4940 (#102) ###########################################
4940
JOHN DRYDEN
O gracious God!
4940
JOHN DRYDEN
O gracious God!
Warner - World's Best Literature - v06 to v10 - Cal to Fro
It operates by heavy downright blows which
crush by the mere weight and power of the stroke. There was in
truth in those days a certain brutality not only permitted but ex-
pected in the way men spoke of each other, and Dryden conformed
in this as in other respects to the manners and methods of his age.
But of its kind the attack is perfect. The blows of a bludgeon which
make of the victim a shapeless mass kill as effectively as the steel
or poison which leaves every feature undisturbed, and to the common
apprehension it serves to render the killing more manifest.
rate, so long as a person has been done to death, it makes compara-
tively little difference how the death was brought about; and the
object in this instance of Dryden's attack, though a man of no mean
abilities, has never recovered from the demolition which his reputa-
tion then underwent.
In 1685 Charles II. died, and his brother James ascended the throne.
In the following year Dryden went over to the Roman Catholic
Church. No act of his life has met with severer censure. Nor can
At any
(
## p. 4928 (#90) ############################################
4928
JOHN DRYDEN
there be any doubt that the time he took to change his religion
afforded ground for distrusting the sincerity of his motives. A king
was on the throne who was straining every nerve to bring the Church
of England once more under the sway of the Church of Rome. Ob-
viously the adoption of the latter faith would recommend the poet to
the favor of the bigoted monarch, and tend to advance his personal
interests. There is no wonder, therefore, that he should at the time
have been accused of being actuated by the unworthiest of reasons,
and that the charge should continue to be repeated to our day. Yet
a close study of Dryden's life and writings indicates that the step he
took was
a natural if not an inevitable outcome of the processes
through which his opinions had been passing. He had been early
trained in the strict tenets of the Puritan party. From these he had
been carried over to the loose beliefs and looser life that followed
everywhere hard upon the Restoration. By the sentiments then pre-
vailing he was profoundly affected. Nothing in the writings of the
first half of his literary life is more marked — not even his flings at
matrimony – than the scoffing way in which he usually spoke of the
clergy. His tone towards them is almost always contemptuous, where
it is not positively vituperative. His famous political satire began
with this line-
In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin;” -
and a little later in the course of the same poem he observed that -
(Fraud was used, the sacrificer's trade,
the sacrificer” here denoting the priest. This feeling toward the
clergy never in truth deserted him entirely. But no one who reads
carefully his Religio Laici, a poem published in 1982, can fail to
perceive that even then he had not only drifted far away from the
faith of his childhood, but had begun to be tormented and perplexed
by the insoluble problems connected with the life and destiny of
man, and with his relations to his Creator. The subject was not
likely to weigh less heavily upon him in the years that followed.
To Dryden, as to many before and since, it may have seemed the
easiest method of deliverance from the difficulties in which he found
himself involved, to cast the burden of doubts which disquieted the
mind and depressed the heart, upon a Church that undertakes to
assume the whole responsibility for the man's future on condition of
his yielding to it an unquestioning faith in the present.
An immediate result of his conversion was the production in 1687
of one of his most deservedly famous poems, (The Hind and the
Panther. He began it with the idea of assisting in bringing about
the reconciliation between the Panther, typifying the Church of Eng-
land, and the Hind, typifying the Church of Rome. It is apparent
## p. 4929 (#91) ############################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4929
that before he finished it he saw that the project was hopeless. It is
a poem of over twenty-five hundred es, of which the opening up to
line 150 is printed in this volume. Part of the passage here cited
contains, without professing it as an object, and probably without
intending it, the best defense that could be made for his change of
religion. The production in its entirety is remarkable for the skill
which its author displayed in carrying on an argument in verse. In
this he certainly had no superior among poets, perhaps no equal.
The work naturally created a great sensation in those days of fierce
political and religious controversy. Both it and its writer were made
the object of constant attack. A criticism, in particular, appeared
upon it in the shape of a dialogue in prose with snatches of verse
interspersed. It is usually known by the title of “The Town Mouse
and the Country Mouse,' and was exalted at the time by unrea-
soning partisanship into a wonderful performance. Even to the pres-
ent day, this dreary specimen of polemics is described as a very
witty work by those who have never struggled to read it.
It was
the production of Charles Montagu, the future Earl of Halifax, and
of Matthew Prior. A story too is still constantly repeated that Dry-
den was much hurt by the attacks of these two young men, to whom
he had been kind, and wept over their ingratitude. If he shed any
tears at all upon the occasion, they must have been due to the morti-
fication he felt that any two persons who had been admitted to his
friendship should have been guilty of twaddle so desperately tedious.
The flight of James and the accession of William and Mary threw
Dryden at once out of the favor of the court, upon which to a large
extent he had long depended for support. As a Jacobite he could
not take the oath of allegiance; but there is hardly any doubt that
under any circumstances he would have been deprived of the offices
of place and profit he held. In the laureateship he was succeeded by
his old antagonist Shadwell; and within a few years he saw the
dignity of the position still further degraded by the appointment to
it of Nahum Tate, one of the worst of the long procession of poetas-
ters who have filled it. Dryden henceforth belonged to the party out
of power. His feelings about his changed relations are shown plainly
in the fine epistle with which he consoled Congreve for the failure
of his comedy of the Double Dealer. ' Yet displaced and unpen-
sioned, and sometimes the object of hostile attack, his literary su-
premacy was more absolute than ever. All young authors, whether
Whigs or Tories, sought his society and courted his favor; and his
seat at Will's coffee-house was the throne from which he swayed the
literary sceptre of England.
