amoureux. But the play, with the usual reservations, may be better spoken of than any of Dryden's comedies, except Marriage a la Mode and Amphitryon. Wildblood and Jacintha, who play the parts of Celadon and Florimel in the Maiden Queen, are a very lively pair. Much of the dialogue is smart, and the inci- dents are stirring, while the play contains no less than four of the admirable sonofs which Dryden now be&'an to lavish on his audiences. In the same year, or perhaps in 1669, appeared the play of Tyrannic Love, or the Royal Martyr, a compound of exquisite beauties and absurdities of the most frantic description. The part of St. Catherine {vevj inappropriately allotted to Mrs. Eleanor Gwyn) is beauti- ful throughout, and that of Maximin is quite captivating in its outrageousness. The Astral spirits who appear gave occasion for some terrible parody in the Rehearsal, but their verses are in themselves rather attractive. An ac- count of the final scene of the play will perhaps show bet- ter than anything else the rant and folly in which authors III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 45 indulged, and which audiences applaudec: in these plays. The Emperor Maximin is dissatisfied with the conduct of the upper powers in reference to his domestic peace. He tlius expresses his dissatisfaction : " What liad the gods to do with me or mine ? Did I molest your heaven ? Why should you then make Maximin your foe, Who paid you tribute, which he need not do ? Your altars I with smoke of rams did crown, For which you leaned your hungry nostrils down, * All daily gaping for my incense there, More than your sun could draw you in a year. And you for this these plagues have on me sent. But, by the gods (by Maximin, I meant). Henceforth I and my world Hostility with you and yours declare. Look to' it, gods ! for you the aggressors are. Keep you your rain and sunshine in your skies, And I'll keep back my flame and sacrifice. Your trade of heaven shall soon be at a stand, And all your goods lie dead upon your hand." Thereupon an aggrieved and possibly shocked follower, of the name of Placidius, stabs him, but the Emperor wrests the dagger from him and returns the blow. Then follows this stage direction : " Placidius falls, and the Emperor staggers after him and sits down upon him." From this singular throne his guards offer to assist him. But he de- clines help, and, having risen once, sits down again upon Placidius, who, despite the stab and the weight of the Emperor, is able to address an irreproachable decasyllabic couplet to the audience. Thereupon Maximin again stabs the person upon whom he is sitting, and they both expire as follows : 46 DRYDEN. [chap. " Plac. Oh! ..am gone. Max. And after thee I go, Revenging still and following ev'n to the other world my blow, And shoving back this earth on which I sit, I'll mount and sciitter all the gods I hit." \_Stabs him again.'\ Tyrannic Love was followed by the two parts of Al- manzor and Almahide, or the Conquest of Granada, the triumph and kt th6 same time the reductio ad ahsurdum of the style. I cannot do better than give a full argument of this famous production, which nobody now reads, and which is full of lines that everybody habitually quotes. The kingdom of Granada under its last monarch, Boab- delin, is divided by the quarrels of factions, or rather fam- ilies — the Abencerrages and the Zegrys. At a festival held in the capital this dissension breaks out. A stranger interferes on v;hat appears to be the weaker side, and kills a prominent leader of the opposite party, altogether dis- regarding the king's injunctions to desist. He is seized by the guards and ordered for execution, but is then dis- covered to be Almanzor, a valiant person lately arrived from Africa, who has rendered valuable assistance to the Moors in their combat with the Spaniards. The king thereupon apologizes, and Almanzor addresses much out- rageous language to the factions. This is successful, and harmony is apparently restored. Then there enters the Duke of Arcos, a Spanish envoy, who propounds hard con- ditions; but Almanzor remarks that " the Moors have Heaven and me," and the duke retires. Almahide, the king's betrothed, sends a messenger to invite him to a dance; but Almanzor insists upon a sally Hfirst, and the first act endg with the acceptance of this order of amuse- ment. The second opens with the triumphant return of the Moors, the ever-victorious Almanzor having captured m.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 47 the Dnke of Arcos. Then is introduced the first female character of importance, Lyndaraxa, sister of Zulema, the Zegry chief, and representative throughout the drama of the less amiable qualities of womankind. Abdalla, the king's brother, makes love to her, and she very plainly tells him that if he were king she might have something to say to him. Zulema's factiousness strongly seconds his sister's ambition and her jealousy of Almahide, and the act ends by the formation of a conspiracy against Boabdelin, the conspirators resolving to attach the invin- cibla.Almanzor to their side. The third act borrows its opening from the incident of Hotspur's wrath, Almanzor being provoked with Boabdelin for the same cause as Harry Percy with Henry IV. Thus he is disposed to join Abdalla, while Abdelmelech, the chief of the Abencerrages, is introduced in a scene full of " sighs and flames," as the prince's rival for the hand of Lyndaraxa. The promised dance takes place with one of Dryden's delightful, and, alas ! scarcely ever wholly quotable lyrics. The first two stanzas may however be given : " Beneath a myrtle's shade, Which love for none but happy lovers made, I slept, and straight my love before me brought Phyllis, the object of my waking thought. Undressed she came my flame to meet, While love strewed flowers beneath her feet, Flowers which, so pressed by her, became more sweet, "From the bright vision's head A careless veil of lawn was loosely shed, From her white temples fell her shaded hair. Like cloudy sunshine, not too brown nor fair. Her hands, her lips, did love inspire. Her every grace my heart did fire, But most her eyes, which languished with desire." 48 DRYDEN. [chap. It is a thousand pities that the quotation cannot be con- tinued ; but it cannot, though the verse is more artfully beautiful even than here. While, however, the king and his court are listening and looking, mischief is brewing. Alm^nzor, Abdalla, and the Zegrys are in arms. The king is diiven in ; Almahide is captured. Then a scene takes place between Almanzor and Almahide in the full spirit of the style. Almanzor sues for Almahide as a prisoner that he may set her at liberty ; but a rival appears in the powerful Zulema. Al- manzor is disobliged by Abdalla, and at once makes his way to the citadel, Avhither Boabdelin has fled, and offers him his services. At the beginning of the fourth act they are of course accepted with joy, and equally of course ef- fectual. Almanzor renews his suit, but Almahide refers him to her father. The fifth act is still fuller of extrava- gances. Lyndaraxa holds a fort which has been commit- ted to her against both parties, and they discourse with her from without the walls. The unlucky Almanzor pre- fers his suit to the king and to Almahide's father; has recourse to violence on being refused, and is overpowered — for a wonder — and bound. His life is, however, spared, and after a parting scene with Almahide he withdraws from the city. The second part opens in the Spanish camp, but soon shifts to Granada, where the unhappy Boabdelin has to face the mutinies provoked by the expulsion of Almanzor. The king has to stoop to entreat Almahide, now his queen, to use her influence with her lover to come back. An act of fine confused fighting follows, in which Lynda- raxa's castle is stormed, the stormers in their turn driven out by the Duke of Arcos and Abdalla, who has joined the Spaniards, and a general imbroglio created. But Almanzor ni.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 49 obeys Almahide's summons, with the result of more sighs and flames. The conduct of Almahide is unexceptiona- ble ; but Boabdelin's jealousy is inevitably aroused, and this in its turn mortally offends the queen, which again offends Ahnanzor. More inexplicable embroilment follows, and Lyndaraxa tries her charms vainly on the champion. The war once more centres round the Albayzin, Lynda- raxa's sometime fortress, and it is not flippant to say that every one fights with every one else ; after which the hero sees the ghost of his mother, and addresses it more suo. Yet-another love-scene follows, and then Zulema, who has not forgotten his passion for Almahide, brings a false ac- cusation against her, the assumed partner of her guilt be- ing, however, not Alraanzor, but Abdelmelech. This leaves the hero free to undertake the wager of battle for his mis- tress, though he is distracted with jealous fear that Zule- ma's tale is true. The result of the ordeal is a foregone conclusion ; but Almahide, though her innocence is proved, is too angry with her husband for doubting her to forgive him, and solemnly forswears his society. She and Alman- zor meet once more, and by this time even the convention- alities of the heroic play allow him to kiss her hand. The king is on the watch, and breaks in with fresh accusations; but the Spaniards at the gates cut short the discussion, and (at last) the embroilment and suffering of true love. The catastrophe is arrived at in the most approved manner. Boabdelin dies fighting ; Lyndaraxa, who has given trai- torous help with her Zegrys, is proclaimed queen by Fer- dinand, but almost immediately stabbed by Abdelmelech. Almanzor turns out to be the long-lost son of the Duke of Arcos ; and Almahide, encouraged by Queen Isabella, owns that when her year of widowhood is up she may possibly be induced to crown his flames. 3* 50 DRYDEN. [chap. Such is the barest outline of this famous play, and I fear that as it is it is too long, though much has been omit- ted, including the whole of a pleasing underplot of love between two very creditable lovers, Osmyn and Benzayda. Its preposterous " revolutions and discoveries," the wild bombast of Almanzor and others, the apparently purpose- less embroilment of the action in ever- new turns and twists are absurd enough ; but there is a kind of generous and noble spirit animating it which could not fail to catch an audience blinded by fashion to its absurdities. There is a skilful sequence even in the most preposterous events, which must have kept up the interest unfalteringly ; and all over the dialogue are squandered and lavished flowers of splendid verse. Many of its separate lines are, as has been said, constantly quoted without the least idea on the quoter's part of their origin, and many more are quotable. Everybod}^ for instance, knows the vigorous couplet : "Forgiveness to the injured does belong, But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong ;" but everybody does not know the preceding couplet, which is, perhaps, better still : " A blush remains in a forgiven face ; It wears the silent tokens of disgrace." Almanzor's tribute to Lyndaraxa's beauty, at the same time that he rejects her advances, is in little, perhaps, as good an instance as could be given of the merits of the poetry and of the stamp of its spirit, and with this I must be content : " Fair though you are As summer mornings, and your eyes more bright ' Than stars that twinkle on a winter's night ; 111.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 51 Though you have eloquence to warm and move Cold age and fasting hermits into love ; Though Almahide with scorn rewards my care, Yet than to change 'tis nobler to despair. My love's my soul, and that from fate is free — 'Tis that unchanged and deathless part of me." The audience that cheered this was not wholly vile. The Conquest of Granada appeared in 1670, and in the following year the famous Rehearsal was brought out at the King's Theatre. The importance of this event in Dr^en's life is considerable, but it has been somewhat exaggerated. In the first place, the satire, keen as much of it is, is only lialf directed against himself. The origi- nal Bayes was beyond all doubt Davenant, to whom some of the jokes directly apply, while they have no reference to Dryden. In the second place, the examples of heroic plays selected for parody and ridicule are by no means ex- clusively drawn from Dryden's theatre. His brothers-in- law, Edward and Robert Howard, and others, figure be- side him, and the central character is, on the whole, as composite as might be expected from the number of au- thors whose plays are satirized. Although fathered by Buckingham, it seems likely that not much of the play is actually his. His coadjutors are said to have been Butler, Sprat, and Martin Clifford, Master of the Charterhouse, au- thor of some singularly ill-tempered if not very pointed remarks on Dryden's plays, which were not published till long afterwards. Butler's hand is, indeed, traceable in many of the parodies of heroic diction, none of which are so good as his acknowledged " Dialogue of Cat and Puss." The wit and, for the most part, the justice of the satire are indisputable ; and if it be true, as I am told, that the Re- hearsal does not now make a good acting play, the fact 52 DRYDEN. [chap. does not bear favourable testimony to tbe culture and re- ceptive powers of modern audiences. But there were many reasons why Dryden should take the satire very coolly, as in fact he did. As he says, with his customary proud hu- mility, " his betters were much more concerned than him- self ;" and it seems highly probable that Buckingham's co- adjutors, confiding in his good nature or his inability to detect the liberty, had actually introduced not a few traits of his own into this singularly composite portrait. In the second place, the farce was what would be now called an advertisement, and a very good one. Nothing can be a greater mistake than to say or to think that the Rehearsal killed heroic plays. It did nothing of the kind, Dryden himself going on writing them for some years until his own fancy made him cease, and others continuing still longer. There is a play of Crowne's, Caligula, in which many of the scenes are rhymed, dating as late as 1698, and the general character of the heroic play, if not the rhymed form, continued almost unaltered. Certainly Dry- den's equanimity was very little disturbed. Buckingham he paid off in kind long afterwards, and his Grace im- mediately proceeded, by his answer, to show how little he can have had to do with the Rehearsal. To Sprat and Clifford no allusions that I know of are to be found in his writings. As for Butler, an honourable mention in a letter to Lawrence Hyde shows how little acrimony he felt towards him. Indeed, it may be said of Dryden that he was at no time touchy about personal attacks. It was only when, as Shadwell subsequently did, the assailants be- came outrageous in their abuse, and outstepped the bounds of fair literary warfare, or when, as in Blackmore's case there was some singular ineptitude in the fashion of the attack, that he condescended to reply. t^.^jh \'rc'\mi III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 53 It is all tlie more surprising that he should, at no great distance of time, have engaged gratuitously in a contest which brought him no honour, and in which his allies were quite unworthy of him. Elkanah Settle w^as one of Rochester's innumerable led-poets, and was too utterly be- neath contempt to deserve even Rochester's spite. The character of Doeg, ten years later, did Settle complete justice. He had a " blundering kind of melody " about him, but absolutely nothing else. However, a heroic play of his, the Em'press of Morocco^ had considerable vogue for soMe incomprehensible reason. Dryden allowed himself to be drawn by Crowne and Shadwell into writing with them a pamphlet of criticisms on the piece. Settle re- plied by a study, as we should say nowadays, of the very vulnerable Conquest of Granada. This is the only in- stance in which Dryden went out of his way to attack any one; and even in this instance Settle had given sonie cause by an allusion of a contemptuous kind in his preface. But as a rule the laureate showed himself proof against much more venomous criticisms than any that Elkanah was capable of. It is perhaps not uncharitable to suspect that the preface of the Empress of Morocco bore to some ex- tent the blame of the Rehearsal^ which it must be remem- bered was for years amplified and re-edited with parodies of fresh plays of Dryden's as they appeared. If this were the case it would not be the only instance of such a trans- ference of irritation, and it would explain Dryden's other- wise inexplicable conduct. His attack on Settle is, from a strictly literary point of view, one of his most unjustifia- ble acts. The pamphlet, it is true, is said to have been mainly "Starch Johnny" Crowne's, and the character of its strictures is quite different from Dryden's broad and catholic manner of censuring. But -the adage, " tell me 54 DRYDEN. [cHip. with whom you live," is peculiarly applicable in siich a case, and Dryden must be held responsible for the assault, whether its venom be really due to himself, to Crowne, or to the fonl-mouthed libeller of whose virulence the laure- ate himself was in years to come to have but too familiar experience. A very different play in 1672 gave Dryden almost as much credit in comedy as the Conquest of Granada in tragedy. There is, indeed, a tragic or serious underplot (and a very ridiculous one, too) in Marriage a la Mode. But its main interest, and certainly its main value, is comic. It is Dryden's only original excursion into the realms of the higher comedy. For his favourite pair of lovers he here substitutes a quartette. Rhodophil and Doralice are a fashionable married pair, who, without having actually exhausted their mutual affection, are of opinion that their character is quite gone if they continue faithful to each other any longer. Rhodophil accordingly lays siege to Melantha, a young lady who is intended, though he does not know^ this, to marry his friend Palamede, while Pala- mede, deeply distressed at the idea of matrimony, devotes himself to Doralice. The cross purposes of this quartette are admirably related, and we are given to understand that no harm comes of it all. But in Doralice and Melantha Dryden has given studies of womankind quite out of Mb usual line. Melantha is, of course, far below Millamant, but it is not certain that that delightful creation of Con- greve's genius does not owe something to her. Doralice, on the other hand, has ideas as to the philosophy of flirta- tion which do her no little credit. It is a thousand pities that the play is written in the language of the time, which makes it impossible to revive and difficult to read without disgust. III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY". 55 Nothing of this kind can or need be said about the play which followed, the Assignation. It is vulgar, coarse, and dull; it was damned, and deserved it; while its suc- cessor, Amboyna, is also deserving of the same epithets, though being a mere play of ephemeral interest, and serv- ing its turn, it was not damned. The old story of the Amboyna massacre — a bad enough story, certainly — was simply revived in order to excite the popular wrath against the Dutch. The dramatic production which immediately succeeded these is one of the most curious of Dryden's perform- ances. A disinclination to put himself to the trouble of designing a wholly original composition is among the most noteworthy of his literary characteristics. No man fol- lowed or copied in a more original manner, but it alw^ays seems to have been a relief to him to have something to follow or to copy. Two at least of his very best produc- 1 tions — All for Love and Palamon and Arcite — are spe-j cially remarkable in this respect. We can hardly say that the State of Innocence ranks with either of these ; yet it has considerable merits — merits of which very few of those/who repeat the story about " tagging Milton's verses " are uware. As for that story itself, it is not particularly CTivJitable to the good manners of the elder poet. "Ay, ybung man, you may tag my verses if you will," is the -^/^'pditional reply which Milton is said to have made to yden's request for permission to write the opera. The i^y^estion of Dryden's relationship to Milton and his early opinion of Paradise Lost is rather a question for a Life of MiltoF. than for the present pages : it is sufficient to say that, with his unfailing recognition of good work, Dryden undoubtedly appreciated Milton to the full long before A idison, as it is vulgarly held, taught the British public 56 DRYDEN. ^chap. to admire him. As for tlie State of Innocence itself, the conception of such an opera has sometimes been derided as preposterous — a derision which seems to overlook the fact that Milton was himself, in some degree, indebted to an Italian dramatic original. The piece is not wholly in rhyme, but contains some very fine passages. The time was approaching, however, v> hen Dryden was to quit his " long-loved mistress Rhyme," as far as dra- matic writing was concerned. These words occur in the prologue to Aurengzehe, which appeared in 1675. It would appear, indeed, that at this time Dryden was thinking of deserting not merely rhymed plays, but play-writing alto- gether. The dedication to Mulgrave contains one of sev- eral allusions to his well-known plan of writing a great heroic poem. Sir George Mackenzie had recently put him upon the plan of reading through most of the earlier English poets, and he had done so attentively, with the result of aspiring to the epic itself. But he still continued to write dramas, though Aurengzebe was his last in rhyme, at least wholly in rhyme. It is in some respects a very noble play, free from the rants, the preposterous bustle, and the still more preposterous length of the Conq\ "M of Granada, while possessing most of the merits of tha' sin- gular work in an eminent degree. Even Dryden ha^^ly ever went farther in cunning of verse than in some of t!i ? passages of Aurengzebe, such as that well-known one whi]>' seems to take up an echo of Macbeth : c " When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat. Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit, Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay. To-morrow's falser than the former day. Lies worse, and while it says, we shall be blest With some new joys, cuts off what we possest. III.] PERIO::> OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 51 Strange cozenage ! none would live past years again, Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain, ' And from the dregs of life think to receive What the first sprightly running could not give. I'm tired with waiting for this chemic gold Which fools us young and beggars us when old." There is a good deal of moralizing of this melancholy kind in the play, the characters of which are drawn with a serious completeness not previously attempted by the author. It is perhaps the only one of Dryden's which, witlj, very little alteration, might be acted, at least as a curiosity, at the present day. It is remarkable that the structure of the verse in the play itself would have led to the conclusion that Dryden was about to abandon rhyme. There is in Aurengzehe a great tendency towards enjamhe- ment ; and as soon as this tendency gets the upper hand, a recurrence to blank verse is, in English dramatic writing, tolerably certain. For the intonation of English is not, like the intonatioji of French, such that rhyme is an abso- lute necessity to distinguish verse from prose ; and where this necessity does not exist, rhyme must always appear to an intelligent critic a more or less impertinent intrusion in dramatic poetry. Indeed, the main thing which had for a time converted Dryden and others to the use of the couplet in drama was a curious notion that blank verse was too easy for long and dignified compositions. It was thought by others that the secret of it had been lost, and that the choice was practicall}^ between bad blank verse and good rhyme. In All for Love Dryden very shortly showed, amhulando, that this notion was wholly ground- less. From this time forward he was faithful to the model he had now adopted, and — which was of the greatest im- portance — he induced others to be faithful too. Had it E 58 . DRYDEN. J [chap. not been for this, it is almost certain that Venice Preserved would have been in rhyme ; that is to say, that it would have been spoilt. In this same year, 1675, a publisher, Bentley (of whom Dryden afterwards spoke with consid- erable bitterness), brought out a play called The Mistaken Husband, which is stated to have been revised, and to have had a scene added to it by Dryden. Dryden, however, definitely disowned it, and I cannot think that it is in any part his ; though it is fair to say that some good judges, notably Mr. Swinburne, think differently.^ Nearly three years passed without anything of Dryden's appearing, and at last, at the end of 1677, or the beginning of 1678, ap- peared a play as much better than Aurengzehe as Aureng- zebe was better than its forerunners. This was All for Love, his first drama, in blank verse, and his " only play written for himself." More will be said later on the cu- rious fancy which made him tread in the very steps of Shakspeare. It is sufficient to say now that the attempt, apparently foredoomed to hopeless failure, is, on the con- trary, a great success. Antony and Cleopatra and All for ^ The list of Dryden's spurious or doubtful works is not large or important. But a note of Pepys, mentioning a play of Dryden en- titled Ladies a la Mode, which was acted and damned in 1668, has puzzled the commentators. There is no trace of this Ladies a, la Mode. But Mr. E. W. Gosse has in his collection a play entitled TJie Mall, or The Modish Lovers, which he thinks may possibly be the very " mean thing " of Pepys' scornful mention. The difference of title is not fatal, for Samuel was not over-accurate in such matters. The play is anonymous, but the preface is signed J. D. The date is 1 674, and the printing is execrable, and evidently not revised by the author, "whoever he was. Notwithstanding this, the prologue, the epilogue, and a song contain some vigorous verse and phrase sometimes not a little suggestive of Dryden. In the entire absence of external evi- dence connecting him with it, the question, though one of much in- terest, is perhaps not one to be dealt with at any length here, III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 59 Love, when they are contrasted, only show by the contrast the difference of kind, not the difference of degree, be- tween their writers. The heroic conception has here, in all probability, as favourable exposition given to it as it is capable of, and it must be admitted that it makes a not un- favourable show even without the "dull sweets of rhyme" to drug the audience into good humour with it. The fa- mous scene between Antony and Ventidius divides with the equally famous scene in Don Sebastian between Sebas- tian and Dorax the palm among Dryden's dramatic efforts. Bu* as a whole the play is, I think, superior to Don Sebas- tian. The blank verse, too, is particularly interesting, be- cause it was almost its author's first attempt at that crux; and because, for at least thirty years, hardly any tolerable blank verse — omitting of course Hilton's — had been writ- ten by any one. The model is excellent, and it speaks Dryden's uneri'ing literary sense, that, fresh as he was from the study of Paradise Lost, and great as was his admira- tion for its author, he does not for a moment attempt to confuse the epic and the tragic modes of the style. All for Love was, and deserved to be, successful. The play, which followed it, Limberham, was, and deserved to be, damned. It must be one of the most astonishing things to any one who has not fully grasped the weakness as well as the strength of Dryden's character, that the noble mat- ter and manner of Aurengzebe and All for Love should have been followed by this filthy stuff. As a play, it is by no means Diy den's worst piece of work; but, in all other respects, the less said about it the better. During the time of its production the author collaborated with Lee in writ- ing the tragedy of (Edipus, in which both the friends are to be seen almost at their best. On Dryden's part, the lyric ipcantation scenes are perhaps most noticeable, an4 60 DRYDEN. [chap. Lee mingles throughout his usual bombast with his usual splendid poetry. If any one thinks this expression hy- perbolical, I shall only ask him to read (Edipus, instead of taking the traditional witticisms about Lee for gospel. There is of course plenty of — " Let gods meet gods and jostle in the dark," and the other fantastic follies, into which " metaphysical" poetry and "heroic" plays had seduced men of talent, and sometimes of genius ; but these can be excused when they lead to such a passage as that where (Edipus cries — • " Thou coward ! yet Art Hving ? canst not, wilt not find the road To the great palace of magnificent death, Though thousand ways lead to his thousand doors Which day and night are still unbarred for all." (Edipus led to a quarrel with the players of the King's Theatre, of the merits of which, as we only have a one- sided statement, it is not easy to judge. But Dryden seems to have formed a connexion about this time with the other or Duke's company, and by them (April, 1679) a "potboiling" adaptation of Troilus and Cressida was brought out, which might much better have been left un- attempted. Two years afterwards appeared the last play (leaving operas and the scenes contributed to the Duke of Guise out of the question) that Dryden was to write for many years. This was The Spanish Friar, a popular piece, possessed of a good deal of merit, from the technical point of view of the play-wright, but which I think has been somewhat over-rated, as far as literary excellence is con- cerned. The principal character is no doubt amusing, but he is heavilv indebted to Falstaff on the one hand, and to Fletcher's Lopez on the other ; and he reminds the reader III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 61 of both his ancestors in a way which cannot but be un- favourable to himself. The play is to me most interesting because of the light it throws on Dryden's grand charac- teristic, the consummate craftsmanship with which he could throw himself into the popular feeling of the hour. This " Protestant play " is perhaps his most notable achieve- ment of the kind in drama, and it may be admitted that some other achievements of the same kind are less cred- itable. Allusion has more than once been made to the very high qtrality, from the literary point of view, of the songs which appear in nearly all the plays of this long list. They con- stitute Dryden's chief title to a high rank as a composer of strictly lyrical poetry ; and there are indeed few things which better illustrate the range of his genius than these exquisite snatches. At first sight, it would not seem by any means likely that a poet whose greatesttriumphs were won in the fields of satire and of argumentative verse should succeed in such things. Ordinary lyric, especially of the graver and more elaborate kind, might not surprise us from such a man. But the song-gift is something dis- tinct from the faculty of ordinary lyrical composition ; and there is certainly nothing which necessarily infers it in the pointed declamation and close-ranked argument with which the name of Dryden is oftenest associated. But the later seventeenth century had a singular gift for such perform- ance — a kind of swan-song, it might be thought, before the death-like slumber which, with few and brief intervals, was to rest upon the English lyric for a hundred years. Dorset, Rochester, even Mulgrave, wrote singularly fasci- nating songs, as smooth and easy as Moore's, and with far less of the commonplace and vulgar about them. Aphra Behn was an admirable, and Tom Durfey a far from des- 62 DRYDEN. [chap. picable, songster. Even among the common run of play- wrights, who have left no lyrical and not much literary reputation, scraps and snatches which have the true song stamp are not unfrequently to be found. But Dryden excelled them all in the variety of his cadences and the ring of his lines. I^owhere do we feel more keenly the misfortune of his licence of language, which prevents too many of these charming songs from being now quoted or sung. Their abundance may b^ illustrated by the fact that a single play, The Mock Astrologer, contains no less than four songs of the very first lyrical merit. "You charmed me not with that fair face," is an instance of the well-known common measure which is so specially Eng- lish, and which is poetry or doggrel according to its ca- dence. "After the pangs of a desperate lover" is one of the rare examples of a real dactylic metre in English, were the dactyls are not, as usual, equally to be scanned as anapaests. " Calm was the even, and clear was the sky," is a perfect instance of what may be called archness in song; and "Celimena of my heart," though not much can be said for the matter of it, is at least as much a met- rical triumph as any of the others. Nor are the other plays less rich in similar work. The song beginning " Farewell, ungrateful traitor," gives a perfect example of a metre which has been used more than once in our own days with great success; and "Long between Love and Fear Phyllis tormented," which occurs in The Assignation, gives yet another example of the singular fertility with which Dryden devised and managed measures suitable for song. His lyrical faculty impelled him also — especially in his early plays — to luxuriate in incantation scenes, lyr- ical dialogues, and so forth. These have been ridiculed, not altogether unjustly, in The Rehearsal ; but the incan- III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 63 tation scene in (Edipus is very far above the average of such things ; and of not a few passages in King Arthur at least as much may be said. Dryden's energy was so entirely occupied with play- writing during this period that he had hardly, it would appear, time or desire to undertake any other work. To- wards the middle of it, however, when he had, by poems and plays, already established himself as the greatest liv- ing poet — Milton being out of the question — he began to be asked for prologues and epilogues by other poets, or by the ^actors on the occasion of the revival of old plays. These prologues and epilogues have often been comment- ed upon as one of the most curious literary phenomena of the time. The custom is still, on special occasions, spar- ingly kept up on the stage ; but the prologue, and still more the epilogue, to the Westminster play are the chief living representatives of it. It was usual to comment in these pieces on circumstances of the day, political and oth- er. It was also usual to make personal appeals to the au- dience for favour and support very much in the manner of the old Trouveres when they commended their wares. But more than all, and worst of all, it was usual to indulge in the extremest licence both of language and meaning. The famous epilogue — one of Dryden's own — to Tyran- nic Love, in which Mrs. Eleanor Gwyn, being left for dead on the stage, in the character of St. Catherine, and being about to be carried out by the scene-shifters, exclaims — " Hold ! are you mad ? you damned confounded dog, I am to rise and speak the epilogue," is only a very mild sample of these licences, upon which Macaulay has commented with a severity which is for once absolutely justifiable. There was, however, no poet 64 DRYDEN. [chap. who had the knack of telling allusion to passing events as Dryden had, and he was early engaged as a prologue writer. The first composition that we have of this kind written for a play not his own is the prologue to Alhuma- zar, a curious piece, believed, but not known, to have been written by a certain Tomkis in James the First's reign, and ranking among the many which have been attributed with more or less (generally less) show of reason to Shak- speare. Dry den's knowledge of the early English drama was not exhaustive, and he here makes a charge of plagi- arism against Ben Jonson, for which there is in all proba- bility not the least ground. The piece contains, however, as do most of these vigorous, though unequal composi- tions, many fine lines. The next production of the kind not intended for a play of his own is the prologue to the first performance of the king's servants, after they had been burnt out of their theatre, and this is followed by many others. In 1673 a prologue to the University of Oxford, spoken when the Silent Woman was acted, is the first of many of the same kind. It has been mentioned that Dryden speaks slightingly of these University prol- ogues, but they are among his best pieces of the class, and are for the most part entirely free from the ribaldry with which he was but too often wont to alloy them. In these years pieces intended to accompany Carlell's Arviragus and Philicia, Etherege's Man of Mode, Charles Davenant's Circe, Lee's Mithridates, Shad well's True Widoiu, Lee's Caesar Borgia, Tate's Loyal General, and not a few others occur. A specimen of the style in which Dryden excelled so remarkably, and which is in itself so utterly dead, may fairly be given here, and nothing can be better for the purpose than the most famous prologue to the University of Oxford. This is the prologue in which the poet at III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 65 once displays his exquisite capacity for flattery, his com- mand over versification, and his singular antipathy to his own Alma Mater ; an antipathy which, it may be pointed out, is confirmed by the fact of his seeking his master's degree rather at Lambeth than at Cambridge. Whether any solution to the enigma can be found in Dennis's re- mark that the " younger fry " at Cambridge preferred Set- tle to their own champion, it would be vain to attempt to determine. The following piece, however, may be taken as a fair specimen of the more decent prologue of the lat^r seventeenth century : " Though actors cannot much of learning boast, Of all who want it, we admire it most : We love the praises of a learned pit, As we remotely are allied to wit. We speak our poet's wit, and trade in ore, Like those who touch upon t>ie golden shore ; Betwixt our judges can distinction make, Discern how much, and why, our poems take ; Mark if the fools, or men of sense, rejoice ; / Whether the applause be only sound or voice. When our fop gallants, or our city folly, Clap over-loud, it makes us melancholy : We doubt that scene which does their wonder raise, And, for their ignorance, contemn their praise. Judge, then, if we who act, and they who write. Should not be proud of giving you delight. London likes grossly ; but this nicer pit Examines, fathoms all the depths of wit ; . The ready finger lays on every blot ; Knows what should justly please, and what should not. Nature herself lies open to your view, You judge, by her, what draught of her is true. Where outlines false, and colours seem too faint. Where bunglers daub, and where true poets paint. 4 66 DRYDEN. [csap. But by the sacred genius of this place, By every Muse, by each domestic grace, Be kind to wit, which but endeavours well, And, where you judge, presumes not to exceL Our poets hither for adoption come, As nations sued to be made free of Rome ; Not in the sufEragating tribes to stand, But in your utmost, last, provincial band. If his ambition may those hopes pursue, Who with religion loves your arts and you, Oxford to him a dearer name shall be. Than his own mother-university. Thebes did his green, unknowing youth engage ; He chooses Athens in his riper age." During this busy period, Dryden's domestic life had been comparatively uneventful. His eldest son had been born either in 1665 or in 1666, it seems not clear which. His second son, John, was born a year or two later ; and the third, Erasmus Henry, in May, 1669. These three sons were all the children Lady Elizabeth brought him. The two eldest went, like their father, to Westminster, and had their schoolboy troubles there, as letters of Dryden still extant show. During the whole period, except in his brief visits to friends and patrons in the country, he was established in the house in Gerrard Street, which is identi- fied with his name.^ While the children were young, his means must have been sufficient, and, for those days, con- ' A bouse in Fetter Lane, now divided into two, bears a plate stating that Dryden lived there. The plate, as I was informed by the pres- ent occupiers, replaces a stone slab or inscription which was destroy- ed in some alterations not very many years ago. I know of no ref- erence to this house in any book, nor does Mr. J. C. Collins, who called my attention to it. If Dryden ever lived here, it must have been between his residence with Herringman and his marriage. III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 6^ siderable. With his patrimony included, Malone has cal- culated that for great part of the time his income must have been fully 700Z. a year, equal in purchasing power to 2000^. a year in Malone's time, and probably to nearer 3000Z. now. In June, 1668, the degree of Master of Arts, to which, for some reason or other, Dryden had never pro- ceeded at Cambridge, was, at the recommendation of the king, conferred upon him by the Archbishop of Canter- bury. Two years later, in the summer of 1670, he was made poet laureate and historiographer royal, ^ Davenant, the 4ast holder of the laureateship, had died two years previously, and Howell, the well-known author of the Epis- tolce Ho-Eliance, and the late holder of the historiogra- phership, four years before. When the two appointments were conferred on Dryden, the salary was fixed in the patent at 200^. a year, besides the butt of sack which the economical James afterwards cut off, and arrears since Davenant's death were to be paid. In the same year, 1670, the death of his mother increased his income by the 20Z. a year which had been payable to her from the North- amptonshire property. From 1667, or thereabouts, Dry- den had been in possession of a valuable partnership with the players of the king's house, for whom he contracted to write three plays a year in consideration of a share and a quarter of the profits. Dryden's part of the contract was not performed, it seems ; but the actors declare that, at any rate for some years, their part was, and that the poet's receipts averaged from 300/. to 400Z. a year, besides which he had (sometimes, at any rate) the third night, and (we ^ The patent, given by. Malone, is dated Aug. 18. Mr. W. Noel Sainsbury, of the Record Office, has pointed out to me a preliminary warrant to " our Attorney or Solicitor Generall" to "prepare a Bill" for the purpose dated April 13. 68 DRYDEN. [t!HAP. may suppose always) the bookseller's fee for the copyright of the printed play, which together averaged lOOl. a play or more. Lastly, at the extreme end of the period most probably, but certainly before 1679, the king granted him an additional pension of 100/. a year. The importance of this pension is more than merely pecuniary, for this is the grant, the confirmation of which, after some delay, by James, was taken by Macaulay as the wages of apostasy. The pecuniary prosperity of this time was accompanied by a corresponding abundance of the good things which generally go with wealth. Dryden was familiar with most of the literary nobles and gentlemen of Charles's court, and Dorset, Etherege, Mulgrave, Sedley, and Rochester were among his special intimates or patrons, whichever word may be preferred. The somewhat questionable boast which he made of this familiarity Nemesis was not long in punishing, and the instrument which Nemesis chose was Rochester himself. It might be said of this famous per- son, whom Etherege has hit off so admirably in his Dorimant, that he was, except in intellect, the worst of all the courtiers of the time, because he was one of the most radically un amiable. It was truer of him even than of Pope, that he was sure to play some monkey trick or other on those who were unfortunate enough to be his in- timates. He had relations with most of the literary men of his time, but those relations almost always ended badly. Sometimes he set them at each other like dogs, or procured for one some court favour certain to annoy a rival ; some- times he satirized them coarsely in his foul-mouthed poems ; sometimes, as we shall see, he forestalled the Chevalier de Rohan in his method of repartee. As early as 1675 Rochester had disobliged Dryden, though the ex- act amount of the injury has certainly been exaggerated III.] PERIOD OF DRAMATIC ACTIVITY. 