After the revolution of 1688 Dryden gave himself entirely up to
authorship. He first turned to the stage; and between 1690 and 1694
IX-309
## p. 4930 (#92) ############################################
4930
JOHN DRYDEN
he produced five plays. With the failure in the last-mentioned year
of his tragi-comedy called Love Triumphant, he abandoned writing
for the theatre. The period immediately following he devoted mainly
to his translation of Virgil, which was published in 1697. It was
highly successful; but far more reputation came to him from a large
folio volume that was brought out in November 1699, under the title
of Fables. Its contents consisted mainly of poetical narratives
founded upon certain stories of the Decameron,' and of the modern-
ization of some of the Canterbury Tales. ' In certain ways these have
been his most successful pieces, and have made his name familiar to
successive generations of readers. Of the tales from Boccaccio, that
of Cymon and Iphigenia' is on the whole the most pleasing. The
modernizations of Chaucer were long regarded as superior to the
original; and though superior knowledge of the original has effect-
ually banished that belief, there is on the other hand no justification
for the derogatory terms which are now sometimes applied to Dry-
den's versions.
The verse in this volume was preceded by a long critical essay in
prose. Many of its views, especially those about the language of
Chaucer, have been long discarded; but the criticism will always be
read with pleasure for the genial spirit and sound sense which per-
vade it, and the unstudied ease with which it is written. Cowley
and Dryden are in fact the founders of modern English prose; and
the influence of the latter has been much greater than that of the
former, inasmuch as he touched upon a far wider variety of topics,
and for that reason obtained a far larger circle of readers in the
century following his death. There was also the same steady im-
provement in Dryden's critical taste that there was in his poetical
expression. His admiration for Shakespeare constantly improved dur-
ing his whole life; and it is to be noticed that in what is generally
regarded as the best of his plays - All for Love,' brought out in the
winter of 1677–78 — he of his own accord abandoned rhyme for blank
verse.
The publication of the Fables) was Dryden's last appearance
before the public. In the following year he died, and was buried in
Westminster Abbey by the side of Chaucer and Cowley. After his
death his fame steadily increased instead of diminishing. For a long
period his superiority in his particular line was ungrudgingly con-
ceded by all, or if contested, was contested by Pope alone. His
poetry indeed is not of the highest kind, though usually infinitely
superior to that of his detractors. Still his excellences were those of
the intellect and not of the spirit. On the higher planes of thought
and feeling he rarely moves; to the highest he never aspires. The
nearest he ever approaches to the former is in his later work, where
## p. 4931 (#93) ############################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4931
religious emotion or religious zeal has ient to expression the aid of
its intensity. There is a striking example of this in the personal
references to his own experiences in the lines cited below from The
Hind and the Panther. ' Something too of the same spirit can be
found, expressed in lofty language, in the following passage from the
same poem, descriptive of the unity of the Church of Rome as con-
trasted with the numerous warring sects into which the Protestant
body is divided :-
« One in herself, not rent by schism, but sound,
Entire, one solid shining diamond,
Not sparkles shattered into sects like you:
One is the Church, and must be to be true,
One central principle of unity.
As undivided, so from errors free;
As one in faith, so one in sanctity.
Thus she, and none but she, the insulting rage
Of heretics opposed from age to age;
Still when the giant brood invades her throne,
She stoops from heaven and meets them half-way down,
And with paternal thunders vindicates her crown.
«Thus one, thus pure, behold her largely spread,
Like the fair ocean from her mother-bed;
From east to west triumphantly she rides,
All shores are watered by her wealthy tides.
The gospel sound diffused from Pole to Pole,
Where winds can carry and where waves can roll,
The selfsame doctrine of the sacred page
Conveyed to every clime, in every age. ”
But though Dryden's poetry is not of the highest class, it is of the
very highest kind in its class. Wherever the pure intellect comes into
play, there he is invariably excellent. There is never any weakness;
there is never any vagueness; there is never any deviation from the
true path into aimless digression. His words invariably go straight to
the mark, and not unfrequently with a directness and force that fully
merit the epithet of “burning” applied to them by the poet Gray.
His thoughts always rise naturally out of the matter in hand; and in
the treatment of the meanest subjects he is not only never mean, but
often falls without apparent effort into a felicity of phrase which
holds the attention and implants itself in the memory.
The benefit
of exercise, for instance, is not a topic that can be deemed highly
poeticai; but in his epistle on country life addressed to his cousin
John Driden, the moment he comes to speak of hunting and its salu-
tary results his expression at once leaves the commonplace, and em-
bodies the thought in these pointed lines:-
## p. 4932 (#94) ############################################
4932
JOHN DRYDEN
“So lived our sires, ere doctors learned to kill,
And multiply with theirs the weekly bill.
The first physicians by debauch were made;
Excess began, and sloth sustains the trade.
By chase our long-lived fathers earned their food;
Toil strung the nerves and purified the blood:
But we their sons, a pampered race of men,
Are dwindled down to threescore years and ten.
Better to hunt in fields for health unbought
Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.
The wise for cure on exercise depend;
God never made his work for man to mend. ”
In a similar way in Cymon and Iphigenia' the contempt which
Dryden, in common with the Tories of his time, felt for the English
militia force, found vent in the following vigorous passage, really
descriptive of them and their conduct though the scene is laid in
Rhodes:
«The country rings around with loud alarms,
And raw in fields the rude militia swarms;
Mouths without hands; maintained at vast expense,
In peace a charge, in war a weak defense:
Stout once a month they march, a blustering band,
And ever, but in times of need, at hand:
This was the morn when, issuing on the guard,
Drawn up in rank and file they stood prepared
Of seeming arms to make a short essay,
Then hasten to be drunk, the business of the day. ”
and power.
men
In a world where what is feeble in expression is so often supposed
to indicate peculiar delicacy; where what is vague is so often deemed
peculiarly poetical; and where what is involved and crabbed and
hard to comprehend is thought to denote peculiar profundity,- it is
a pleasure to turn to a writer with a rank settled by the consensus
of successive generations, who thought clearly and wrote forcibly,
who knew always what he had to say and then said it with directness
There are greater poets than he; but so long as
continue to delight in vividness of expression, in majesty of numbers,
in masculine strength and all-abounding vigor, so long will Dryden
continue to hold his present high place among English authors.
The writings of Dryden constitute of themselves a literature.
They treat of a vast variety of topics in many different departments
of intellectual activity. The completest edition of his works was first
published in 1808 under the editorship of Walter Scott. It fills twenty-
one volumes, the first of which however is devoted to a biography.
The notes to this edition are generally excellent; the text is very
## p. 4933 (#95) ############################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4933
indifferent. A revised edition of it has been recently published un-
der the editorship of George Saintsbury. But easily accessible is
a single-volume edition of the poems alone, edited by W. D. Chris-
tie, which furnishes a superior text, and is amply supplied with all
necessary annotations.
Thomas R Leunsbury.
FROM "THE HIND AND THE PANTHER)
A
MILK-WHITE Hind, immortal and unchanged,
Fed on the lawns and in the forest ranged;
Without unspotted, innocent within,
She feared no danger, for she knew no sin.
Yet had she oft been chased with horns and hounds,
And Scythian shafts, and many winged wounds
Aimed at her heart; was often forced to fly,
And doomed to death, though fated not to die.
Not so her young; for their unequal line
Was hero's make, half human, half divine.
Their earthly mold obnoxious was to fate,
The immortal part assumed immortal state.
Of these a slaughtered army lay in blood,
Extended o'er the Caledonian wood,
Their native walk; whose vocal blood arose
And cried for pardon on their perjured foes.
Their fate was fruitful, and the sanguine seed,
Endued with souls, increased the sacred breed.
So captive Israel multiplied in chains,
A numerous exile, and enjoyed her pains.
With grief and gladness mixed, their mother viewed
Her martyred offspring and their race renewed;
Their corps to perish, but their kind to last,
So much the deathless plant the dying fruit surpassed.
Panting and pensive now she ranged alone,
And wandered in the kingdoms once her own.
The common hunt, though from their rage restrained
By sovereign power, her company disdained,
Grinned as they passed, and with a glaring eye
Gave gloomy signs of secret enmity.
'Tis true she bounded by and tripped so light,
They had not time to take a steady sight;
## p. 4934 (#96) ############################################
4934
JOHN DRYDEN
For truth has such a face and such a mien
As to be loved needs only to be seen.
The bloody Bear, an independent beast,
Unlicked to form, in groans her hate expressed.
Among the timorous kind the quaking Hare
Professed neutrality, but would not swear.
Next her the buffoon Ape, as atheists use,
Mimicked all sects and had his own to chuse;
Still when the Lion looked, his knees he bent,
And paid at church a courtier's compliment.
The bristled ba ist Boar, impure as he,
But whitened with the foam of sanctity,
With fat pollutions filled the sacred place,
And mountains leveled in his furious race;
So first rebellion founded was in grace.
But since the mighty ravage which he made
In German forests had his guilt betrayed,
With broken tusks and with a borrowed name,
He shunned the vengeance and concealed the shame,
So lurked in sects unseen. With greater guile
False Reynard fed on consecrated spoil;
The graceless beast by Athanasius first
Was chased from Nice, then by Socinus nursed,
His impious race their blasphemy renewed,
And Nature's King through Nature's optics viewed;
Reversed they viewed him lessened to their eye,
Nor in an infant could a God descry.
New swarming sects to this obliquely tend,
Hence they began, and here they all will end.
What weight of ancient witness can prevail,
If private reason hold the public scale ?
But gracious God, how well dost thou provide
For erring judgments an unerring guide!
Thy throne is darkness in the abyss of light,
A blaze of glory that forbids the sight.
O teach me to believe thee thus concealed,
And search no farther than thy self revealed;
But her alone for my director take,
Whom thou hast promised never to forsake!
My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires;
My manhood, long misled by wandering fires,
Followed false lights; and when their glimpse was gone,
My pride struck out new sparkles of her own.
Such was I, such by nature still I am;
Be thine the glory and be mine the shame!
## p. 4935 (#97) ############################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4935
Good life be now my task; my doubts are done;
What more could fright my faith than Three in One ?
Can I believe eternal God could lie
Disguised in mortal mold and infancy,
That the great Maker of the world could die ?
And after that, trust my imperfect sense
Which calls in question his omnipotence ?
Can I my reason to my faith compel,
And shall my sight and touch and taste rebel?
Superior faculties are set aside;
Shall their subservient organs be my guide ?
Then let the moon usurp the rule of day,
And winking tapers show the sun his way;
For what my senses can themselves perceive
I need no revelation to believe.
Can they, who say the Host should be descried
By sense, define a body glorified,
Impassible, and penetrating parts ?
Let them declare by what mysterious arts
He shot that body through the opposing might
Of bolts and bars impervious to the light,
And stood before his train confessed in open sight.
For since thus wondrously he passed, 'tis plain
One single place two bodies did contain;
And sure the same omnipotence as well
Can make one body in more places dwell.
Let Reason then at her own quarry fly;
But how can finite grasp infinity ?
'Tis urged again, that faith did first commence
By miracles, which are appeals to sense,
And thence concluded, that our sense must be
The motive still of credibility.
For latter ages must on former wait,
And what began belief must propagate.
But winnow well this thought, and you shall find
'Tis light as chaff that flies before the wind.
Were all those wonders wrought by power Divine
As means or ends of some more deep design?
Most sure as means, whose end was this alone,
To prove the Godhead of the Eternal Son.
God thus asserted: Man is to believe
Beyond what Sense and Reason can conceive,
And for mysterious things of faith rely
On the proponent Heaven's authority.