69 by Malone, whom most biographers, except Mr. Christie, have followed. There is little doubt (though Mr. Christie thinks otherwise) that one of the chief functions of the poet laureate was to compose masques and such like pieces to be acted by the court ; indeed, this appears to have been the main regular duty of the oflSce at least in the seventeenth century. That Crowne should have been charged with the composition of Calisto was, therefore, a slight to Dryden. Crowne was not a bad play-wright. He might perhaps, by a plagiarism from Lamb's criticism on Heywood, be called a kind of prose Dryden, and a characteristic saying of Dryden's, which has been handed down, seems to show that the latter recognized the fact. But the addition to the charge against Rochester that he afterwards interfered to prevent an epilogue, which Dryden wrote for Crowne's piece, from being recited, rests upon absolutely no authority, and it is not even certain that the epilogue referred to was actually written by Dryden. In the year 1679, however, Dryden had a much more serious taste of Rochester's malevolence. He had recently become very intimate with Lord Mnlgrave, who had quar- relled with Rochester. Personal courage was not Roches- ter's forte, and he had shown the white feather when challenged by Mulgrave. Shortly afterwards there was circulated in manuscript an Essay on Satire, containing virulent attacks on the king, on Rochester, and the Duch- esses of Cleveland and Portsmouth. How any one could ever have suspected that the poem was Dryden's it is dif- ficult to understand. To begin with, he never at any time in his career lent himself as a hired literary bravo to. any private person. In the second place, that he should at- tack the king, from whom he derived the greatest part of his income, was inconceivable. Thirdly, no literary judge 10 . . DRYDEN. [cHAP.ra. Qould for one moment connect him with the shambling doggrel lines which distinguish the Essay on Satire in its original form. A very few couplets have some faint ring of Dryden's verse, but not more than is perceivable in the work of many other poets and poetasters of the time. Lastly, Mulgrave, who, with some bad qualities, was truth- ful and fearless enough, expressly absolves Dry den as be- ing not only innocent, but ignorant of the whole matter. However, Rochester chose to identify him as the author, and in letters still extant almost expressly states his belief in the fact, and threatens to " leave the repartee to Black Will with a cudgel." On the 18th December, as Dryden was going home at night, through Rose Alley, Covent Garden, he was attacked and beaten by masked men. Fifty pounds reward (deposited at what is now called Childs' Bank) was offered for the discovery of the offend- ers, and afterwards a pardon was promised to the actual criminals if they would divulge the name of their employ- er, but nothing came of it. The intelligent critics of the time affected to consider the matter a disgrace to Dryden, and few of the subsequent attacks on him fail to notice it triumphantly. How frequent those attacks soon be- came the next chapter will show. CHAPTER ly. SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. In the year 1680 a remarkable change came over thw char- acter of Dryden's work. Had he died in this year (and he had already reached an age at which many men's work is done) he would not at the present time rank very high even among the second class of English poets. In pure poe- try he had published nothing of the slightest consequence for fourteen years, and though there was much admirable work in his dramas, they could as wholes only be praised by allowance. Of late years, too, he had given up the style — rhymed heroic drama — which he had specially made his own. He had been for some time casting about for an opportunity of again taking up strictly poetical work ; and, as usually happens with the favourites of fort- une, a better opportunity than any he could have elaborated for himself was soon presented to him. The epic poem which, as he tells us, he intended to write would doubtless have contained many fine passages and much splendid versification ; but it almost certainly would not have been the best thing in its kind even in its own language. The series of satirical and didactic poems which, in the space of less than seven years, he was now to produce, occupies the position* which the epic would almost to a certainty have failed to attain. Not only is there riothing better 72 DRYDEN. [chap. of their own kind in English, but it may almost be said that there is nothing better in any other literary language. Satire, argument, and exposition may possibly be half- spurious kinds of poetry — that is a question which need not be argued here. But among satirical and didactic poems Absalom and Achitopkel, The Medal, Macjlecknoe, Reliyio Laid, The Hind and the Panther, hold the first place in company with very few rivals. In a certain kind of satire to be defined presently they have no rival at all ; and in a certain kind of argumentative exposition they have no rival except in Lucretius. It is probable that, until he was far advanced in middle life, Dryden had paid but little attention to political and religious controversies, though he was well enough versed in their terms, and had a logical and almost scholastic mind. I have already endeavoured to show the unlikeli- ness of his ever having been a very fervent Roundhead, and I do not think that there is much more probability of his having been a very fervent Royalist. His literary work, his few friendships, and the tavern-coffeehouse life which took up so much of the time of the men of that day, probably occupied him sufficiently in the days of his earlier manhood. He was loyal enough, no doubt, not merely in lip-loyalty, and was perfectly ready to furnish an Amhoyna or anything else that was wanted; but for the first eighteen years of Charles the Second's reign, the nation at large felt little interest, of the active kind, in po- litical questions. Dryden almost always reflected the sym- pathies of the nation at large. The Popish Plot, however, ' and the dangerous excitement which the misgovern rn^rit of ' Charles, on the one hand, and the machinations of ShaftfeS' ■ bury, on the other, produced, found him at an age when ^ serious subjects are at any rate, by courtesy, supposed' to ■ lY/}i>] SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 73 poises^, gr^^fc^. attractions than they exert in youth. Tra- dition h^s it ,tiiat he was more or less directly encouraged by Charles to write one, if not two, of the poems which in a few months made him the first satirist in Europe. It is possible, for Charles had a real if not a very lively interest in literature, iw as a sound enough critic in his way,'^nd had ^mple shreiwdness to perceive the advantage to his own cause which he might gain by enlisting Dryden. However this may be, Absalom and Achitophel was pub- lished about the middle of November, 1681, a week or so befojce the grand jury threw out the bill against Shaftes- bury on a charge of high treason. At no time before, and hardly at any time since, did party-spirit run higher ; and though the immediate object of the poem was defeat- ed by the fidelity of the brisk boys of the city to their leader, there is no question that the poem worked power- fully among the influences which after the most desperate struggle, short of open warfare, in which any English sov- ereign has ever been engaged, finally won for Charles the victory over the Exclusionists, by means at least ostensibly constitutional and legitimate. It is, however, with the lit- erary rather than with the political aspect of the matter that we are here concerned. The story of Absalom and Achitophel has obvious capac- ities for political adaptation, and it had been more than once so used in the course of the century, indeed (it would appear), in the course of the actual political struggle in which Dryden now engaged. Like many other of the greatest writers, Dryden was wont to carry out Moliere's principle to the fullest, and to care very little for technical originality of plan or main idea. The form which his poem ^took was also in many ways suggested by the pre- vailing literary tastes of the day. Both in France and in F 4* 1A DRYDEN. /-B [ciuP. England the character or portrait, a set d^S*i4^tlo#'«l<^'a given person in prose or verse, had for some time been fashionable. Clarendon in the one country, Saint Evre- mond in the other, had in particular composed prose por- traits which have never been surpassed. Dryden, accord- ingly, made his poem little more than a string of such portraits, connected together by the very slenderest thread of narrative, and interspersed with occasional speeches in which the arguments of his own side were put in a light as favourable, and those of the other in a light as un- favourable, as possible. He was always very careless of anything like a regular plot for his poems — a carelessness rather surprising in a practised writer for the stage. But he was probably right in neglecting this point. The sub- jects with which he dealt were of too vital an interest to his readers to allow them to stay and ask the question, whether the poems had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sharp personal satire and biting political denunciation need- ed no such setting as this — a setting which to all appear- ance Dryden was as unable as he was unwilling to give. He could, however, and did, give other things of much greater importance. The wonderful command over the couplet of which he had displayed the beginnings in his early poems, and which had in twenty years of play-writing been exercised and developed till its owner was in as thor- ough training as a professional athlete, was the first of these. The second was a faculty of satire, properly so called, which was entirely novel. The third was a faculty of specious argument in verse, which, as has been said, no one save Lucretius has ever equalled ; and whicli, if it falls short of the great Roman's in logical exactitude, hardly falls short of it in poetical ornament, and excels it in a sort of triumphant vivacity which hurries the reader along, i rv.] SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 75 whether he will or no. All these three gifts are' almost in- differently exemplified in the series of poems now under discussion, and each of t]^^^;,inay deserve a little consid- eration before we proceed' to gis^ie account of the poems themselves. The versification of English satire before Dryden had been almost without exception harsh and rugged. There are whole passages of Marston and of Donne, as well as more rarely of Hall, which /?an only be recognised for verse by the rattle of the rhj'^mes and by a diligent scansion with the finger. Something the same, allowing for the influence of Waller and his school^ may be said of Marvell and even of Oldhani. . Meanwhile, the octosyllabic satire of Cleve- land, Butler, and others, though less violently uncouth than the decasyllabics, was purposely grotesque. There is some difference* of opinion as to how far the heroic satirists them- selves wore intentionally rugged. Donne, when he chose, could write with., perfect sweetness, and Marston could be smooth enough in blank verse. It has been thought that some mistaken classical tradition made the early satirists adopt their j^w- breaking style, and there may be some- thing to be said for this ; but I think that regard must, in fairness, also be had to the very imperfect command of the opi^let which they possessed. The languid cadence of its then ordinary form was unsuited for satire, and the satirists had not the art of quickening and varying it. —Hence the only resource was to -make it as like prose as P^ rssible. But Dryden was in no such case ; his native % ^ifts and his enormous practice in play- writing had made the couplet as natural a vehicle to him for any form of discourse as blank verse or as plain prose. The form of t, too, which he had most affected, was specially suited for jatire. In the first place, this form had, as has already % DRYDEN. [CHA« been noted, a remarkably varied cadence ; in the second,; its strong antitheses and smart telling hits lent themselves') to personal description and attack with consummate ease'. There are passages of Dfyden's 'isatires in which everj/ couplet has not only the force but the actual sound of a slap in the face. The rapidity of movement from on'e couplet to the other is another remarkable characteristic. Even Pope, master as he was of verse, often fell into the fault of isolating his couplets too much, as if he expected applause between each, and Wi^hM to give time for it. Dryden's verse, on the other hand, strides along with a careless Olympian motion, as if the writer were looking at his victims rather with a kind of good-humoured scorn than with any elaborate triumph. This last remark leads us naturally to the second head, the peculiar character of Dryden's satire itself. In this re- spect it is at least as much distinguished from its prede- cessors as in the former. There had been a continuous tradition among satirists that they must affect ini men se moral indignation at the evils they attacked. Juvenal and still more Persius are probably responsible foi* this ; and even Dryden's example did not put an end to the practice, for in the next century it is found in persons upon whom it sits with singular awkwardness — ^^such as Chui-ciliU" and Lloyd. Now, this moral indignation, apt to b some when the subject is purely ethical — Mars ing example of this — becomes quite intolerab subject is political. It never does for the poli to lose his temper, and to rave and rant and dei the air of an inspired prophet. Dry den, and pe den alone, has observed this rule. As I have jus his manner towards his subjects is that of a co ill-humoured scorn. They are great scoundrels IV.] SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 11 but they are probably even more contemptible than they are vidous. The well-known line — " They got a villain, and we lost a fool," expresses this attitude admirably, and the attitude in its turn explains the frantic rage which Dryden's satire pro- duced in his opponents. There is yet another peculiarity of this satire in which it stands almost alone. Most satir- ists are usually prone to the error of attacking either mere types, or else individuals too definitely marked as individ- ual«. The first is the fault of Regnier and all the minor French satirists ; the second is the fault of Pope. In the first case the point and zest of the thing are apt to be lost, and the satire becomes a declamation against vice and fol- ly in the abstract; in the second case a suspicion of per- sonal piqne comes in, and it is felt that the requirement of art, the disengagement of the general law from the individ- ual instance, is not sufficiently attended to. Regnier per- haps only in Macette, Pope perhaps only in Atticus, escape this Scylla and this Charybdis ; but Dryden rarely or nev- er falls into cither's grasp. His figures are always at once types and individuals. Zimri is at once Buckingham and the idle grand seigneur who plays at politics and at learn- ing ; P. chitophel at once Shaftesbury and the abstract in- triguer; Shiinei at once Bethel and the sectarian politician of all days. It is to be noticed, also, that in drawing these satirical portraits the poet has exercised a singular judgment in selecting his traits. If Absalom and Achitophel be com- pared with the repliies it called forth, this is especially no- ticeable. Shadwell, for instance, in the almost incredibly scurrilous libel which he put forth in answer to the Medal, accuses Dryden of certain definite misdoings and missay- ings, most of which are unbelievable, while others are in- 78 DRYDEN. [csap. conclusive. Dryden, on the other hand, in the character of Og, confines himself in the adroitest way to generalities. These generalities are not only much more effective, but also much more difficult of disproval. When, to recur to the already quoted and typical line attacking the unlucky Johnson, Dryden says — " They got a villain, and we lost a fool," it is obviously useless for the person assailed to sit down and write a rejoinder tending to prove that he is neither one nor the other. He might clear himself from the charge of villainy, but only at the inevitable cost of estab- lishing that of folly. But when Shadwell, in unquotable verses, says to Dryden, on this or that day you did such and such a discreditable thing, the reply is obvious. In the first place the charge can be disproved ; in the second it can be disdained. When Dryden himself makes such charges, it is always in a casual and allusive way, as if there were no general dissent as to the truth of his alle- gation, while he takes care to be specially happy in his language. The disgraceful insinuation against Forbes, the famous if irreverent dismissal of Lord Howard of Escrick — " And canting Nadab let oblivion damn, Who made new porridge for the paschal lamb," justify themselves by their form if not by their matter. It has also to be noted that Dryden's facts are rarely dis- putable. The famous passage in which Settle and Shad- well are yoked in a sentence of discriminating damnation is an admirable example of this. It is absolutely true that Settle had a certain faculty of writing, though the matter of his verse was worthless ; and it is absolutely true that ir.J SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 19 Shadwell wrote worse, and was in some respects a duller man, than any person of equal talents placed among Eng- lish men of letters. There could not possibly be a more complete justification of Macjlecknoe than the victim's complaint that "he had been represented as an Irish- man, though Dryden knew perfectly well that he had only once been in Ireland, and that was but for a few hours;" Lastly has to be noticed Dryden's singular faculty of verse argument. He was, of course, by no means the first did*actic poet of talent in England. Sir John Davies is usually mentioned specially as his forerunner, and there were others who would deserve notice in a critical history of English poetry. But Dryden's didactic poems are quite unlike anything which came before them, and have never been approached by anything that has come after them. Doubtless they prove nothing ; indeed, the chief of them, The Hind and the Panther, is so entirely desultory that it could not prove anything ; but at the same time they have a remarkable air of proving something. Dryden had, in reality, a considerable touch of the scholastic in his mind. He delights at all times in the formulas of the schools, and his various literary criticisms are frequently very fair specimens of deductive reasoning. The bent of his mind, moreover, was of that peculiar kind which delights in ar- guing a point. Something of this may be traced in the singular variety, not to say inconsistency, even of his liter- ary judgments. He sees, for the time being, only the point which he has set himself to prove, and is quite careless of the fact that he has proved something very different yes- terday, and is very likely to prove something different still to-morrow. But for the purposes of didactic poetry he had special equipments unconnected with his merely logi- 80 DEYDEN. [^h^^. cal power. He was at all times singularly happy fy^.lej*- tile in the art of illustration, and of concealing the weak- ness of an argument in the most convincing way, by a happy simile or jest. He steered clear of the rock on which Lucretius has more than once gone nigh to split — the repetition of dry formulas and professional terms. In the Hind and Panther, indeed, the argument is, in great part, composed of narrative and satirical portraiture. The Fable of the Pigeons, the Character of the Buzzard, and a dozen more such things, certainly prove as little as the most determined enemy of the belles lettres could wish. -•sBut Religio Laid, which is our best English didactic poem, is not open to this charge, and is really a very good piece of argument. Weaknesses here and there are, of course, adroitly patched over with ornament, but still the whole possesses a v^ery fair capacity of holding water. Here, too, the peculiar character of Dryden's poetic style served him well. He speaks with surely affected depre- ciation of the style of the Religio as "unpolished and rugged." In reality, it is a model of the plainer sort of verse, and nearer to his own admirable prose than anything else that can be cited. One thing more, and a thing of the greatest importance, has to be said about Dryden's satirical poems. There never, perhaps, was a satirist who less abused his power for personal ends. He only attacked Settle and Shadwell af- ter both had assailed him in the most virulent and unpro- voked fashion. Many of the minor assailants whom, as we shall see, Absalom and Achitophel raised up against him, he did not so much as notice. On the other hand, no kind of personal grudge can be traced in many of his most famous passages. The character of Zirari was not only perfectly true and just, but was also a fair literary jv.J SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 81 tit-for-tat in return for the Rehearsal ; nor did Bucking- ham's foolish rejoinder provoke the poet to say another word. Last of all, in no part of his satires is there the slightest reflection on Rochester, notwithstanding the dis- graceful conduct of which he had been guilty. Rochester was dead, leaving no heirs and very few friends, so that at any time during the twenty years which Dry den survived him satirical allusion would have been safe and easy. But Dryden was far too manly to war with the dead, and far too manly even to indulge, as his great follow-er did, in vicious flings at the living. Absalom and Achitopkel is perhaps, with the exception of the St. Cecilia ode, the best known of all Dryden's poems to modern readers, and there is no need to give any very lengthy account of it, or of the extraordinary skill with which Monmouth is treated. The sketch, even now about the best existing in prose or verse, of the Popish Plot, the character and speeches of Achitophel, the unap- proached portrait of Zimri, and the final harangue of David, have for generations found their places in every book of elegant extracts, either for general or school use. But perhaps the most characteristic passage of the whole, as indicating the kind of satire which Dryden now intro- duced for the first time, is the passage descriptive of Shimei — Slingsby Bethel — the Republican sheriff of the city : " But he, though bad, is followed by a worse, The wretch, who heaven's anointed dared to curse; Shimei — whose youth did early promise bring Of zeal to God, and hatred to his King- Did wisely from expensive sins refrain. And never broke the Sabbath but for gain : Nor ever was he known an oath to vent, Or curse, unless against the government. 