## p. 4936 (#98) ############################################
4936
JOHN DRYDEN
If then our faith we for our guide admit,
Vain is the farther search of human wit;
As when the building gains a surer stay,
We take the unuseful scaffolding away.
Reason by sense no more can understand;
The game is played into another hand.
Why choose we then like bilanders to creep
Along the coast, and land in view to keep,
When safely we may launch into the deep?
In the same vessel which our Savior bore,
Himself the pilot, let us leave the shore,
And with a better guide a better world explore.
Could he his Godhead veil with fresh and blood
And not veil these again to be our food ?
His grace in both is equal in extent;
The first affords us life, the second nourishment.
And if he can, why all this frantic pain
To construe what his clearest words contain,
And make a riddle what he made so plain?
To take up half on trust and half to try,
Name it not faith, but bungling bigotry.
Both knave and fool the merchant we may call,
To pay great sums and to compound the small,
For who would break with Heaven, and would not break for all ?
Rest then, my soul, from endless anguish freed:
Nor sciences thy guide, nor sense thy creed.
Faith is the best insurer of thy bliss;
The bank above must fail before the venture miss.
TO MY DEAR FRIEND MR. CONGREVE
ON His COMEDY CALLED "THE DOUBLE DEALER)
W
ELL then, the promised hour is come at last;
The present age of wit obscures the past :
Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ:
Conquering with force of arms and dint of wit:
Theirs was the giant race before the flood;
And thus, when Charles returned, our empire stood.
Like Janus, he the stubborn soil manured,
With rules of husbandry the rankness cured;
Tamed us to manners, when the stage was rude,
And boisterous English wit with art endued.
## p. 4937 (#99) ############################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4937
Our age was cultivated thus at length,
But what we gained in skill we lost in strength.
Our builders were with want of genius curst;
The second temple was not like the first;
Till you, the best Vitruvius, come at length,
Our beauties equal, but excel our strength.
Firm Doric pillars found your solid base,
The fair Corinthian crowns the higher space;
Thus all below is strength, and all above is grace.
In easy dialogue is Fletcher's praise;
He moved the mind, but had not power to raise.
Great Jonson did by strength of judgment please,
Yet, doubling Fletcher's force, he wants his ease.
In differing talents both adorned their age,
One for the study, t'other for the stage.
But both to Congreve justly shall submit,
One matched in judgment, both o'ermatched in wit.
In him all beauties of this age we see:
Etherege his courtship, Southern's purity,
The satire, wit, and strength of manly Wycherley.
All this in blooming youth you have achieved;
Nor are your foiled contemporaries grieved.
So much the sweetness of your manners move,
We cannot envy you, because we love.
Fabius might joy in Scipio, when he saw
A beardless Consul made against the law,
And join his suffrage to the votes of Rome,
Though he with Hannibal was overcome.
Thus old Romano bowed to Raphael's fame,
And scholar to the youth he taught became.
O that your brows my laurel had sustained !
Well had I been deposed, if you had reigned:
The father had descended for the son,
For only you are lineal to the throne.
Thus, when the State one Edward did depose,
A greater Edward in his room arose:
But now, not I, but poetry, is curst;
For Tom the second reigns like Tom the first.
But let them not mistake my patron's part,
Nor call his charity their own desert.
Yet this I prophesy: Thou shalt be seen,
Though with some short parenthesis between,
High on the throne of wit, and seated there,
Not mine — that's little — but thy laurel wear.
## p. 4938 (#100) ###########################################
4938
JOHN DRYDEN
Thy first attempt an early promise made;
That early promise this has more than paid.
So bold, yet so judiciously you dare,
That your least praise is to be regular.
Time, place, and action may with pains be wrought,
But genius must be born, and never can be taught.
This is your portion, this your native store:
Heaven, that but once was prodigal before,
To Shakespeare gave as much; she could not give him more.
Maintain your post: that's all the fame you need;
For 'tis impossible you should proceed.
Already I am worn with cares and age,
And just abandoning the ungrateful stage:
Unprofitably kept at Heaven's expense,
I live a rent-charge on His providence:
But you, whom every Muse and grace adorn,
Whom I foresee to better fortune born,
Be kind to my remains; and oh, defend,
Against your judgment, your departed friend!
Let not the insulting foe my fame pursue,
But shade those laurels which descend to you:
And take for tribute what these lines express;
You merit more, nor could my love do less.
ODE
TO THE PIOUS MEMORY OF THE ACCOMPLISHED YOUNG LADY
MRS. ANNE KILLIGREW,
EXCELLENT IN THE TWO SISTER ARTS OF POESY AND PAINTING.
THU
HOU youngest virgin daughter of the skies,
Made in the last promotion of the blest;
Whose palms, new-plucked from Paradise,
In spreading branches more sublimely rise,
Rich with immortal green above the rest :
Whether, adopted to some neighboring star,
Thou roll'st above us in thy wandering race,
Or in procession fixed and regular
Moved with the heaven's majestic pace,
Or called to more superior bliss,
Thou tread'st with seraphims the vast abyss :
Whatever happy region be thy place,
Cease thy celestial song a little space;
## p. 4939 (#101) ###########################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4939
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 practice here,
When thy first fruits of poesy were given,
To make thyself a welcome inmate there;
While yet a young probationer,
And candidate of Heaven.
If by traduction came thy mind,
Our wonder is the less to find
A soul so charming from a stock so good;
Thy father was transfused into thy blood:
So wert thou born into the tuneful strain
(An early, rich, and inexhausted vein).
But if thy pre-existing soul
Was formed at first with myriads more,
It did through all the mighty poets roll
Who Greek or Latin laurels wore,
And was that Sappho last, which once it was before.
If so, then cease thy flight, О heaven-born mind!
Thou hast no dross to purge from thy rich ore:
Nor can thy soul a fairer mansion find
Than was the beauteous frame she left behind:
Return, to fill or mend the quire of thy celestial kind.
May we presume to say that at thy birth
New joy was sprung in heaven, as well as here on earth ?
For sure the milder planets did combine
On thy auspicious horoscope to shine,
And even the most malicious were in trine.
Thy brother angels at thy birth
Strung each his lyre, and tuned it high,
That all the people of the sky
Might know a poetess was born on earth;
And then, if ever, mortal ears
Had heard the music of the spheres.
And if no clustering swarm of bees
On thy sweet mouth distilled their golden dew,
'Twas that such vulgar miracles
Heaven had not leisure to renew :
For all the blest fraternity of love
Solemnized there thy birth, and kept thy holiday above.
## p.
4940 (#102) ###########################################
4940
JOHN DRYDEN
O gracious God! how far have we
Profaned thy heavenly gift of Poesy!
Made prostitute and profligate the Muse,
Debased to each obscene and impious use,
Whose harmony was first ordained above,
For tongues of angels and for hymns of love!
Oh wretched we! why were we hurried down
This lubric and adulterate age,
(Nay, added fat pollutions of our own,)
To increase the steaming ordures of the stage ?
What can we say to excuse our second fall ?
Let this thy Vestal, Heaven, atone for all:
Her Arethusian stream remains unsoiled,
Unmixed with foreign filth and undefiled;
Her wit was more than man, her innocence a child.
Art she had none, yet wanted none,
For Nature did that want supply:
So rich in treasures of her own,
She might our boasted stores defy:
Such noble vigor did her verse adorn
That it seemed borrowed, where 'twas only born.
Her morals too were in her bosom bred,
By great examples daily fed,
What in the best of books, her father's life, she read.
And to be read herself she need not fear;
Each test and every light her Muse will bear,
Though Epictetus with his lamp were there.
Even love (for love sometimes her Muse exprest)
Was but a lambent flame which played about her breast;
Light as the vapors of a morning dream,
So cold herself, whilst she such warmth exprest,
'Twas Cupid bathing in Diana's stream.
Born to the spacious empire of the Nine,
One would have thought she should have been content
To manage well that mighty government;
But what can young ambitious souls confine ?
To the next realm she stretched her sway,
For Painture near adjoining lay,
A plenteous province and alluring prey.
A Chamber of Dependences was framed,
As conquerors will never want pretense,
(When armed to justify the offense,)
And the whole fief in right of Poetry she claimed.
## p. 4941 (#103) ###########################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4941
The country open lay without defense;
For poets frequent inroads there had made,
And perfectly could represent
The shape, the face, with every lineament,
And all the large demains which the dumb Sister swayed;
All bowed beneath her government,
Received in triumph wheresoe'er she went.
Her pencil drew whate'er her soul designed,
And oft the happy draught surpassed the image in her mind;
The sylvan scenes of herds and flocks
And fruitful plains and barren rocks;
Of shallow brooks that flowed so clear,
The bottom did the top appear;
Of deeper too and ampler floods
Which, as in mirrors, showed the woods;
Of lofty trees, with sacred shades
And perspectives of pleasant glades,
Where nymphs of brightest form appear,
And shaggy satyrs standing near,
Which them at once admire and fear.
The ruins too of some majestic piece,
Boasting the power of ancient Rome or Greece,
Whose statues, friezes, columns, broken lie,
And, though defaced, the wonder of the eye;
What nature, art, bold fiction, e'er durst frame,
Her forming hand gave feature to the name.
So strange a concourse ne'er was seen before,
But when the peopled Ark the whole creation bore.
The scene then changed; with bold erected look
Our martial King the sight with reverence strook:
For, not content to express his outward part,
Her hand called out the image of his heart:
His warlike mind, his soul devoid of fear,
His high-designing thoughts were figured there,
As when by magic ghosts are made appear.
Our phonix Queen was portrayed too so bright
Beauty alone could beauty take so right:
Her dress, her shape, her matchless grace,
Were all observed, as well as heavenly face.
With such a peerless majesty she stands,
As in that day she took the crown from sacred hands;
Before a train of heroines was seen,
In beauty foremost, as in rank the Queen.
## p. 4942 (#104) ###########################################
4942
JOHN DRYDEN
Thus nothing to her genius was denied,
But like a ball of fire, the farther thrown,
Still with a greater blaze she shone,
And her bright soul broke out on every side.
What next she had designed, Heaven only knows:
To such immoderate growth her conquest rose
That Fate alone its progress could oppose.
Now all those charms, that blooming grace,
The well-proportioned shape and beauteous face,
Shall never more be seen by mortal eyes;
In earth the much-lamented virgin lies.
Not wit nor piety could Fate prevent;
Nor was the cruel Destiny content
To finish all the murder at a blow,
To sweep at once her life and beauty too;
But, like a hardened felon, took a pride
To work more mischievously slow,
And plundered first, and then destroyed.
O double sacrilege on things divine,
To rob the relic, and deface the shrine!
But thus Orinda died:
Heaven by the same disease did both translate;
As equal were their souls, so equal was their fate.
Meantime, her warlike brother on the seas
His waving streamers to the winds displays,
And vows for his return with vain devotion pays.
Ah, generous youth! that wish forbear,
The winds too soon will waft thee here!
Slack all thy sails, and fear to come;
Alas! thou knowest not, thou art wrecked at home.
No more shalt thou behold thy sister's face;
Thou hast already had her last embrace.
But look aloft, and if thou ken’st from far,
Among the Pleiads, a new-kindled star,
If any sparkles than the rest more bright,
'Tis she that shines in that propitious light.