82 DHYDEN. [chap. Thus heaping wealth, by the most ready way Among the Jews, which was to cheat and pray ; The City, to reward his pious hate Against his master, chose him magistrate. His hand a vare of justice did uphold, His neck was loaded with a chain of gold. During his office treason was no crime, The sons of Belial had a glorious time : For Shimei, though not prodigal of pelf. Yet loved his wicked neighbour as himself. When two or three were gathered to declaim Against the monarch of Jerusalem, Shimei was always in the midst of them : And, if they cursed the King when he was by, Would rather curse than break good company. If any durst his factious friends accuse, He packed a jury of dissenting Jews, Whose fellow-feeling in the godly cause Would free the suffering saint from human laws : For laws are only made to punish those Who serve the King, and to protect his foes. If any leisure time he had from power. Because 'tis sin to misemploy an hour, His business was, by writing to persuade. That kings Were useless, and a clog to trade : And that his noble style he might refine. No Rechabite more shunned the fumes of wine. Chaste were his cellars, and his shrieval board The grossness of a city feast abhorred : His cooks with long disuse their trade forgot; Cool was his kitchen, though his brains were hot. Such frugal virtue malice may accuse. But sure 'twas necessary to the Jews : For towns, once burnt, such magistrates require. As dare not tempt God's providence by fire. With spiritual food he fed his servants well. But free from flesh, that made the Jews rebel: And Moses' laws he held in more account. For forty days of fasting in the mount." IV.] SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 83 There had been nothing in the least like this, before. The prodigality of irony, the sting in the tail of every couplet, the ingenuity by which the odious charges are made against the victim in the very words almost of the phrases which his party were accustomed to employ, and above all the polish of the language and the verse, and the tone of half -condescending banter, were things of which that time had no experience. The satire w^as as bitter as Butler's, but less grotesque and less laboured. It was not likely that at a time when pamphlet-writing was the chief employment of professional authors, and when the public mind was in the hottest state of excite- ment, such an onslaught as Absalom and Achitophel should remain unanswered. In three weeks from its appearance a parody, entitled Towser the Second, attacking Dryden, was published, the author of which is said to have been Henry Care. A few days later Buckingham proved, with tolerable convincingness, how small had been his own share in the Rehearsal, by putting forth some Po- etical Reflections of the dreariest kind. Him followed an anonymous Nonconformist with A Whip for the FooVs Back, a performance which exposed his own back to a much more serious flagellation in the preface to the Medal. Next came Samuel Pordage's Azaria and Hushai. This work of " Lame Mephibosheth, the wizard's son," is weak enough in other respects, but shows that Dryden had already taught several of his enemies how to write. Last- ly, Settle published Absalom Senior, perhaps the worst of all the replies, though containing evidences of its author's faculty for "rhyming and rattling." Of these and of sub- sequent replies Scott has given ample selections, ample, that is to say, for the general reader. But the student of Dryden can hardly appreciate his author fully, or estimate 84 DRYDEN. [chap. the debt whicTi the English language owes to him, unless he has read at last some of them in full. The popularity of Absalom and Achitophel was immense, and its sale rapid; but the main object, the overthrowing of Shaftesbury, was not accomplished, and a certain tri- umph was even gained for that turbulent leader by the fail- ure of the prosecution against him. This failure was cele- brated by the striking of a medal with the legend Laeta- mur. Thereupon Dry den wrote the Medal. A very precise but probably apocryphal story is told by Spence of its origin. Charles, he says, was walking with Dryden in the Mall, and said to him, " If I were a poet, and I think I am poor enough to be one, I would write a poem on such a subject in such a manner," giving him at the same time hints for the Medal, which, when finished, was rewarded with a hundred broad pieces. The last part of the story is not very credible, for the king was not extravagant towards literature. The first is unlikely, because he was, in the first place, too much of a gentleman to reproach a man to whom he was speaking with the poverty of his profession ; and, in the second, too shrewd not to see that he laid himself open to a damaging repartee. However, the story is not impossible, and that is all that can be said of it. The Medal came out in March, 1682. It is a much shorter and a much graver poem than Absalom and Achitophel, extend- ing to little more than 300 lines, and containing none of the picturesque personalities which had adorned its pred- ecessor. Part of it is a bitter invective against Shaftes- bury, part an argument as to the unfitness of republican institutions for England, and the rest an " Address^to the Whigs," as the prose preface is almost exclusively^ . The language of the poem is nervous, its versification less live- ly than that of Absalom and Achitophel, but not less care- IV.] SATIRICAL AN6 ^ll)ACTIC POEMS. 85 ful. It is noticeable, too, tniat^tM^Jire«faZ contains a line of fourteen syllables, " Thou leap'st o'er all eternal truths in thy Pindaric way." The Alexandrine was already a favourite device of Dryden's, but he has seldom elsewhere tried the seven-foot verse as a variation. Strange to say, it is far from inharmonious in " its place, and has a certain connexion with the sense, though the example certainly cannot be recommended for univer- sal imitation. I cannot remember anv instance in another poet of such a licence except the well-known three in the Revolt of Islarriy which may be thought to be covered by Shelley's prefatory apology. The direct challenge to the Whigs which the preface contained was not likely to go unanswered ; and, indeed, Dryden had described in it with exact irony the character of the replies he received. Pordage returned to the charge with the Medal Reversed ; the admirers of Somers hope that he did not write Dryden's Satire to his Muse ; and there were many others. But one of them, the Medal of John Ba?jes, is, of considerably greater importance. It was written by Thomas Shadwell, and is perhaps the most scur- rilous piece of ribaldry which has ever got itself quoted in English literature. The author gives a life of Dryden, ac- cusing him pell-mell of all sorts of disgraceful conduct and unfortunate experiences. His adulation of Oliver, his puri- tanic relations, his misfortunes at Cambridge, his marriage, his intrigues with Mrs. Reeve, &c., &c., are all raked up oi invented for the purpose of throwing obloquy on him The attack passed all bounds of decency, especially as i had not been provoked by any personality towards Shac well, and tOt^ once Dryden resolved to make an example c his assailant. ''^^'' ' ' . .iwiuas Sliadw^llviiw^^ J aj Norfolk man, and about ten >."ai"s Dryden's junior. Ever since the year 1668 he had iM'en writing plays (chiefly comedies) and hanging abont town, and Dryden and he had been in a manner friends. They had joined Crowne in the task of writing down the Empress of Morocco, and it does not appear that Dryden had ever given Shadwell any direct cause of offence. Shad- well, however, who was exceedingly arrogant, and appar- ently jealous of Dryden's acknowledged position as leader of the English drama, took more than one occasion of sneer- ing at Dryden, and especially at his critical prefaces. Not long before the actual declaration of war Shadwell had re- ceived a prologue from Dryden, and the outbreak itself wa§ due to purely political causes, though no doubt Shadwell, who was a sincere Whig and Protestant, was very glad to pour out his pent-up literary jealousy at the same time. The personality of his attack on Dryden was, however, in the last degree unwise ; for the house in which he lived was of glass almost all over. His manners are admitted to have been coarse and brutal, his conversation unclean, his appearance uninviting; nor was his literary personal- ity safer from attack. He had taken Ben Jonson for his model, and any reader of his comedies must admit that he had a happy knack of detecting or imagining the oddities which, after Ben's example, he called "humours." The Sullen Lovers is in this way a much more genuinely amus- ing play than any of Dryden's, and the Squire of Alsatia, Bury Fair, Epsom Wells, the Virtuoso, &c., are comedies of manners by no means unimportant for the social history of the time. But whether it was owing to haste, as Roch- ester pretended, or, as Dryden would have it, to certain in- tellectual incapacities, there can be no doubt tWiat nobody ever made less use of his faculties than ^»:jhadwell. His iv.j SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 87 work is always disgraceful as writing; he seems to have been totally destitute of any critical faculty, and he mixes up what is really funny with the dullest and most weari- some folly and ribaldry. He was thus given over entirely into Dryden's hands, and the unmatched satire of Mac- Fiecknoe was the result. Flecknoe, whom but for this work no one would ever have inquired about, was, and had been for some time, a stock-subject for allusive satire. He was an Irish priest who had died not long before, after writing a little good verse and a great deal of bad. He had paid compliments to Dryden, and ther6 is no reason, to suppose that Dryden had any enmity towards him ; his part, indeed, is simply representative, and the satire is reserved for Shadwell. Well as they are known, the first twenty or thirty lines of the poem must be quoted once more, for illustration of Dryden's satirical faculty is hardly possible without; them : "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 blessed with issue of a large increase. Worn out with business, did at length debate To settle the succession of the state ; i^.ff, ' •' 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 88 UKYDEN. [chap. 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.' " MacFlecknoe was published in October, 1682, but Diy- den had not done with Shadwell. A month later came out the second part of Absalom and AcJiitophel, in which Nahum Tate took up, the story. Tate copied the versi^- cation of his master with a good deal of success, though, as it is known that Dryden gave strokes almost all through ^ the poem, it is difficult exactly to apportion the other lau- reate's part. But the second part of Absalom and Achit- (fphel would assuredly never be opened were it not for a long passage of about 200 lines, which is entirely Dry- den's, and which contains some of his very best work. Unluckily it contains also some of Ms greatest licences of expression, to which he was probably provoked by the un- paralleled language which, as has been said, Shadwell and others had used to him. The 200 lines which he gave Tate are one string of characters, each more savage and more masterly than the last. Ferguson, Forbes, and John- son are successively branded ; Pordage has his ten syllables of immortalizing contempt ; and then come the famous characters of Doeg (Settle) and Og (Shadwell) — *' Two fools that crutch their feeble sense on verse, Who by my muse to all succeeding times Shall live, in spite of their own doggrel rhymes," IV.] SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 89 The coarseness of speech before alluded to makes it im- possible to quote these characters as a whole, but a cento is fortunately possible with little loss of vigour. " Doeg, though without knowing how or why, Made still a blundering kind of melody ; Spurred boldly on, and dashed through thick and thin, Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in ; Free from all meaning, whether good or bad, And, in one word, heroically mad, He was too warm on picking-work to dwell, ^ • But fagoted his notions as they fell, And, if they rhymed and rattled, all was well. ^- Railing in other men may be a crime, But ought to pass for mere instinct in him ; Instinct he follows, and no farther knows. For, to write verse with him is to tramprose; 'Twere pity treason at his door to lay. Who makes heaven's gate a lock to its own key; Let him rail on, let his invective muse Have four-and-twenty letters to abuse. Which, if he jumbles to one line of sense, Indict him of a capita,l offence. In fire-works give him leave to vent his spite, Those are the only serpents he can write ; The height of his ambition is, we know, But to be master of a puppet-show ; On that one stage his works may yet appear. And a month's harvest keep him all the year. " Now stop your noses, readers, all and some. For here's a tun of midnight work to gome, Og from a treason-tavern rolling home. ' Round as a globe, and liquored every chink, ; Goodly and great he sails behind his link. Tith all this bulk there's nothing lost in Og, or every inch, that is not fool, is rogue. iThe midwife laid her hand on his thick skull, ith this prophetic blessing — Be thou dull ! 5 90 DRYDEN. [chaj». Drink, swear, and roar; forbear no lewd delight 03 aiJ'i' Fit for thy bulk, do anything but write. ' " ■ Thou art of lasting make, like thoughtless men, A strong nativity — but for the pen ; Eat opium, mingle arsenic in thy drink. Still thou mayest live, avoiding pen and ink. I see, I see, 'tis counsel given in vain, For treason, botched in rhyme, wilj be thy bane ; Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck, 'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck. Why should thy metre good King David blast ? A psalm of his will surely be thy last. A double noose thou on thy neck dost pull For writing treason, and for writing dull ; To die for faction is a common evil. But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil. Hadst thou the glories of thy king exprest. Thy praises had been satire at the best ; But thou in clumsy verse, unlickt, unpointed. Hast shamefully defied the Lord's anointed : I will not rake the dunghill of thy crimes, For who would read thy life that reads thy rhymes ? But of King David's foes, be this the doom. May all be like the young man Absalom ; And for my foes may this their blessing be, To talk like Doeg, and to write like thee." No one, I think, can fail to recognise here the qualities which have already been set forth as specially distinguish- ing- Dryden's satire, the fund of truth at the bottom of it, the skilful adjustment of the satire so as to make faults of the merits which are allowed, the magnificent force and variety of the verse, and the constant maintenance of a kind of superior contempt never degenerating into mere railing, or losing its superiority in petty spite. The last four verses in especial might almost be taken as a model of satirical verse. IV.] SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 91 Tftese verses were the last that Dryden wrote in the directly patirical way. His four great poems — the two parLs of Absalom and Achitophel, the Medal, and Mac- Flecknoe, had been produced in rather more than a year, and, high as was his literary position before, had exalted him infinitely higher. From this time forward there could be no doubt at all of his position, with no second at any moderate distance, at the head of living English men of letters. He was now to earn a new title to this position. Almost simultaneously with the, second part of Absalom and Achitophel appeared Religio Laid. Scott has described Religio Laid as one of the most admirable poems in the language, which in some respects it undoubtedly is ; but it is also one of the most singular. That a man who had never previously displayed any par- ticular interest in theological questions, and who had reach- ed the age of fifty -one, with a reputation derived, until quite recently, in the main from the composition of loose plays, should appear before his public of pleasure-seekers with a serious argument in verse on the credibility of the Christian religion, and the merits of the Anglican form of doctrine and church government, would nowadays be something more than a nine days' wonder. In Dryden's time it was somewhat less surprising. The spirit of theo- logical controversy was bred in the bone of the seventeenth certtury. It will always remain an instance of the subor- dination in Macaulay of the judicial to the advocating fac- ulty, that he who knew the time so well should have ad- duced the looseness of Dryden's plays as an argument againi^t the sincerity of his conversion. It is quite certain that James the Second was both a man of loose life and of thoroughly sincere religious belief ; it is by no means certain that his still more profligate brother's unbelief was DRY DEN. [chap. , mere assumption, and generally it may be noted that )iograpl:iies of tbe time never seem to infer any con- ..jon between irregularity of life and unsoundness of re- ligious faith. I have already shown some cause for dis- believing the stories, or rather the assertions, of Dryden's profligacy, though, even these would not be conclusive against his sincerity ; but I believe that it would be diffi- cult to trace any very active concern in him for things religious before the Popish Plot. Various circumstances already noticed may then have turned his mind to the sub- ject, and that active and vigorous mind when it once at- tacked a subject rarely deserted it. Consistency was in no matter Dryden's great characteristic, and the arguments of JReligio Laid are not more inconsistent with the arguments of The Hind and the Panther than the handling of the question of rhymed plays in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy is with the arguments against them in the prefaces and dissertations subsequent to Aurengzehe. It has sometimes been sought to give Religio Laid a political as well as a religious sense, and to connect it in this way w'ith the series of political satires, with the Duke of Guise^ and with the subsequent Hind and Panther. The connexion, how^ever, seems to me to be faint. The strug- gles of the Popish Plot had led to the contests on the Ex- clusion Bill on the one hand, and they had reopened the controversial question between the Churches of England and Rome on the other. They had thus in different; ways given rise to Absalom and Achitophel and to Religio Laid^ but the two poems have no community but a community of origin. Indeed, the suspicion of any political design in Religio Laid is not only groundless but contradictory. The views of James on the subject were known to every one, and those of Charles himself are not likely to have iv.] SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. l'> been wholly bidden from an assiduous follower of tbe court, and a friend of tbe king's greatest intimates, like Dryden. Still less is it necessary to take account of the absurd sug- gostion that Dryden wrote the poem as a stepping-stone to orders and to ecclesiastical preferment. He has definitely denied that he bad at any time thoughts of entering the church, and such thoughts are certainly not likely to have occurred to him at tbe age of fifty. The poem, therefore, as it seems to me, jnust be regarded as a genuine produc- tion, expressing tbe author's first thoughts on a subject which bad just presented itself to him as interesting and important. Such first thoughts in a mind like Dry den's, which was by no means a revolutionary mind, and which was disposed to accept tbe church as part and parcel of the Tory system of principles, were pretty certain to take tbe form of an apologetic harmonizing of difficulties and doubts. Tbe author must have been familiar with the usual objections of the persons vaguely called Hobbists, and with the counter - objections of the Romanists. He takes them both, and be makes tbe best of them. In its form and arrangement Religio Laid certainly de- serves tbe praise which critics have given it. Dryden's overtures are very generally among the happiest parts of his poems, and tbe opening ten or twelve lines of this poem are among his very best. Tbe bold evjamhement of tbe first two couplets, with the striking novelty of cadence given by tbe sharply cut ccesura of tbe third line, is one of his best metrical effects, and the actual picture of tbe cloudy night-sky and the wandering traveller matches the technical beauty of the v^erse. Tbe rest of the poem is studiously bare of ornament, and almost exclusively argu- mentative. There is and could be nothing specially novel or extraordinarily forcible in tbe arguments ; but they are €4 DRYDEN. [c&.