When in mid-air the golden trump shall sound,
To raise the nations under ground;
When in the Valley of Jehoshaphat
The judging God shall close the book of Fate,
And there the last assizes keep
For those who wake and those who sleep;
## p. 4943 (#105) ###########################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4943
When rattling bones together fly
From the four corners of the sky;
When sinews o'er the skeletons are spread,
Those clothed with flesh, and life inspires the dead;
The sacred poets first shall hear the sound,
And foremost from the tomb shall bound,
For they are covered with the lightest ground;
And straight, with inborn vigor, on the wing,
Like mounting larks, to the new morning sing.
There thou, sweet saint, before the quire shalt go,
As harbinger of Heaven, the way to show,
The way which thou so well hast learned below.
A SONG
F"
AIR, sweet, and young, receive a prize
Reserved for your victorious eyes:
From crowds whom at your feet you see,
Oh pity and distinguish me!
As I from thousand beauties more
Distinguish you, and only you adore.
Your face for conquest was designed,
Your every motion charms my mind;
Angels, when you your silence break,
Forget their hymns to hear you speak;
But when at once they hear and view,
Are loth to mount, and long to stay with you.
No graces can your form improve,
But all are lost, unless you love;
While that sweet passion you disdain,
Your veil and beauty are in vain:
In pity then prevent my fate,
For after dying all reprieve's too late.
LINES PRINTED UNDER MILTON'S PORTRAIT
IN Tonson's Folio EDITION OF THE PARADISE LOST,' 1688
TRE
THREE poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.
The first in loftiness of thought surpassed,
The next in majesty, in both the last:
The force of Nature could no farther go;
To make a third she joined the former two.
## p. 4944 (#106) ###########################################
4944
JOHN DRYDEN
ALEXANDER'S FEAST; OR, THE POWER OF MUSIC
A SONG IN HONOR OF St. Cecilia's DAY: 1697
I
'T™AS
WAS at the royal feast for Persia won
By Philip's warlike son:
Aloft in awful state
The godlike hero sate
On his imperial throne;
His valiant peers were placed around;
Their brows with roses and with myrtles bound:
(So should desert in arms be crowned. )
The lovely Thais, by his side,
Sate like a blooming Eastern bride,
In flower of youth and beauty's pride.
Happy, happy, happy pair!
None but the brave,
None but the brave,
None but the brave deserves the fair.
CHORUS
Happy, happy, happy pair!
None but the brave,
None but the brave,
None but the brave deserves the fair.
II
Timotheus, placed on high
Amid the tuneful quire,
With flying fingers touched the lyre:
The trembling notes ascend the sky,
And heavenly joys inspire.
The song began from Jove,
Who left his blissful seats above,
(Such is the power of mighty love. )
A dragon's fiery form belied the god:
Sublime on radiant spires he rode,
When he to fair Olympia pressed:
And while he sought her snowy breast,
Then round her slender waist he curled,
And stamped an image of himself, a sovereign of the world.
## p. 4945 (#107) ###########################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4945
The listening crowd adınire the lofty sound
A present deity, they shout around;
A present deity, the vaulted roofs rebound:
With ravished ears
The monarch hears,
Assumes the god,
Affects to nod,
And seems to shake the spheres.
CHORUS
With ravished ears
The monarch hears,
Assumes the god,
Affects to nod,
And seems to shake the spheres.
III
The praise of Bacchus then the sweet musician sung,
Of Bacchus ever fair, and ever young.
The jolly god in triumph comes;
Sound the trumpets, beat the drums;
Flushed with a purple grace
He shows his honest face:
Now give the hautboys breath; he comes, he comes.
Bacchus, ever fair and young,
Drinking joys did first ordain;
Bacchus's blessings are a treasure,
Drinking is the soldier's pleasure;
Rich the treasure,
Sweet the pleasure,
Sweet is pleasure after pain.
CHORUS
Bacchus's blessings are a treasure,
Drinking is the soldier's pleasure;
Rich the treasure,
Sweet the pleasure,
Sweet is pleasure after pain.
IV
Soothed with the sound, the king grew vain;
Fought all his battles o'er again;
And thrice he routed all his foes, and thrice he slew the slain
IX-310
## p. 4946 (#108) ###########################################
4946
JOHN DRYDEN
The master saw the madness rise,
His glowing cheeks, his ardent eyes;
And while he heaven and earth defied,
Changed his hand, and checked his pride.
He chose a mournful Muse,
Soft pity to infuse;
He sung Darius great and good,
By too severe a fate,
Fallen, fallen, fallen, fallen,
Fallen from his high estate,
And weltering in his blood;
Deserted at his utmost need
By those his former bounty fed;
On the bare earth exposed he lies,
With not a friend to close his eyes.
With downcast looks the joyless victor sate,
Revolving in his altered soul
The various turn of chance below;
And now and then a sigh he stole,
And tears began to flow.
CHORUS
Revolving in his altered soul
The various turns of chance below;
And now and then a sigh he stole,
And tears began to flow.
The mighty master smiled to see
That love was in the next degree;
'Twas but a kindred sound to move,
For pity melts the mind to love.
Softly sweet, in Lydian measures,
Soon he soothed his soul to pleasures.
War, he sung, is toil and trouble;
Honor but an empty bubble,
Never ending, still beginning,
Fighting still, and still destroying:
If the world be worth thy winning,
Think, oh think it worth enjoying:
Lovely Thais sits beside thee;
Take the good the gods provide thee;
The many rend the skies with loud applause;
So Love was crowned, but Music won the cause.
## p. 4947 (#109) ###########################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4947
The prince, unable to conceal his pain,
Gazed on the fair
Who caused his care,
And sighed and looked, sighed and looked,
Sighed and looked, and sighed again;
At length, with love and wine at once oppressed,
The vanquished victor sunk upon her breast.
CHORUS
The prince, unable to conceal his pain,
Gazed on the fair
Who caused his care,
And sighed and looked, sighed and looked
Sighed and looked, and sighed again;
At length, with love and wine at once oppressed,
The vanquished victor sunk upon her breast.
VI
Now strike the golden lyre again;
A louder yet, and yet a louder strain.
Break his bands of sleep asunder,
And rouse him, like a rattling peal of thunder.
Hark, hark, the horrid sound
Has raised up his head;
As awaked from the dead,
And amazed, he stares around.
Revenge, revenge, Timotheus cries,
See the Furies arise;
See the snakes that they rear,
How they hiss in their hair,
And the sparkles that flash from their eyes!
Behold a ghastly band,
Each a torch in his hand!
Those are Grecian ghosts, that in battle were slain,
And unburied remain
Inglorious on the plain :
Give the vengeance due
To the valiant crew.
Behold how they toss their torches on high,
How they point to the Persian abodes,
And glittering temples of their hostile gods!
The princes applaud with a furious joy;
## p. 4948 (#110) ###########################################
4948
JOHN DRYDEN
And the king seized a flambeau with zeal to destroy;
Thais led the way,
To light him to his prey,
And like another Helen, fired another Troy.
CHORUS
And the king seized a flambeau with zeal to destroy:
Thais led the way,
To light him to his prey,
And like another Helen, fired another Troy.
VII
Thus long ago,
Ere heaving bellows learned to blow,
While organs yet were mute,
Timotheus, to his breathing Aute
And sounding lyre,
Could swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire.
At last divine Cecilia came,
Inventress of the vocal frame;
The sweet enthusiast, from her sacred store,
Enlarged the former narrow bounds,
And added length to solemn sounds,
With Nature's mother wit, and arts unknown before.
Let old Timotheus yield the prize,
Or both divide the crown:
He raised a mortal to the skies;
She drew an angel down.
GRAND CHORUS
At last divine Cecilia came,
Inventress of the vocal frame;
The sweet enthusiast, from her sacred store,
Enlarged the former narrow bounds,
And added length to solemn sounds,
With Nature's mother wit, and arts unknown before.
Let old Timotheus yield the prize,
Or both divide the crown:
He raised a mortal to the skies;
She drew an angel down.
## p. 4949 (#111) ###########################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4949
ACHITOPHEL *
From (Absalom and Achitophel)
T'
His plot, which failed for want of common-sense,
Had yet a deep and dangerous consequence:
For as when raging fevers boil the blood,
The standing lake soon floats into a flood,
And every hostile humor, which before
Slept quiet in its channels, bubbles o'er;
So several factions from this first ferment
Work up to foam, and threat the government.
Some by their friends, inore by themselves thought wise,
Opposed the power to which they could not rise.
Some had in courts been great, and thrown from thence,
Like fiends were hardened in impenitence.
Some, by their monarch's fatal mercy, grown
From pardoned rebels kinsmen to the throne,
Were raised in power and public office high;
Strong bands, if bands ungrateful men could tie.
Of these the false Achitophel was first;
A name to all succeeding ages curst:
For close designs and crooked councils fit;
Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit;
Restless, unfixed in principles and place;
In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace:
A fiery soul, which, working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy body to decay,
And o'er-informed the tenement of clay.
A daring pilot in extremity:
Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high
He sought the storms; but for a calm unfit,
Would steer too nigh the sands to boast his wit.
Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide;
Else why should he, with wealth and honor blest,
Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?
Punish a body which he could not please;
Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease ?
And all to leave what with his toil he won,
To that unfeathered two-legged thing, a son;
Got while his soul did huddled notions try,
And born a shapeless lump, like anarchy.
*Lord Shaftesbury.
## p. 4950 (#112) ###########################################
4950
JOHN DRYDEN
In friendship false, implacable in hate;
Resolved to ruin or to rule the State.
To compass this the triple bond he broke,
The pillars of the public safety shook,
And fitted Israel for a foreign yoke:
Then, seized with fear yet still affecting fame,
Usurped a patriot's all-atoning name.
So easy still it proves in factious times,
With public zeal to cancel private crimes.
How safe is treason, and how sacred ill,
Where none can sin against the people's will!
Where crowds can wink, and no offense be known,
Since in another's guilt they find their own!
Yet fame deserved no enemy can grudge;
The statesman we abhor, but praise the judge.
In Israel's courts ne'er sat an Abethdin
With more discerning eyes, or hands more clean,
Unbribed, unsought, the wretched to redress;
Swift of dispatch, and easy of access.
Oh! had he been content to serve the Crown,
With virtues only proper to the gown;
Or had the rankness of the soil been freed
From cockle that oppressed the noble seed;
David for him his tuneful harp had strung,
And heaven had wanted one immortal song.
But wild Ambition loves to slide, not stand,
And Fortune's ice prefers to Virtue's land.
Achitophel, grown weary to possess
A lawful fame, and lazy happiness,
Disdained the golden fruit to gather free,
And lent the crowd his arm to shake the tree.
Now, manifest of crimes contrived long since,
He stood at bold defiance with his prince;
Held up the buckler of the people's cause
Against the Crown, and skulked behind the laws.
The wished occasion of the plot he takes;
Some circumstances finds, but more he makes.
By buzzing emissaries fills the ears
Of listening crowds with jealousies and fears
Of arbitrary counsels brought to light,
And proves the king himself a Jebusite.
## p. 4951 (#113) ###########################################
4951
MAXIME DU CAMP
(1822-1894)
Shy have I always felt happy, filled with the spirit of content
and of infinite independence, whenever I have slept in the
tent or in the ruins of foreign lands? ). The love of ange
and adventure has been the spring of Du Camp's life, a life whose
events are blended so intimately with his literary achievement, that
to know the one is to know the other. This practical man of the
world has an imaginative, beauty-loving side to his nature, which
craves stimulus from tropical unfamiliar nature and exotic ways.