« put with that ease and apparent cogency which have been already remarked upon as characterizing all Dryden's di- dactic work. The poem is not without touches of humour, and winds up with a characteristic but not ill-humoured fling at the unhappy Shadwell. Dryden's next productions of importance were two odes of the so-called Pindaric kind. The example of Cowley had made this style very popular ; but Dryden himself had not practised it. The years 1685-6 gave him occasion to do so. His Threnodia Augustalis, or funeral poem on Charles the Second, may be taken as the chief official pro- duction of his laureateship. The difficulties of such per- formances are well known, and the reproaches brought against their faults are pretty well stereotyped. Threno- dia Augustalis is not exempt from the faults of its kind ; but it has merits which for that kind are decidedly unu- sual. The stanza Which so adroitly at once praises and satirizes Charles's patronage of literary men is perhaps the best, and certainly the best known ; but the termination is also fine. Of very different merit, however, is the Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killegrew. This elegy is among the best of many noble funeral poems which Dry- den wrote. The few lines on the Marquis of Winchester, the incomparable address to Oldham — " Farewell, too little and too lately known" — and at a later date the translated epitaph on Claverhouse, are all remarkable ; but the Kil- legrew elegy is of far greater importance. It is curious that in these days of selections no one has attempted a collection of the best regular and irregular odes in English. There are not many of them, but a small anthology could be made, reaching from Milton to Mr. Swinburne, which would contain some remarkable poetry. Among these the ode to x\nne Killegrew would assuredly hold a high wJ SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 95 place. Johnson pronounced it the noblest in the language, and in his time it certainly was, unless Lycidas be called an ode. Since its time there has been Wordsworth's great immortality ode, and certain beautiful but fragmentary pieces of Shelley which might be so classed ; but till our own days nothing else which can match this. The first stanza may be pronounced absolutely faultless, and inca- pable of improvement. As a piece of concerted music in verse it has not a superior, and Warton's depreciation of it is a curious instance of the lack of catholic taste which has so often marred English criticism of poetry : " Thou youngest virgin-daughter of the skies, Made in the last promotion of the blessed ; 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 rollest above us, in thy wandering race, Or, in procession fixed and regular, Movest with the heaven's majestic pace ; Or, called to more superior bUss, Thou treadest with seraphims the vast abyss : Whatever happy region is 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, W/'hen thy first fruits of Poesy were- given, 7tO make thyself a welcome inmate there ; While yet a young probationer, And candidate of heaven." ,«v^»' lese fjmaller pieces were followed at some interval by the remairkable poem which is Dryden's chief work, if 96 DRYDEN. '^ITAa '^^^^^ bulk and originality of plan are taken'^ifi^-^6bmid\^^on. There is a tradition as to the place of composition of The Hind and the Panther, which in many respects deserves to be true, though there is apparently no direct testimo- ny to its truth. It is said to have been written at Rush- ton not far from Kettering, in the poet's native county. Rush ton had been (thoagh it had passed from them at this time) the seat of the Treshams, one of the staunchest families to the old faith which Dryden had just embraced. They had held another seat in Northamptonshire — Lyve- den, within a few miles of Aldwinlde and of all the scenes of the poet's youth ; and both at Lyveden and Rushton, architectural evidences of their devotion to the cause sur- vive in the shape of buildings covered with symbolical carvings. The neighbourhood of Rushton, too, is singu- larly consonant to the scenery of the poem. It lay just on the southern fringe of the great forest of Rocking- ham, and the neighbourhood is still wonderfully timbered, though most of the actual wood owes its existence to the planting energy of Duke John of Montagu, half a century after Dryden's time. It would certainly not have been easy to conceive a better place for the conception and ex- ecution of this sylvan poem ; but, as a matter of fact, it seems impossible to obtain any definite evidence of the connexion between the two. The Hind and the Panther is in plan a sort of combina- tion of Absalom and Achitophel, and of Religio Laid, but its three parts ai'c by no means homogeneous. The first part, whicb is perhaps, on the whole, the best, contains the well-known apportionment of the characters of different beasts to the different churches and sects ; the second con- tains the major part of the controversy between the Hind and the Panther ; the third, which is as long as th^ other IV.] SATIRICAL AND DIDACTIC POEMS. 97 two put together, continues this controversy, but before very long diverges into allegorical and personal satire. The story of the Swallows, which the Panther tells, is one of the liveliest of all Dryden's pieces of narration, and it is not easy to give the palm between it and the Hind's retort, the famous fable of the Doves, in which Burnet is caricatured with hardly less vigour and not much less truth than Buckingham and Shadwell in the satires proper. This told, the poem ends abruptly. The Hind and the Panther was certain to provoke con- troversy, especially from the circumstances, presently to be discussed, under which it was written. Dryden had two points especially vulnerable, the one being personal, the other literary. It was inevitable that his argument in Religio Laici should be contrasted with his argument in The Hind and the Panther. It was inevitable, on the other hand, that the singularities of construction in the latter poem should meet with animadversion. No de- fender of The Hind and the Panther, indeed, has ever at- tempted to defend it as a regular or classically proportion- ed piece of work. Its main theine is, as always with Dry- den, merely a canvas whereon to embroider all sorts of episodes, digressions, and ornaments. Yet his adversaries, in their blind animosity, went a great deal too far in the matter of condemnation, and showed themselves entirelv ignorant of the history and requirements of allegory in general, and the beast -fable in particular. Dryden, like many other great men of letters, had an admiration for the incomparable story of Reynard the fox. It is charac- teristic, both of his enemies and of the age, that this was made a serious argument against him. This is specially done in a celebrated little pamphlet which has perhaps had the honour of being more overpraised than anything else 5* 98 DKYDEN. [chap.it. of its kind in Englisli literature. If any one wishes to appraise the value of the story that Dryden was serious- ly vexed by The Hind and the Panther transversed to the Story of the City and Country Mouse, he cannot do better than read that production. It is difficult to say what was or was not unworthy of Montague, whose published poems certainly do not authorize us to say that he wrote below hiinseif on this occasion, but it assuredly is in the high- est degree unworthy of Prior. Some tolerable parody of Dryden's own work, a good deal of heav}^ joking closely modelled on the Rehearsal, and assigning to Mr. Bayes plenty of "i'gads" and the like catchwords, make up the staple of this piece, in which Mr. Christie has discovered "true wit," and the Quarterly Reviewer already cited, " exquisite satire." Among the severest of Messrs. Mon- tague and Prior's strictures is a sarcastic reference to Rey- nard the fox. What was good enough for Dryden, for Goethe, and for Mr. Carlyle was childish rubbish to these brisk young critics. The story alluded to says that Dry- den wept at the attack, and complained that two young fellows to whom he had been civil should thus have treated an old man. * Now Dryden certainly did not consider him- self an old man at this time, and he had " seen many others," as an admirable Gallicism has it, in the matter of attacks. One more poem, and one only, remains to be noticed in this division. This was the luckless Britannia, Rediviva, written on the bii'th of the most ill-starred of all Princes of Wales, born in the purple. It is in couplets, and as no work of Dryden's written at this time could be worthless, it contains some vigorous verse, but on the whole it is by far the worst of his serious, poems ; and it was no mis- fortune for his fame that the Revolution left it out of print for the rest of the author's life. CHAPTER V. LIFF FROM 1680 TO 1688. That portion of Diyden's life which extends from the Popish Plot to the Revolution is of so much more impor- tance for the estimate of his personal character, ^s well as for that of his literary genius, than any other period of equal length, that it has seemed well to devote a separate chapter to the account and discussion of it. The question of Dryden's conversion, its motives and its sincerity, has of itself been more discussed than any other point in his life, and on the opinions to be formed of it must depend the opinion which, on the whole, we form of him as a man. According to one view his conduct during these years places him among the class which paradox delights to describe as the " greatest an-d meanest of mankind," the men who compensate for the admiral)le qualities ojLtheir heads by the despicable infirmities of their hearts. Ac- cording to another, his conduct, if not altogether wise, contains nothing discreditable to him, and some things which may be reasonably described as very much the con- trary. Twenty years of play-writing had, in all probabil- ity, somewhat disgusted Dryden with the stage, and his Rose-Alley misfortune had shown him that even a scrupu- lous abstinence from meddling in politics or in personal satire would not save him from awkward consequences. 100 DRYDEN". ' [chap. His lucrative contract with the players had, beyond all doubt, ceased, and his official salaries, as we shall see, were paid with the usual irregularity. At the same time, as has been already pointed out, his turn of thought probably led him to take more interest in practical politics and in relig- ious controversy than had been previously the case. The additional pension, which as we have seen he had received, made his nominal income sufficient, and instead of writing; plays invita Minerva he took to writing satires and argu- mentative pieces to please himself. Other crumbs of royal favour fell to his lot from time to time. The broad pieces received for the Medal are very probably apocryphal, but there is no doubt that his youngest son received, in Feb- ruary, 1683, a presentation to the Charterhouse from the king. This presentation it was which he was said to have received from Shaftesbury, as the price of the mitigating lines (" Yet fame deserved — easy of access ") inserted in the later edition of Absalom and Achitophel. He was also indefatigable in undertaking and performing minor literary work of various kinds, which will be noticed later. Nor, indeed, could he afford to be idle ; his pensions were often unpaid, and it is just after the great series of his satires closed that we get a glimpse of this fact. A letter is extant to Rochester — Hyde, not Wilmot — complaining of long arrears, and entreating some compensation in the shape of a place in the Customs, or the Excise, besides an instalment at least of the debt. It is this letter which contains the well-known phrase, "It is enough for one age to have neglected Mr. Cowley and starved Mr. Butler." As far as documentary evidence goes, the answer to the appeal was a Treasury warrant for 75/., the arrears being over 1000/., and an appointment to a collectorship of Customs in the port of London, with unknown emoluments. The v.j LIFE FROM 1680 TO 1688. 101 only definite sura mentioned is a nominal one of 61. a year as collector of duties on cloth. But it is not likely that cloth was the only subject of Dryden's labours, and in those days the system of fees and perquisites flourished. This Customs appointment was given in 1683. To the condition of Dryden's sentiments in the last years of Charles' reign Religio Laid must be taken as the surest, and, indeed, as the only clue. There is no proof that this poem was composed to serve any political pur- pose, and indeed it could not have served any, neither James nor Charles being likely to be propitiated by a de- fence, however moderate and rationalizing, of the Church of England. It is not dedicated to any patron, and seems to have been an altogether spontaneous expression of what was passing in the poet's mind. A careful study of the poem, instead of furnishing arguments against the sincer- ity of his subsequent conduct, furnishes, I think, on the contrary, arguments which are very strongly in its favour. It could have, as has just been said, no purpose of pleasing a lay patron, for there was none to be pleased by it. It is not at all likely to have commended itself to a clerical pa- tron, because of its rationalizing tone, its halting adop- tion of the Anglican Church as a kind of makeshift, and its heterodox yearnings after infallibility. These last, indeed, are among the most strongly-marked features of the piece, and point most clearly in the direction which the poet afterwards took. " Such an omniscient church we wish indeed, 'Twere worth both Testaments, cast in the Creed," is an awkward phrase for a sound divine, or a dutifully acquiescing layman ; but it is exactly the phrase which might be expected from a man who was on the slope from 102 DRYDEN. [chap. placid caring for none of these things to a more or less fervent condition of membership of an infallible church. The tenor of the whole poem, as it seems to me, is the same. The author, in his character of high Tory and orthodox Englishman, endeavours to stop himself at the point which the Anglican Church marks with a thus far and no farther; but, in a phrase which has no exact Eng- lish equivalent, nous le voyons venir. . It is quite evident that if he continues to feel anything like a lively interest in the problems at stake, he will go farther still. He did go farther, and has been accordingly railed against for many generations. But I do not hesitate to put the ques- tion to the present generation in a very concrete form. Is Dryden's critic nowadays prepared to question the sin- cerity of Cardinal Newman ? If he is, I have no objection to his questioning the sincerity of Dryden. But what is sauce for the nineteenth-century goose is surely sauce for the seventeenth- century gander. The post -conversion writings of the Cardinal are not less superficially incon- sistent with the Tracts for the Times and the Oxford Sermons, than the Hind and the Panther is with Religio Laid. A hyperbole has been in some sort necessary in order to rebut the very unjust aspersions which two of the most popular historians of the last thirty years have thrown on Dryden. But I need hardly say, that though the glory of Oxford in the first half of the nineteenth century is a fair argumentative parallel to the glory of Cambridge in the second half of the seventeenth, the comparison is not in- tended to be forced. I believe Dryden to have been, in the transactions of the years 1685-7, thoroughly sincere as far as conscious sincerity went, but of a certain amount of unconscious insincerity I am by no means disposed to v.] LIFE FROM 1680 TO 1688. 103 acquit 'him. If I judge his character aright, no Englisli man of letters was ever more thoroughly susceptible to the spirit and influence of his time. Dryden was essen- tially a literary man, and was disposed rather to throw himself into the arms of any party than into those of one so hopelessly unliterary as the ultra-Liberal and ultra-Prot- estant party of the seventeenth century was. He was, moreover, a professed servant of the public, or as we should put it in these days, he had the journalist spirit. Fortu- nately — and it is for everybody who has to do with litera- ture'the most fortunate sign of the times — it is not now necessary for any one to do violence to a single opinion, even to a single crotchet of his own, in order to make his living by his pen. It was not so in Dryden's days, and it is fully believable that a sense that he was about to be on the winning side may have assisted his rapid determina- tion from Hobbism or Halifaxism to Romanist orthodoxy. I am the more disposed to this allowance because it seems to me that Dryden's principal decrier was in need of a similar charity. Lord Macaulay is at present a glory of the Whigs. If there had been an equal opening when he was a young man for distinction and profit as a Tory, for early retirement ^n literary pursuits with a competence, and for all the other things which he most desired, is it quite so certain that he would not have been of the other persuasion ? I have heard persons much more qualified than I am to decide on the characteristics of pure Lib- eralism energetically repudiate Macaulay's claim to be an apostle thereof. Yet I, for my part, have not the least idea of challenging his sincerity. It seems to me that he would have been at least wise if he had refrained, consid- ering the insuflScieney of his knov^'ledge, from challenging the sincerity of Dryden. 104 • DRYDEN. [ch^. How insufficient the knowledge was the labours of sub- sequent investigators have sufficiently shown. Mr, Bell proved that the pension supposed to be conferred by James as a reward for Dryden's apostasy was simply a re- newal of the pension granted by Charles years before ; that it preceded instead of following the conversion ; and that the sole reason of its having to be renewed at all was technical merely. As for the argument about Dryden's being previously indifferent to religion, and having written indecent plays, the arguer has himself demolished his argu- ment in a famous passage about James's own morals, and the conduct of the non-resistance doctors of the Anglican Church. Burnet's exaggerated denunciations of Dryden as a " monster of impurity of all sorts," (fee, are sufficiently traceable to Shadwell's shameless libels and to the Char- acter of the Buzzard. It is true that the allegations of Malone and Scott, to the effect that Lady Elizabeth had been already converted, and Charles Dryden likewise, rest on a very slender foundation ; but these are matters which have very little to do with the question in any case. The real problem can be very easily stated. Given a man to the general rectitude of whose private conduct all quali- fied witnesses testify, while it is only qu^pstioned by un- scrupulous libellers — who gained, as can be proved, not one penny by his conversion, and though he subsequently lost heavily by it, maintained it unswervingly — who can be shown, from the most unbiassed of his previous writ- ings, to have been in exactly the state of mind which was likely to result in such a proceeding, and of whose insin- cerity there is no proof of the smallest value — what rea- son is there for suspecting him ? The literary greatness of the man has nothing to do with the question. The fact is that he has been convicted, or rather sentenced, on v.] LIFE FROM 1680 TO 1688. 105 evidence which would not suflSce to convict Elkanah Settle or Samuel Pordage. In particular, we have a right to insist upon the absolute consistency of Dryden's subsequent conduct. Mr. Christie, who, admirably as for the most part he judges Dryden's literary work, was steeled against his personal character by the fact that Dryden attacked his idol, Shaftesbury, thinks that a recantation would have done him no good had he tried it. The opinion is, to say the least, hasty. Had Dryden proffered the oaths to William and Mary, as po(5l laureate and historiographer, it is very hard to see what power could have deprived him of his two hundred a year. The extra hundred of pension might have been forfeited, but the revenues of these places and of that in the Customs must have been safe, unless the new Govern- ment chose to incur what it was of all thino;s desirous to prevent, the charge of persecution and intolerance. When the Whigs were so desperately hard up for literary talent that Dorset, in presenting Shad well for the laureateship, had to pay him the very left-handed compliment of say- ing that, if he was not the best poet, he was at least the honestest — i. e., the most orthodoxly Whiggish — man, when hardly a single distinguished man of letters save Locke, who was nothing of a pamphleteer, was on their side, is it to be supposed for a moment that Dryden would not have been welcome ? The argument against him recalls a curious and honourable story which Johnson tells of Smith, the Bohemian author of Phcedra and Hippolytus. Addi- son, who, as all the world knows, was a friend of Smith's, and who was always ready to do his friends good turns, procured for Smith, from some Whig magnates, a commis- sion for a History of the Revolution. To the disgust of the mediator, Smith demurred. " What," he said, " am I 11 106 DRYDEN. [ciiaf. to do with the character of Lord Sunderland ?" Addison is said to have replied, in deep but illogical wrath, "When were you drunk last?" I feel extremely inclined to put Smith's query to the persons who maintain that it would have been impossible for Dryden to turn his coat at the Revolution. What are they going to do with the charac- ter of Lord Sunderland? In the age not merely of Sun- derland, but of Marlborough, of Godolphin, of Russell, of a hundred other treble-dyed traitors, it surely cannot be contended that the first living writer of English would have been rejected by those who had need of his services. Now we. know that, so far from making any overtures of submission, Dryden was stiff in his Jacobitism and in his faith. Nothing in his life is more celebrated than his per- sistent refusal to give way to Tonson's entreaties to dedi- cate the Virgil to William, and his whole post-Revolution works may be searched in vain for a single stroke intended to curry favour with the powers that were. If, as he puts it in a letter still extant, they would take him on his lit- erary merits, he would not refuse their offers ; but as to yielding an inch of his principles, he would not. And his works amply justify the brave words. It is surely hard measure to go out of one's way to upbraid with wanton or venal apostasy one to whose sincerity there is such complete testimony, both a 'priori and a posteriori^ as this. Except the Hind and the Panther, no work inspired by his new religious sentiments did Dryden much credit, or, it would appear, brought him much profit. James was not a particularly generous master, though it is probable that the laureate -historiographer -collector received his dues much more punctually under his orderly administration than in the days of his spendtiirift brother. The works upon which the court put Dryden were not very happily v.] LIFE FROM 1680 TO 1688. 101 chosen, nor in all cases very happily executed. His defence of the reasons which had converted Anne Hyde is about the worst of his prose works, and was handled (in the rough controversial fashion of the day) very damagingly by Stillingfleet. A translation of a work of Varillas' on ecclesiastical history was announced but never published ; and, considering the worthlessness of Varillas as a histori- an, it is just as well. The Life of St. Francis Xavier, dedi- cated to the queen, was better worth doing, and was well done. It is curious that in this dedication occurs one of those confident anticipations of the birth of the young Pretender, which after the event were used by zealous Protestants as arguments for the spuriousness of the child. These and minor works show that Dryden, as indeed might be expected, was in favour at court, and was made use of by the economical and pious rulers of England. But of any particular benefit reaped by him from his conversion there is no hint whatever ; in some respects, indeed, it did him harm. His two youngest sons, who had followed their father's change of faith, were elected about this time to scholarships at the universities, but were prevented, appar- ently by their religion, from going into residence. The mere loss of education and prospects for his children was, however, a trifle to what Dryden had to undergo at the Revolution. It is probable that this event was almost as much a surprise to him as to James himself. But how- ever severe the blow might be, it was steadily borne. The period at which the oaths had to be taken to the new Government came, and Dryden did not take them. This vacated at once his literary posts and his place in the Cus- toms, if, as there seems every reason to believe, he held it up to the time. His position was now exceedingly serious. He was nearly sixty years of age. His patrimony was 108 DRYDEK [chai^. but small, and such addition to it as he had received with Lady Elizabeth did not exceed a few scores of pounds an- nually. He had three sons grown to man's estate, and all the more difficult to provide for that their religion inca- pacitated them from almost every profitable pursuit in their native country. He himself had long, save in one trifling instance, broken his relation with the stage, the most lu- crative opening for literary work. He was a marked man, far more obnoxious personally to many of the ruling party than Milton had been thirty years before, when he thought it necessary to go into " abscondence." The very gains of the theatre were not what they had been, unless they were enhanced by assiduous visits to patrons and dedicatees, a degrading performance to which Dryden never would con- sent. Loss of fortune, of prospects, and of powerful friends was accompanied in Dryden's case by the most galling an- noyances to his self-love. His successor in the laureateship was none other than Shadwell, whom he had so bitterly satirized, whom he had justly enough declared able to do anything but write, and who was certain to exult over him with all the triumph of a coarse and vindictive nature. Dryden, however, came out of the trial admirably. He had, indeed, some staunch friends in both political parties — the Dorsets and the Leveson-Gowers being as true to him as the Rochesters and the Ormonds. Bat his main resource now, as all through his life, was his incomparable literary faculty, his splendid capacity for work, and his dogged op- position to the assaults of fortune. In the twelve years of life which remained to him he built up his fortune and maintained it anew, not merely by assiduous practice of those forms of literature in which he had already won renown, but by exercising yet again his marvellous talent for guessing the taste of the time, and striking out new v.] LIFE FROM 1680 TO 1688. 109 lines to please it. Just as no one from Annus Mirahilis and Aurengzebe could have divined Absalom and Achito- phel and the Hind and the Panther^ so no one, except on the principle that all things were now possible to Dry den, could have divined from Absalom and Achitophel and the Hind and the Panther either Palamon and Arcite or the translation of Virgil. Some minor works of Dryden's not mentioned in the last chapter, nor falling under the heads to be noticed in subsequent chapters, may here deserve notice. Some time or other in the reign of James the Second, Dryden wrote to Etherege a poetical epistle, which is its author's only attempt in the easy octosyllabic verse, which Butler had just used with such brilliant success, and which Prior was in a more polished if less vigorous form to use with suc- cess almost equally brilliant a few years later. "Gentle George" Etherege deserved the compliments which Dry- den paid him more than once, and it is only to be wished that the poet's communications with him, whether in verse or prose, had been more frequent. Had they been so, we might have been able to solve what is now one of the most curious problems of English literary history. Though Etherege was a man of fashion, of literary importance, and of a distinguished position in diplomacy — he was English minister at Ratisbon, where Dryden addresses him — only the circumstances and not the date of his death are known. It is said that in seeing his friends downstairs he over- balanced himself and was taken up dead ; but when this happened no one seems to know.^ A line in the epistle ^ In reply to a request of mine, Mr.W.Noel Sainsbury has brought to my notice letters of Etherege in the Record Office and in the Re- ports of the Historical MSS. Commission. In January, 1688-9, Ethe- rege wrote .to Lord Preston from Ratisbon. The first letter from his no DRYDEN. [chIp. seems to show that Etherege had been obliged to take to heavy drmking as a compliment to his German friends, and thus indirectly prophesies the circumstances of his death. But the author or Sir Fopling Flutter and She would if she could hardly deserved such a hugger-mugger end. To this time, too, belongs the first Ode on St. Cecilia's Day. It is not a great production, and cannot pretend comparison with the second and more famous piece com- posed on a later occasion. But it is curious how many lines and phrases it has contributed to the list of stock quotations — especially curious when it is remembered that the whole piece is only sixty-three lines long. "A heap of jarring atoms," "the diapason closing full in man," " the double, double, double beat of the thundering drum," and several other phrases, survive. The thing was set to music by an Italian composer named Draghi, and seems to have been popular. Besides these and other tasks. Dry- den began at this time a curious work or series of works, which was continued at intervals till his death, which was imitated afterwards by many others, and which in some sort was an ancestor of the modern literary masfazine or review. This was the Miscellany, the first volume of which appeared in the beginning of 1684, and the second in the beginning of 1685, though a considerable interval occur- red before a third volume was brought out. These vol- umes contained both old and new poems, mostly of the occasional kind, by Dryden himself, besides many of his successor is dated April, 1689. If, then, he died at Ratisbon, this brings the date between narrow limits. There is, however, a rival legend that he followed James into exile. Since this note was writ- ten more letters have, I hear, been found in the British Museum, and Mr. Gosse has the whole subject under treatment. v.] LIFE FROM 1680 TO 1688. Ill translations. But they were by no means limited to his own productions. Many other authors, old and new, were admitted, and to the second vohime Charles Dryden, his eldest son, was a contributor. These two years (1684 and 1685), it will be observed, were not merely those in which, owing to the non-payment of his appointments, his pe- cuniary straits must have been considerable, but they were also years in which there was a kind of lull between the rapid series of his great satirical works and the collection of verse and prose productions which owe their birth to his conversion. It is somewhat remarkable that Dry- den's abstinence from the stage during this time — which was broken only by the Duke df Guise and by the pro- duction of the rather unsuccessful opera, Albion and Alba- nius — seems to have been accompanied by a cessation also in his activity as a prologue writer. Both before and af- ter this period prologue writing was a regular source of income and employment to him. There is a famous story of Southern and Dryden which is often quoted, both for its intrinsic interest, and because the variety with which its circumstances are related is rather an instructive com- ment on the trustworthiness of such stories. Every one is supposed to know Pope's reference to the author of Oroonoko as — *' Tom, whom heaven sent down to raise The price of prologues and of plays." The story is that Southern in 1682 applied to Dryden for a prologue (which is extant), and was told that the tariff had gone up from two guineas to three — " Not out of any disrespect to you, young man, but the players have had my goods too cheap." The figures two and three are replaced in some versions by four and six, in others by 112 DRYDEN. [cflAP.v. five and ten. This story gives the date of 1682, and it is remarkable that until 1690, when Dryden once more came on the stage himself with a new play, his prologues and epilogues are very few. Possibly the increased price was prohibitive, but it is more likely that the political strug- gles of the time put all but political verse out of fashion. These compositions had always been famous, or rather in- famous, for their licence of language, and the political ex- cesses of some of Dryden's few utterances of the kind at this time are not creditable to his memory. Uallam's phrase of "virulent ribaldry " is absurd as applied to Ab- salom and Achitophel, or to the Medal. It is only too well in place as applied to the stuff put in the mouth of the actress who spoke the epilogue to the DuJce of Guise. The truth is that if they be taken as a whole these prol- ogues and epilogues could be better spared by lovers of Dryden from his works than any other section thereof; and it is particularly to be regretted that Mr. Christie, in his excellent Globe edition of the poems, has admitted them, while excluding the always melodious, and some- times exquisitely poetical songs from the plays, which cer- tainly do not exceed the prologues in licence of language, while their literarv merit is incomparably greater. ; CHAPTER VI. LATER DRAMAS AND PROSE WORKS. ^ It might have seemed, at first siglit, that the Revohition would be a fatal blow to Dryden. Being unwilling to take the oaths to the new Government, he lost at once the places and the pensions which, irregularly as they had been paid, had made up, since he ceased to write constantly for the stage, by far the greater part of his income. He was nearly sixty years old, his private fortune was, if not al- together insignificant, quite insufficient for his wants, and he had three sons to maintain and set out in the world. But he faced the ruin of his fortunes, and, what must have been bitterer to him, the promotion of his enemies into his own place, with the steady courage and practical spirit of resource which were among his most creditable character- istics. Not all his friends deserted him, and from Dor- set in particular he received great and apparently constant assistance. The story that this generous patron actually compensated Dryden by an annuity equal in value to his former appointments seems to rest on insufficient founda- tion. The story that when Dryden and Tom Brown dined with Dorset the one found a hundred-pound note and the other a fifty-pound note under his cover, does not do much credit to Dorset's powers of literary arithmetic, nor, even allowing for the simpler manners of the time, to his deli- 6 ll4 DRYDEN. [chap. ciicy of feeling. But Dryden's own words are explicit on the point of his having received assistance from this old friend, and it is said that in certain letfers preserved at Knole, and not yet given to the world, there are still more definite acknowledgments. Dryden, however, was never disposed to depend on patrons, even though, like Corneille, he did not think it necessary to refuse their gifts when they presented themselves. Theatrical gains had, it has been ^aid, decreased, unless dramatists took pains to in- crease them by dedication or by the growing practice of placing subscription copies among wealthy friends. Still, a hundred pounds could be depended upon from a good third night and from the bookseller's fee for the book, and a hundred pounds was a matter of considerable im- portance to Dryden just now. For full seven years he had all but abandoned dramatic composition. His con- tributions to Lee's Duke of Guise, which probably brought him no money, and certainly brought him a troublesome controversy, and the opera of Albion and Alhanius had been his only attempts on the stage since the Spcmish Friar. The JDuke of Guise, though Dryden's part in it is of no little merit, hardly needs notice here, and Albion and Albanius was a failure. It was rather a masque than an opera, and depended, though there is some good verse in it, rather on elaborate and spiteful gibbeting of the ene- mies of the court than on poetical or dramatic merits. But Dryden's dramatic reputation was by no means im- paired. The first play ordered to be performed by Queen Mary was the Spanish Friar, and this Protestant drama proved a most unfortunate one for her Majesty ; for the audience at that time were extraordinarily quick to seize any kind of political allusion, and, as it happcn(>d, there were in the Spanish Friar many allusions of an accidt^i- VI.] LATER DRAMAS A^D PROSE WORKS. 115 tal biit uninistalvable kind to ungrateful cliildren, banished monarchs, and so forth. The eyes of the whole audience were fixed on Mary, and she probably repented of her choice. But Dryden did not long depend on revivals of his old plays. The second year of the new regime saw the pro- duction of Don Sebastian^ a tragi-comedy, one scene of which, that between Sebastian and Dorax, is famous in literature, and which as a whole is often ranked above all Dryden's other dramas, though for my own par^ I prefer All for Love. The play, though at first received with a certain lukewarmness, which may have been due to vari- ous causes, soon became very popular. It was dedicated to Lord Leicester, Algernon Sidney's eldest brother, a ver\' old man, who was probably almost alone among liis con- temporaries (with the exception of Dryden himself) in be- ing an ardent admirer of Chaucer. In the preface to the Fables the poet tells us that he had postponed his transla- tion of the elder bard out of deference to Lord Leicester's strongly expressed opinion that the text should be left alone. In the same year was produced a play less origi- nal, but perhaps almost better, and certainly more popular. This was Amphitryon^ which some critics have treated most mistakenly as a mere translation of Moliere. The truth is, that the three plays of Plautus, MoUere, and Dry- den are remarkable examples of the power which great writers have of treading in each other's steps without ser- vile imitation. In a certain dry humour Dryden's play is inferior to Plautus, but, as compared with Moliere, it has two features which are decided improvements — the introduction of the character of Judge Gripus and the separation of the part of the Soubrette into two. As Don Sebastian had been dedicated to Lord Leicester, an old Cromwellian, so Amphitryon was dedicated to Sir William 116 DRYDEN. [chIp. Leveson Gower, a prominent Williamite. Neither dedica- tion contains the least truckling to the powers that were, but Dry den seems to have taken a pleasure in showing that men of both parties were sensible of his merit and of the hardship of his position. Besides these two plays an alteration of The Prophetess was produced in 1690, in which Dryden is said to have assisted Betterton. In 1691 appeared King Arthur, a masque-opera on the plan of Al- bion and Albanius. Unlike the latter, it has no political meaning; indeed, Dryden confesses to having made con- siderable alterations in it, in order to make it non-political. The former piece had been set by a Frenchman, Grabut, and the music had been little thought of. Purcell under- took the music for King Arthur with much better success. Allowing for a certain absurdity which always besets the musical drama, and which is particularly apparent in that of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. King Arthur is a very good piece ; the character of Emmeline is attractive, the supernatural part is managed with a skill which would have been almost proof against the wits of the Rehearsal, and many of the lyrics are excellent. Dry- den was less fortunate with his two remaining dramas. In writing the first, he showed himself, for so old a crafts- man and courtier, very unskilful in the choice of a sub- ject. Cleomenes, the banished King of Sparta, could not but awaken the susceptibilities of zealous revolution cen- sors. After some difficulties, in which Laurence Hyde once more did Dryden a good turn, the piece was licensed, but it was not very successful. It contains some fine pas- sages, but the most remarkable thing about it is that there is a considerable relapse into rhyme, which Dryden had abandoned for many years. It contains, also, on^:?of the last, not the least beautiful, and fortunately almost the \ VI.] LATER DRAMAS AND PROSE WORKS. IIY most quotable of the exquisite lyrics which, while they prove, perhaps, more fully than anything else, Dryden's al- most unrivalled command of versification, disprove at the same time his alleged incapacity to express true feeling. Here it is : *' No, no, poor suffering heart, no change endeavour, Choose to sustain the smart, rather than leave her ; My ravished eyes behold such charms about her, I can die with her, but not live without her ; One tender sigh of hers to see me languish, • Will more than pay the price of my past anguish : Beware, cruel fair, how you smile on me, 'Twas a kind look of yours that has undone me. I "Love has in store for me one happy minute, And she will end my pain who did begin it ; • Then no day void of bliss, of pleasure, leaving. Ages shall slide away without perceiving : Cupid shall guard the door, the more to please us, And keep out time and death, when they would seize us : Time and death shall depart, and say, in flying. Love has found out a way to live by dying." Last of all the long list came Love Triumphant, a tragi- comedy, in 1694, which failed completely; why, it is not very easy to say. It is probable that these four plays and the opera did not by any means requite Dry den for his trouble in' writing them. The average literary worth of them is, however, superior to that of his earlier dramas. The remarkable thing, indeed, about this portion of his work is not that it is not better, but that it is so good. He can scarcely be said to have had la.tete dramatique, and yet in the Conquest of Granada, in Marriage a la Mode, in Aurengzehe, in All for Love, in the Spanish Frtatj in Don Sebastian, and in Amphitryon he produced 118 DRYDEN. [ch^. plays wliicli are certainly worthy of no little admiration. For the rest, save in isolated scenes and characters, little can be said, and even those just specified have to be praised vi'ith not a little allowance. Nevertheless, great as are the drawbacks of these plays, their position in the history of English dramatic literature is still a high and remarkable one. It was Dry den who, if he for the moment headed the desertion of the purely English style of drama, authoritatively and finally ordered and initiated the return to a saner tradition. Even in his period of aberration he produced on his faulty plan such work as few other men have produced on the best plans yet elaborated. The reader who, ignorant of the English heroic play, goes to Dryden for information about it, may be surprised and shocked at its inferiority to the drama of the great masters. But he who goes to it know- ing the contemporary work of Davenant and Boyle, of Howard and Settle, will rather wonder at the unmatched literary faculty which from such data could evolve such a result. The one play in which he gave himself the reins remains, as far as it appears to me, the only play, with the exception of Venice Preserved, which was written so as to be thoroughly worth reading now for 150, 1 had almost said for 200 years. The Mourning Bride and the Fair Penitent are worthless by the side of it, and to them may be added at one sweep every tragedy written during the whole eighteenth century. Since the begin- ning of the nineteenth we have indeed improved the poet- ical standard of this most difficult, not to say hopeless, form of composition ; but at the same time we have in general lowered the dramatic standard. Half the best plays writ- ten since the year 1800 have been avowedly written with hardly a thought of being acted ; I should be sorry to say VI.] LATER DRAMAS AND PROSE WORKS. 119 how many of the otiier half have either failed to be acted at all, or, having been acted, have proved dead failures. Now Dryden did so far manage to conciliate the gifts of the play-wright and the poet, that he produced work which was good poetry and good acting material. It is idle to dispute the deserts of his success, the fact remains. Most, however, of his numerous hostile critics would confess and avoid the tragedies, and would concentrate their attention on the comedies. It is impossible to help, in part, imitating and transferring their tactics. No apol- ogy "f or the offensive characteristics of these productions is possible, and, if it were possible, I for one have no care to attempt it. The coarseness of Dryden's plays is unpar- donable. It does not come under any of the numerous categories of excuse which can be devised for other offend- ers in the same kind. It is deliberate, it is unnecessary, it is a positive defect in art. When the culprit, in his oth- erwise dignified and not unsuccessful confiteor to Collier, endeavours to shield himself by the example of the elder dramatists, the shiel(J is seen at once, and, w^hat is more, we know that he must have seen it himself to be a mere shield of paper. - But in truth the heaviest punishment that Dryden could possibly have suffered, the punishment which Diderot has indicated as inevitably imminent on this particular offence, has come upon him. The fouler parts of his work have simply ceased to be read, and his most thorough defenders can only read them for the pur- pose of appreciation and defence at the price of being queasy and qualmish. He has exposed his legs to the ar- rows of any criticaster who chooses to aim at him, and the criticasters have not failed to jump at the chance of so no- ble a quarry. Yet I, for my part, shall still maintain that the merits of Dryden's comedies are by no means incon- 120 DRYDEN. [citap. siderable ; indeed that, when Shakspeare, and Jonson, and Fletcher, and Etherege, and Wycherley, and Congreve, and Vanbrugh, and Sheridan have been put aside, he has few superiors. The unfailing thoroughness with which he did every description of literary work has accompanied him even here, where he worked, according to his own confes- sion, against the grain, and where he was less gifted by nature than scores of other facile workers who could be named. The one situation which he could manage has been already indicated, and it is surely not a thing to be wholly neglected that his handlings of this situation un- doubtedly preceded and probably suggested the crowning triumph of English comedy — the sublime apotheosis of the coquette in Millamant. To produce that triumph Dry- den himself was indeed unable. But from sheer literary skill (the dominant faculty in him) he produced in Dora- lice, and in Melantha, and in Florimel, something not wholly unlike it. So, too, in the central figure of the Spanish Friar he achieved in the same way, by sheer lit- erary faculty and by the skilful manipulation of his pred- ecessors, -something like an independent and an original creation. The one disqualification under which Dryden laboured, the disqualification to create a. character, would have been in any lesser man a hopeless bar even to the most moderate dramatic success. But the superhuman degree in which he possessed the other and strictly litera- ry gift of adoption and arrangement almost supplied the place of what v/as wanting, and almost made him the equal of the more facile makers. So close was his study, so untiring his experiments, so sure his command, by dint of practice, of language, and metre, and situation, that he could, like the magicians of Egypt, make serpents almost like, or quite like those of the true dramatic Moses. VI.] LATER DRAMAS AND PROSE WORKS. 121 Shakspeare's serpents have eaten his up in time, and the retribution is just, but the credit of the original feat is hardly the less for that. In short, all, or almost all. Dry- den's dramatic work is a tour de force^ but then it is such a tour deforce as the world has hardly elsewhere seen. He was " bade to toil on to make them sport," and he obeyed the bidding with perhaps less reluctance than he should have shown. But he managed, as genius always does manage, to turn the hack-work into a possession for ever here and there. Unluckily it was only here and there, an^ no more can be claimed for it by any rational critic. The subject of Dryden's prose work is intimately con- nected with that of his dramatic performances. Had it not been for the interest he felt in matters dramatic, he might never have ventured into anything longer than a preface ; and his prefaces would certainly have lacked the remarkable interest in the history of style and in the his- tory of criticism which they now possess. At the time when he first began to write, the accepted prose style of English was in much greater need of reform and reinforce- ment than the accepted poetical style ; or, to speak more properly, there was no accepted prose style at all. Great masters — Bacon, Hooker, Clarendon, Milton, Taylor, Hobbes, Bunyan, and some others — may be quoted from the first two-thirds of the seventeenth century; but their excellences, like the excellences of the writers of French prose somewhat earlier, were almost wholly individual, and provided in no way a model whereby the average writer might form himself for average purposes. Now, prose is above all things the instrument of the average purpose. Poetry is more or less intolerable if it be not intrinsical- ly and peculiarly good ; prose is the necessary vehicle of thought. Up to Dryden's time no such generally avml' I 6* 122 DRYDEN. [chap. able vehicle had been attempted or achieved by any one. Clarendon had shown how genius can make the best of the worst style, which from any general point of view his must probably be pronounced to be. In his hands it is alternately delightful or tolerable; in the hands of any- body else it would be simply frightful. His parentheses, his asides, his endless involutions of phrase and thought, save themselves as if by miracle, and certainly could not be trusted so to save themselves in any less favoured hands. Bacon and Hooker, the former in an ornate, the latter in a simple style, reproduce classical constructions and forms in English. Taylor and Milton write poetry in prose. Quaint- ness and picturesque matter justify, and more than justify. Fuller and Browne. Bunyan puts the vernacular into print with a sublime assurance and success. Hobbes, casting off all ornament and all pretence of ornament, clothes his naked strength in the simplest garment of words competent to cover its nakedness. But nor^ of these had elaborated, or aimed at elaborating, a style suited for every-day use — for the essayist and the pamphleteer, the preacher and the lay orator, the historian and the critic. This was what Dry- den did with little assistance from any forerunner, if it were not Tillotson, to whom, as we know from Congreve, he ac- knowledo-ed his indebtedness. But Tillotson was not a much older man than Dryden himself, and at least when the latter began to write prose, his work was neither bulky nor particularly famous. Nor in reading Tillotson, though it is clear that he and Dryden were in some sort working on the same lines, is it possible to trace much indebtedness on the part of the poet. The sometime archbishop's ser- mons are excellent in their combination of simplicity with a certain grace, but they are much less remarkable than Dryden's own work for the union of the two. The great Ti.J LATER DRAMAS AND PROSE WORKS. 123 fault of the elders had been, first, the inordinate length of their sentences ; secondly — and this was rather a cause of the first fault than an additional error — their indulgence in parenthetic quotations, borrowed ar-guments, and other strengtheners of the position of the man who has to rely on authority ; thirdly, the danger to which they were al- ways exposed, of slipping into clumsy classicisms on one side, or inelegant vernacular on the other. Dryden avoid- ed all these faults, though his avoidance was not a matter of a day or a year, nor was it, as far as can be made out, alfogether an avoidance of malice prepense. Accident fa- voured him in exactly the reverse way to that in which it had favoured the reformer of French prose half a century or so before. Balzac had nothing to say, and therefore was extremely careful and exquisite in his manner of saying it. Dryden had a great deal to say, and said it in the plaip, straightforward fashion which was of all things most likely to be useful for the formation of a workman-like prose style in English. The influences of the post-Restoration period which, by their working, produced the splendid variety and efliiciency of prose in the eighteenth century — the century, 'par excel- lence^ of prose in English — were naturally numerous ; but there were four which had an influence far surpassing that of the rest. These four were the influences of the pul- pit, of political discussion, of miscellaneous writing — -partly fictitious, partly discursive — and lastly, of literary criticism. In this last Dryden himself was the grgat authority of the period, and for many years it was in this form tl^at he at once exercised himself and educated his age in the matter of prose writing. Accident and the circumstances of the time helped to give him a considerable audience, and an influence of great width, the critical spirit being extensive- 124 DRYDEN. [ckap. \y diffused at the time. This critical spirit was to a great extent a reflection of that which, beginning with Malherbe, and continuing with the institution and regulation of the Academy, had for some time been remarkable in France. Not long after the Restoration one of the subtlest and most accomplished of all French critics took up his resi- dence in England, and gave further impulse to the fashion which Charles himself and many other cavaliers had al- ready picked up. Saint Evremond lived in England for some forty years, and during the greater part of that time was an oracle of the younger men of wit and pleasure about London. Now Saint Evremond was a remarkable instance of that rare animal, the born critic ; even nowa- days his critical dicta are worthy of all attention. He had a kind of critical intuition, which is to be paralleled only by the historical and scientific intuition which some of the greatest historians and men of science have had. With national and characteristic indolence he never gave Himself the trouble to learn English properly, and it is doubtful whether he could have read a single English play. Yet his critical remarks on some English poets, not borrowed from his friends, but constructed from their remarks, as a clever counsel would construct a pleading out of the infor- mation furnished him, are extraordinarily acute and accu- rate. The relish for literary discussion which Saint Evre- mond shows was no peculiarity of his, though he had it in super-eminent measure. It was fashionable in France, and he helped to make it fashionable in England. I have seen this style of criticism dismissed contempt- uously as "trifling;" but this is only an instance of the strange power of reaction. Because for many years the p^an of criticising by rule and line was almost exclusively pursued, and, as happens in the case of almost all exclusive vl] later dramas and prose works. 125 pursuits, was followed too far, it seems to some people now^adays, that criticism ought to be confined to the ex^ pression, in more or less elegant language, of the feelings of admiration or dislike which the subject criticised may excite in the critic's mind. The critic ought to give this impression, but he ought not to leave the other task unat- tempted, and the result of leaving it unatterapted is to be found in the loose and haphazard judgments which now too often compose what is called criticism. The criticism of the Gallic School, which Dryden and Saint Evremond helped so much to naturalize in England, was at least not afraid of giving a reason for the faith that was,in it. The critics strove to examine the abstract value of this or that literary form, the propriety of this or that mode of expres- sion, the limits to be imposed on the choice and disposition of this or that subject. No doubt this often resulted in looking merely at the stopwatch, as Sterne's famous phrase has it. But it often resulted in something better, and it at least produced something like reasonable uniformity of judgment. Dryden's criticisms took, as a rule, the form of prefaces to his plays, and the reading of the play ensured, to some considerable extent, the reading of the preface. Probably the pattern may be found in Corneille's Examens. Nor must it be forgotten that the questions attacked iH these disquisitions were of real interest at the time to a large number of persons; to a very much larger number rela- tively, perhaps even to a much larger number absolutely, than would now be the case. The first instance of a con- siderable piece of prose written by Dryden was not, indeed, a preface, though it was of the nature of one. The Essay on Dramatic Poesy was written, according to its own show- ing, in the summer of 1665, and published two or three 126 DRYDEN. [chap. years later. It takes the form of a dialogue between in- terlocutors, who are sufficiently identified with Dorset, Sed- ley, Sir Robert Howard, and Dryden himself. The argu- ment turns on various questions of comparison between classical French and English dramas, and especially between English dramas of the old and of the newer type, the lat- ter of which Dryden defends. It is noticeable, however, that this very essay contained one of the best worded and best thought-out of the author's many panegyrics upon Shakspeare. Viewed simply from the point of view of style this performance exhibits Dryden as already a considerable master of prose, though, so far as we know, he had had no practice in it beyond a few Prefaces and Dedications, if we except the unacknowledged hackwork which he is some- times said to have performed for the bookseller Herring- man. There is still something of the older, lengthy sen- tence, and of the tendency to elongate it by joint on joint as fresh thoughts recur to the writer. But these elonga- tions rarely sacrifice clearness, and there is an almost total absence, on the one hand, of the cumbrous classical con- structions of the elders ; on the other, of the quaint collo- quialisms which generally make their appearance when this more ambitious style is discarded. The Eesay was quickly followed by a kind of reply from Sir Robert Howard, and Dryden made a somewhat sharp rejoinder to his brother- in-law in the defence of the Essay which he prefixed to his play of The Indian Emperor. He was evidently very an- gry with Sir Robert, who had, indeed, somewhat justified Shadwell's caricature of him as "Sir Positive At-All ;" and this anger is not without effects on the style of the de- fence. Its sentences are sharper, shorter, more briskly and flippantly moulded than those of the Essay. Indeed, about this time — the time of his greatest prosperity — Dryden VI.] LATER DRAMAS AND PROSE WORKS. 127 seems to have passed, somewhat late in life, througli a pe- riod of flippancy. He was for a few years decidedly pros- perous, and his familiarity with men of rank and position seems a little to have turned his head. It was at this time, and at this time onlj^, that he spoke disrespectfully of his great predecessors, and insinuated, in a manner which, I fear, must be called snobbish, that his own familiarity with such models of taste and deportment as Rochester put him in a very superior position for the drawing of character to such humble and home-keeping folks as the old drama- tists. These prefaces and dedications, however, even where their matter is scarcely satisfactory, show an ever-growing command of prose style, and very soon the resipiscence of Dryden's judgment, and the result of his recently renewed study of the older writers. The Preface to All for Love, though short, and more familiar in style than the earlier work, is of excellent quality ; and the same may be said of those to Troilus and Cressida and the Spanish Friar, the latter of which is especially characteristic, and contains some strikino; remarks on the old dramatists. The 2:reat poetical works of the period between 1680 and 1687 are also attended by prose introductions, and some of these are exceedingly well done. The Epistle to the Whigs, which forms the preface to the Medal, is a piece of po- litical writing such as there had been hitherto but very little in English, and it was admirably followed up by the Vindication of the Duke of Guise. On the other hand, the preface to Religio Laici^ though partly also polemical, is a model of what may be called the exposi- iory style. Dryden obtained no great credit for his con- troversy with Stillingfleet, his Life of St. Francis Xavier, or his History of the League, all of which were directly or indirectly controversig,l, and concerned with the political 128 DRYDEN. [chap. events of the tjrae. As his lengthiest prose works, how- ever, they can hardly be passed over without notice. The Revolution, in throwing Dryden back upon purely literary pursuits, did him no more harm in the way of prose than of poetical composition. Not a few of his Translations have prose prefaces of peculiar excellence pre- fixed. The sketch of Satire which forms the preface to the Juvenal is one of the best of its author's performances. The uEneid is introduced by an admirable dedication to Mulgrave ; but the essay on the Georgics, though it is not, indeed, Dryden's own, is almost more interesting in this connexion than if it were ; for this essay came from the pen of no less a person than Addison, then a young man of five-and-twenty, and it enables us to judge of the in- debtedness of the Queen Anne men to Dryden, in prose as well as in poetry. It would be a keen critic who, knowing Addison only from the Spectator, could detect his hand in this performance. But it does not require much keenness in any one who knows Dryden's prose and Addison's, to trace the link of connexion which this piece affords. It lies much nearer to the former than the latter, and it shows clearly how the writer must have studied those "prefaces of Dryden" which Swift chose to sneer at. As in poetry, however, so in prose, Dryden's best, or almost his best work, was his last. The dedication of the Fables to the Duke of Ormond is the last and the most splendid of his many pieces of polished flattery. The preface which follows it is the last and one of the best examples of his literary criticism. It has been justly observed of Dryden's prose style that it is, for the style of so distinguished a writer, singularly destitute of mannerism. If we father any particular piece upon him without knowing it to be, his, it is not, as in the VI.] LATER DRAMAS AND PROSE WORKS. 129 case of most writers, because of some obvious trick of ar- rangement or phraseology. The truth is, or at least the probability, that Dryden had no thought of inventing or practising a definite prose style, though he had more than once a very definite intention in his practice of matters poetical. Poetry was with him, as, indeed, it should be, an end in itself ; prose, as perhaps it should also be for the niost part, only a means to an end. He wanted, from time to time, to express his ideas on certain points that in- terested him ; to answer accusations which he thought un- jusf; to propitiate powerful patrons; sometimes, perhaps, merely to discharge commissions with which he had been intrusted. He found no good instrument ready to his hand for these purposes, and so, with that union of the practical and literary spirit which distinguished him so strongly, he set to work to make one. But he had no special predi- lection for the instrument, except in so far as it served its turn, and he had, therefore, no object in preserving any special peculiarities in it except for the same reason. His poetical and dramatic practice, and the studies which that practice implied, provided him with an ample vocabulary, a strong, terse method of expression, and a dislike to ar- chaism, vulgarity, or want of clearness. He therefore let his words arrange themselves pretty much as they would, and probably saw no object in such devices as the balanc- ing of one part of a sentence by another, which attraited so many of his* successors. The long sentence, with its involved clauses, was contrary to his habit of thought, and would have interfered with his chief objects — clearness and precision. Therefore he, in the main, discarded it ; yet if at any time a long and somewhat complicated sentence seemed to him to be appropriate, he did not hesitate to write one. Slipshod diction and cant vulgarities revolted 130 DRYDEN. [chap. his notions of correctness and elegance, and therefore he seldom uses them ; yet there ar5 not very .many writers in whom colloquialisms occasionally occur with happier effect. If a fault is to be found with his style, it probably lies in a certain abuse of figures and of quotation, for both of which his strong tincture of the characteristics of the first half of .the century may be responsible, while the former, at least, is natural to a poet. Yet, on the whole, his style, if compared either with Hooker and Clarendon, Bacon and Milton, on the one hand, or with Addison, and still more the later eighteenth century writers, on the other, is a dis- tinctly plain and homely style. It is not so vernacular as Bunyan or Defoe, and not quite so perfect in simplicity as Swift. Yet with the work of these three writers it stands at the head of the plainer English prose styles, possessing at the same time a capacity of magnificence to which the others cannot pretend. As there is no original narrative of any length from Dryden's hand in prose, it is difficult to say whether he could have discharged satisfactorily this part of the prose-writer's functions. The Life of Xavier is good, but not of the best. For almost any other func- tion, however, the style seems to be well adapted. Now this, it must be remembered, was the great want of the day in matter of prose style — a style, namely, that should be generally flexible and capable of adaptation, not merely to the purposes of the erudite and ambitious, but to any purpose for which it might be .required, and in which the vernacular and the literary elements should be , properly blended and adjusted. It is scarcely too much to say that if, as some critics have inclined to think, the influence of Dryden tended to narrow the sphere and cramp the efforts of English poetry, it tended equally to enlarge the sphere and develope the energies of English VI.] LATER DRAMAS AND PROSE WORKS. 131 prose. It has often been noticed that poets, when they have any faculty for prose writing, are among the best of prose writers, and of no one is this more true than it is of Dry den. Set prose passages of laboured excellence are not very common with Dryden. But the two following, the first being the famous character of Shakspeare from the Essay on Dramatic Poesy, the second an extract from the preface to the Fables, will give some idea of his style at periods separated by more than thirty years. The one was his first work of finished prose, the other his last : " As Neander was beginning to examine ' The Silent Woman,' Eugenius, earnestly regarding him ; I beseech 5'ou, Neander, said he, gratify the company, and me in particular, so far, as before you speak of the play, to give us a character of the author ; and tell us frankly your opinion, whether you do not think all writers, both French and English, ought to give place to him. I fear, replied Neander, that in obeying your commands I shall draw some envy on myself. Besides, in performing them, it will be first necessary to speak somewhat of Shakspeare and Eletcher, his rivals in poesy ; and one of them, in my opinion, at least his equal, perhaps his superior. To begin then with Shakspeare. He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps an- cient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not la- boriously, but luckily ; when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learn- ing, give him the greater commendation : he was naturally learned ; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature ; he looked in- wards, and found her there. I cannot say he is everywhere alike ; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid — his comick wit degen- erating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him ; no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets, * ' Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.' 132 DRYDEN. q [chap. The consideration of this made Mr. Hales ol jJton say, that there vas no subject of which any poet ever writ but he would produce it mucu better done in Shakspeare ; and however others are now generally preferred before him, yet the age wherein he lived, which had con- temporaries with him, Fletcher and Jonson, never equalled them to him in their esteem ; and in the last king's court, when Ben's repu- tation was at highest, Sir John Suckling, and with him the greater part of the courtiers, set our Shakspeare far above him." " As for the religion of our poet,^ he seems to have some little bias towards the opinions of WicklifPe, after John of Gaunt, his patron ; somewhat of which appears in the ' Tale of Pierce Plowman ;' yet I cannot blame him for inveighing so sharply against the vices of the clergy in his age : their pride, their ambition, their pomp, their ava- rice, their worldly interest, deserved the lashes which he gave them, both in that and in most of his Canterbury Tales. Neither has his contemporary, Boccace, spared them. Yet both those poets lived in much esteem with good and holy men in orders ; for the scandal which is given by particular priests reflects not on the sacred func- tion. Chaucer's Monk, his Canon, and his Friar took not from the character of his Good Parson. A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests. We are only to take care that we involve not the innocent with the guilty in the same condemnation. The good cannot be too much honoured, nor the bad too coarsely used ; for the corruption of the best becomes the worst. When a clergy- man is whipped, his gown is first taken off, by which the dignity of his order is secured. If he be wrongfully accused, he has his action of slander: and it is at the poet's peril if he transgress the law. But they will tell us that all kind of satire, though never so well de- served by particular priests, yet brings the whole order into con- tempt. Is then the peerage of England anything dishonoured when a peer suffers for his treason ? If he be libelled, or any way de- famed, he has his scandalum magnatum to punish the offender. They who use this kind of argument seem to be conscious to them- selves of somewhat which has deserved the poet's lash, and are less > Chaucer. vr.]'*^*''"-! LATER I 4MAS AND PROSE WORKS. 133 oh{J6rn^' for Weht' pfttt)lick capacity than for their private ; at least, there iU pride at the bottom of their reasoning. If the faults of men in orders are only to be judged among themselves, they are all in some sort parties ; for, since they say the honour of their order is concerned in every member of it, how can we be sure that they will be impartial judges ? How far I may be allowed to speak my opin- ion in this case, I know not ; but I am sure a dispute of this nature caused mischief in abundance betwixt a King of England and an Archbishop of Canterbury , one standing up for the laws of his land, and the other for the honour (as he called it) of God's church; which ended in the murder of the Prelate, and in the whipping of his Majesty from post to pillar for his penance. The learned and in- genious Dr. Drake has saved me the labour of enquiring into the esteem and reverence which the priests have had of old ; and I would rather extend than diminish any part of it ; yet I must needs say that, when a priest provokes me without any occasion given him, I have no reason, unless it be the charity of a Christian, to forgive him : prior Icesit is justification sufficient in the civil law. If I an- swer him in his own language, self-defence, I am sure, must be allow- ed me ; and if I carry it farther, even to a sharp recrimination, some- what may be indulged to human frailty. Yet my resentment has not wrought so far, but that I have followed Chaucer in his character of a holy man, and have enlarged on that subject with some pleasure, reserving to myself the right, if I shall think fit hereafter, to describe another sort of priests, such as are more easily to be found than the Good Parson ; such as have given the last blow to Christianity in this age, by a practice so contrary to their doctrine. But this will keep cold till another time. In the mean while I take up Chaucer where I left him." These must suffice for examples of the matter as well as of the manner of the literary criticism which forms the chief and certainly the most valuable part of Dryden's prose works. The great value of that criticism consists in its extremely appreciative character, and in its constant connexion with the poet's own constructive work. There is much in it which might seem to expose Dryden to the charge of inconsistency. But the truth is, that his literary 134 DRYDEN. ,,| gg^AJ C^HAJ^Tt opinions were in a perpetual state of progress, ATjdj.tb^;^}^ fore of apparent flux. Sometimes he wrote with defective knowledge, sometimes, though not often, without think- ing the subject out, sometimes (and this very often) with a ;>:.ertain one-sidedness of view having reference rather to the bearing of the point on experiments he was then trying or about to try, than to any more abstract considerations. He never aimed at paradox for its own sake, but he never shrank from it ; and, on the whole, his criticisms, though perhaps nowadays they appeal rather to the expert and the student than to the general reader, are at least as in- teresting for their matter as for their form. The impor- tance of the study of that form in the cultivation of a ro- bust English style has never been denied. 9 .Uvjy:j 'jit^l' •. s;f>xm CHAPTER VII. % PERIOD OF TRANSLATION. 7t i^in most cases a decidedly difficult problem to settle the exact influence which any Vriter's life and circum- stances have upon his literary performances and career. Although there are probably few natures so absolutely self-sufficing and so imperial in their individuality that they take no imprint from the form and pressure of the time, the exact force which that pressure exercises is near- ly always very hard to calculate. In the case of Dry den, however, the difficulty is fortunately minimized. There was never, it may safely be said, so great a writer who was so thoroughly occasional in the character of his greatness. The one thing which to all appearance he could not do, was to originate a theme. His second best play, accord- ing to the general judgment, his best as I venture to think, is built, with an audacity to which only great genius or great folly could lead, on the lines of Shakspeare. His longest and most ambitious poem follows, with a surpris- ing, faithfulness, the lines of Chaucer. His most effective piece of tragic description is a versified paraphrase — the most magnificent paraphrase, perhaps, ever written — of the prose of Boccaccio. Even in his splendid satires he is rarely successful, unless he has what is called in modern literaryjiiang a very definite "peg" gi^^en hjm to hang his 136 DRYDEN. [chap. verse upon. Absalom, and Achitophel is litll^ more than a loosely connected string of cKaracters, each owing no doubt something, and what is more, a great deal, to the poet, but originally given to, and not invented by him. No fashion of poetry can be farther aloof from Dryden's than that which, as in the case of Shelley, spins great poems purely out of its own brain. His strong and pow- erful mind could grind the corn supplied to it into the finest flour, but the corn must always be supplied. The exquisite perfection of his smaller lyrics forbids us to set this down as in any sense a drawback. It was rather a strong inclination to the one office than an incapacity for the other. What is more to the purpose, this peculiarity is very closely connected with Dryden's fitness for the posi- tion which he held. The man who is to control the peace- able revolution of a literature, who is to shape a language to new uses, and help writers for a century after his death to vocabulary, rhythm, and style, in prose as well as in verse, is perhaps all the better off for not being too spon- taneous or original in his choice of subjects. But however this may be, there is no doubt that outward circumstances always had a great, and the greatest, influence upon the de- velopment of Dryden's genius. There was in some respects a quality about this genius for which it would be hard to find an appropriate name. To call such a mind and such a talent as Dryden's parasitic would be ridiculous. Yet in any lesser man the same characteristics would undoubtedly receive that appellation. It seems always to have been, if not necessary, at any rate satisfactory to him, to follow some lines which had been already laid down, to accept a depart- ure from some previous w^ork, to match himself closely with some existing performance. It appears almost as if, in his extraordinary bare for the manner of his poetical Tvork, he VII.] • PEKIOD OF TRANSLATION. 13Y felt it an advantage to be relieved of mucli trouble about the matter. The accusations of plagiarism which his fran- tic enemies constantly brought against him were, in any discreditable sense, as idle as accusations of plagiarism usually are; but they bad considerably more foundation in literal fact than is usual with such accusations. He had a habit of catching up phrases sometimes from the works of men to whom he was anything but compliment- ary, and inserting them, much improved, it is true, for the most part, in his own work. I have come across a curi- ous'instance of this, which I do not remember to have seen anywhere noticed. One of the most mortifying incidents in Dry den's literary career was the already mentioned com- position by his rival, though not exactly enemy, Crowne, of the Masque of Calisto. There seems to be little doubt, though the evidence is not entirely conclusive, that Crowne's share in this work was due to Rochester, who afterwards made himself obnoxious to Dryden's wrath in a still more unpardonable manner. Under these circum- stances we certainly should not expect to find Dryden borrowing from Calisto. Yet a whole line in Macjlecknoe, " The fair Augusta much to fears inclined," is taken, with the addition of the adjective and the adverb, from a song of Crowne's: "Augusta is to fears inclined." This tem- perament made the work of translation one peculiarly suitable to Dryden. He had, as early as 1684, included several translations in his first volume of Miscellanies, and he soon perceived that there was plenty of demand for more of the same ware. Except his great editor, it is doubtful whether any man of letters ever knew the pub- lic taste better than Dryden. The call for translations of the ancients was quite natural and intelligible. Direct cla^siqj^l study was considerably on the wane. So far, in- K 7 138 DRYDEN. [chap. deed, as one sex was concerned, it had practically gone out of fashion altogether, and women of the accomplish- ments of Lady Jane Grey or Queen Elizabeth were now . » thought monsters. Even as regards men, a much smaller'" proportion of the upper classes were able to read the classics in the original than had once been the case. Busi- ness, court life, employment in a standing army and navy, and many other distractions called men early away from their studies. Yet the interest felt, or supposed to be felt, in classical literature w^as at least as great as ever. The classics were still considered as literary models and pat- terns; and the famous controversy between the ancients and the moderns which arose about this time helped to inspire a desire for some acquaintance with the former in the easy, fashionable verse which Dryden had himself created. In 1693 he gave to the world the whole of Per- sius and much of Juvenal, the latter being completed by his sons and some friends. In the same year some more versions of Ovid and a little of Homer appeared; and in 1693 also his greatest work of translation, the Virgil, was begun. This was the only one of Dryden's works for which he received not wholly inadequate remuneration, and this remuneration was attained chiefly by the method of subscription. Besides these authors, his translations include extracts from Theocritus and Lucretius, a very few Odes of Horace, and a considerable portion of the Meta- morphoses of Ovid, which appeared last of all in the well- known volume of Fables. The merits and peculiarities of Dryden's translation are easily estimated. It has been ex- cellently remarked in the Preface of a recent prose trans- lation of the Odyssey, that there can be no final translation of Homer, because the taste and literary habits of each age demand different qualities in poetry. There is no need to VII.] PERIOD OF TRANSLATION. - 139 limit this remark to Homer, or indeed to poetry. The work of the translator is to bridge over the interval be- tw^ejft his author and his public, and therefore the con- struction and character of the bridge must necessarily dif- fer, according to the instruction and demands of the pub- lic. Dryden could not give exact accuracy, though he was by no means such a bad scholar as Pope. But his public did not want exact accuracy, and would not have been grateful for it. He did not — whether he was or was not able — give them classical flavour and local colour, but forlhese they would have been still less grateful. What they wanted, and what he could give them as no other man then living could, was the matter of the original, tol- erably unadulterated, and dressed up in the splendid dic- tion and nervous verse which he had himself taught them to love. The parallel between the characteristics of the translation and the simple device whereby Jacob Tonson strove to propitiate the ruling powers in the illustrations to the Virgil is indeed obvious enough. Those illustra- tions displayed "old Nassau's hook-nosed head on pious Eneas' shoulders." The text itself displayed the head of Dryden on the shoulders of Virgil. Even before the Miscellany of 1684, translations from Dryden's hands had been published. There appeared in 1680 a version of Ovid's H&roides, io which he gave a preface and a translation of two epistles, besides collabo- rating with Mulgrave in a third. The preface contains some good criticism of Ovid, and a defence of the man- ner of translation which with little change Dryden himself constantly employed. This he defines as being equally remote from verbal fidelity and from mere imitation. He also lays down a canon as to the necessary equipment of a translator, which, if it could be despotically enforced, 140 DRYDEN. [chap. would be a remarkable boon to reviewers. " No man is capable of translating poetry who, besides a genius to that art, is not a master both of his author's language and of his own. Nor must we understand the language only of the poet, but his particular turn of thoughts and expres- sions, which are the characters that distinguish, and as it were individuate him from all o^her writers." These first translations are interesting because they are the first, and for the sake of contrast with the later and more perfect work of the same kind. In some respects Ovid was an unfortunate author for Dryden to select, because his pe- culiarities tempted a relapse into the faults of the heroic- play style. But, on the other hand, Dry den's practice in the heroic play fitted him very well to translate Ovid. A few lines from the close of Canace to Macareus may be given as an instance — " And now appeared the messenger of death ; Sad were his looks, and scarce he drew his breath, To say, ' Your father sends you ' (with that word His trembling hands presented me a sword ;) ^Your father sends you this ; and lets you know That your own crimes the use of it will show.' Too well I know the sense those words impart ; His present shall be treasured in my heart. Are these the nuptial gifts a bride receives ? And this the fatal dower a father gives ? Thou God of marriage, shun thy own disgrace, And take thy torch from this detested place ! Instead of that, let furies light their brands, And fire my pile with their infernal hands ! With happier fortune may my sisters wed, Warned by the dire example of the dead. For thee, poor babe, what crime could they pretend? How could thy infant innocence offend ? VII.] PERIOD OF TRANSLATION. 141 A guilt there was ; but, oh, that guilt was mine ! Thou suffer'st for a sin that was not thine. Thy mother's grief and crime ! but just enjoyed, Shewn to my sight, and born to be destroyed ! Unhappy offspring of my teeming womb ! Dragged headlong from thy cradle to thy tomb ! Thy unoffending life I could not save, Nor weeping could I follow to thy grave ; Nor on thy tomb could offer my shorn hair. Nor shew the grief which tender mothers bear. Yet long thou shalt not from my arms be lost ; - For soon I will o'ertake thy infant ghost. But thou, my love, and now my love's despair, Perform his funerals with paternal care ; His scattered limbs with my dead body burn. And once more join us in the pious urn. If on my wounded breast thou droppest a tear. Think for whose sake my breast that wound aid bear ; And faithfully my last desires fulfil. As I perform my cruel father's will." The Miscellanies of 1684 and 1685 contained a con- siderable number of translations from many different au- thors, and those of 1693 and 1694 added yet more. Al- together, besides Ovid and Virgil, specimens of Horace, Homer, Theocritus, and Lucretius are in these translations, ■while the more ambitious and complete versions of Juve- nal and Virgil swell the total (in Scott's edition) to four volumes, containing perhaps some 30,000 lines. It could hardly be expected that in translating authors of such different characters, and requiring in a poetical translator so many different gifts, Dryden should be al- together and equally successful. The Juvenal and the Virgil deserve separate notice ; the others may be briefly reviewed- All of them are, according to the general con- ception of translation which Dryden had formed, decidedly 142 DRYDEN. [c&a?. loose, and by no means adhere to the original. Indeed, Dryden not unfreqnently inserts whole lines and passages of his own, a proceeding scarcely to be reconciled with the just-inentioned conception. On the whole, he is perhaps most successful with Ovid. The versions of Horace are few, and by no means excessively Horatian, but they are almost all good poems in Dryden's statelier rhythm. The version into a kind of Pindaric of the twenty-ninth ode of the third book is particularly good, and contains the well- known paraphrase of resigno quce dedit ("I puff the pros- titute away "), which was such a favourite with Thackeray that he puts it into the mouth, if I remember rightl}?^, of more than one of his characters. Indeed, the three last stanzas of this are well worth quotation — yiii. " Happy the man, and happy he alone, He, who can call to-day his own ; He who, secure within, can say, • To-morrow do thy worst, for I have lived to-day ; Be fair, or foul, or rain, or shine, The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine •. Not heaven itself upon the past has power, But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour. IX. " Fortune, that with malicious joy Does man, her slave, oppress. Proud of her office to destroy, Is seldom pleased to bless : Still various and unconstant still, But with an inclination to be ill, Promotes, degrades, delights in strife, And makes a lottery of life. I can enjoy her while she's kind ; But when she dances in the wind, ni.] PERIOD OF TRANSLATION. 143 And shakes the wings and will not stay, I puff the prostitute away : The little or the much she gave is quietly resigned ; Content with poverty, my soul I arm. And virtue, though in rags, will keep me warm. X. " What is't to me, Who never sail in her unfaithful sea, If storms arise and clouds grow black. If the mast split, and threaten wreck ? m Then let the greedy merchant fear For his ill-gotten gain ; And pray to gods that will not hear. While the debating winds and billows bear His wealth into the main. For me, secure from fortune's blows, Secure of what I cannot lose. In my small pinnace I can sail. Contemning all the blustering roar; And running with a merry gale. With friendly stars my safety seek. Within some little winding creek. And see the storm ashore." Least successful of all, perhaps, are the Theocritean translations. The idyllic spirit was not one of the many which would come at Dryden's call, and certain peculiari- ties of Theocritus, harmless enough in the original, are accentuated and magnified in the copy in a manner by no means pleasant. A thing more unfortunate still was the selection made from Lucretius. No one was ever better qualified to translate the greatest of Roman poets than Dryden ; and had he given us the whole, it would probably have been the best verse translation in the language. As it is, he has done few things better than the selections from the second and third books ; but that from the fourth 144 DRYDEN. [chap. has, justly or unjustly, tainted the whole in the eyes of most critics. It reproduces only too nakedly the original where it would be better left alone, and it fails almost entirely even to attempt the sombre fury of sentiment, the inexpressible agony of regret, which transfuse and redeem that original itself. The first book of Homer and part of the sixth were avowedly done as an experiment, and it is difficult to be very sorry that the experiment was not pur- sued farther. But the versions of Ovid's Metamorphoses are very good. They, however, belong more properly to the next period, that of the Fables. Dryden's Juvenal is not the least remarkable, and has been in some ways'among the most fortunate of his works. It is still, if there be any such, the standard verse transla- tion of the great Roman satirist, and this although much of it is not Dryden's. His two elder sons assisted him in the work, as well as some friends. But the first, third, sixth, tenth, and sixteenth satires are his own, as well as the whole of the Persius. The book was published in 1693, addressed to Dorset, with a prefatory essay or dis-- course on satire, which is of great interest and value. It 'is somewhat discursive, as is Dryden's wont, and the erudi- tion which it contains is, as is also his wont, anything but invariably, accurate. But it contains some precious autobiographic information, much capital criticism, and some of the best passages of its author's prose. He dis- tinguishes between his own idea of satire and Juvenal's, approaching the former to that of Horace, which, how- ever, is scarcely a tenable position. But, as has been suf- ficiently pointed out already, there are actually many and grave differences between the satire of Dryden and that of Juvenal. The former rarely or never even simulates indignation ; the latter constantly and invariably expresses m] PERIOD OF TRANSLATION. 145 it. Still, the poetical resemblances between the two men are sufficiently close to make the expectation of a valuable version pretty confident, nor is that expectation disap- pointed. For a wonder Dry den resists, for the most part, his unhappy tendency to exaggerate the coarseness of his subjects, and to choose their coarsest parts in preference to others. No version of Juvenal could be other than shocking to those accustomed only to modern standards of literary language ; but this version is perhaps less so than might be expected. The vigorous stamp of Dryden's verse is, moreover, admirably suited to represent the orig- inal, and the chief fault noticeable in it — a fault not un- common with Dryden in translating — is an occasional lapse into an unpoetical vernacular, with the object, doubt- less, of representing the text more vividly to English read- ers. The Persius is in this respect better than the Juvenal, though the peculiar dryness of flavour of the singular original is scarcely retained. It is not known exactly when Dryden first conceived the idea of working up the scattered fragments of Vir- gilian translation which he had as yet attempted into a whole. The task, however, was regularly begun either at the end of 1693 or the beginning of 1694, and it occupied the best part of three years. A good deal of interest was generally felt in the proceeding, and many friends helped the poet with books or literary assistance of one kind or another. A great deal of it, too, was written during visits to hospitable acquaintances in the country. Much of it was doubtless done in Northamptonshire and Hun- tingdonshire, at the houses of Mrs. Creed and of Driden of Chesterton. There is, indeed, a universally repeated tra- dition that the first lines were written with a diamond on a window in this latter mansion. The house was pulled 1* 146 DRYBEK. [