So, after the usual training of French
boys in lycée and college, _“in those hid-
eous houses where they wearied our child-
hood, as he says,--the just-emancipated
youth of twenty-two left his home in Paris
for an eighteen-months' trip in the far East.
The color and variety of the experience
whetted his love of travel, and very soon
after his return he began a serious study of
photography in view of future plans.
Then came the revolution of 1848, the
overthrow of Louis Philippe; and Du Camp
had an opportunity to prove
his
courage
and patriotism in the ranks of the National MAXIME DU CAMP
Guard. In his Souvenirs de l'Année 1848,
he tells the story with color and interest, and with the forceful logic
of an eye-witness.
His bravery and a serious wound won him the red ribbon of the
Legion of Honor, bestowed by General Cavaignac. This drew atten-
tion to him, and led the minister of public instruction to intrust him
a few months later with a mission of exploration to Egypt, Nubia,
Palestine, and Asia Minor; a result of which trip was his first literary
success. Utilizing his photographic knowledge, he collected a great
many negatives for future development. Upon his return he pub-
lished a volume of descriptive sketches, Le Nil, Egypte, et Nubie,'
generously illustrated with printed reproductions of these pictures.
This first combination of photography and typography was popular,
and was speedily imitated, initiative of many illustrated books.
)
## p. 4952 (#114) ###########################################
4952
MAXIME DU CAMP
Later, Du Camp's warlike and exploring instincts led him at his
own expense into Sicily with Garibaldi, where he collected matter
and photographs for (Les Deux Siciles,' another successful volume.
In 1851 he associated with others to found the Revue de Paris, for
which he wrote regularly until its suspension in 1858. He has also
written a great deal for the Revue des Deux Mondes, in which for
several years he continued a series of historical studies upon the gov-
ernment of Paris. The six volumes upon (Paris: its Organs, its
Functions, its Life, during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Cen-
tury,' form one of his chief achievements. His personal knowledge
on the subject, and his access to valuable unpublished documents,
give it authoritative value.
In 'Les Ancêtres de la Commune,' and 'Les Convulsions de Paris,'
he has accomplished much more in the same line. The latter, a brill-
iant circumstantial exposition of the Commune, a logical condemna-
tion of its folly and ignorance, brought him gratitude from the French
Academy, and aided his election to that body in 1880. For this exten-
sive work on contemporary politics, for his illustrated travels, and his
artistic and literary criticism, he is better known than for his two or
three novels and volumes of poetry.
Du Camp's may be characterized as a soldierly style, strong, direct,
and personal. He loves to retrace old scenes with the later visible
sequence of cause and effect. Always straightforward, sometimes
bluntly self-assertive, he is sometimes eloquent. Perhaps his great
charm is spontaneity.
A STREET SCENE DURING THE COMMUNE
From (The Convulsions of Paris)
T"
HERE were strange episodes during this terrible evening. At
half-past eight, M. Rouville, a Protestant minister, was at
home in a house he owns on the Rue de Lille. He heard
an alarm, the cry, “Everything is burning! Escape! ” Then he
went down, saw the street in flames, and the poor people weep-
ing as they escaped. Just as he was returning to rescue a few
valuables, some federates rushed into the court, crying, “Hurry!
They are setting the place on fire! » He took some money and
the manuscript of the sermons he had preached. Mechanically
he seized his hat and cane. Then, throwing a last look around
the apartment where he had long lived, invoking the memory
of the great Biblical destructions familiar to him in Holy Writ,
## p. 4953 (#115) ###########################################
MAXIME DU CAMP
4953
weak and trembling with emotion, he descended the staircase
from his home.
There was indescribable tumult in the street, dominated by
the cry of women; a shrill wordless involuntary cry of terror,
vibrating above the uproar like a desperate appeal to which no
supernatural power replied. Pastor Rouville stopped. The house
next his own was in fames. They were setting fire to the one
opposite. The houses between the Rue de Beaune and the Rue
du Bac, red from cellar to garret, were vomiting flame from all
the broken windows.
The pastor's family were not at Paris. He was alone with a
faithful maid, who did not leave him for a moment. This doubt.
less determined his resolution, and gave him courage to brave all
to save his house. If he had felt his wife and daughter near, he
would have thought only of their safety, and would have hastened
to get them away from the place, where, he said, “One could
die of horror. ”
Pastor Rouville is a small man, whose great activity keeps
him young and remarkably energetic. He belongs to the strong
race of Southern Protestants, which has resisted everything to
guard its faith. I should not be surprised if he has had some
nimble Cévennole, companion of Jean Cavalier, among his an-
cestors. Chaplain in the prisons of the Seine, accustomed to
sound doubtful spirits, to seek in vicious hearts some intact
fibres which could re-attach them to virtue; fervent in faith, elo-
quent, with a high voice which could rise above the tumult,
knowing by experience that there is no obscurity so profound
that light cannot be made to penetrate it,- he had remained on
duty at his post during the Commune; for the prisoners had
more need of spiritual aid, now that the regular administration no
longer watched over them. He had been indignant at the incar-
ceration of Catholic priests, and had signed the fine protest
demanding the liberty of the archbishop, which the ininisters
had carried to the Hôtel de Ville.
Alone in the presence of the great disaster which threatened
him, he commended his spirit to God, remembering that the
little stone of David had killed the giant Philistine, and he de-
cided to fight for his home. He encamped energetically before
the door, to forbid access; and using the weapons bestowed upon
him by Providence and study, he spoke. The federates stopped
before this man, whose simplicity rendered him heroic. One may
guess what he said to them:
## p. 4954 (#116) ###########################################
4954
MAXIME DU CAMP
(
Why strike the innocent and tender, as if they were execra-
ble? Why be enraged with a Protestant, a minister, whose
religion, founded on the dogma of free examination, is naturally
allied to republican ideas? The faith he teaches is that promul-
gated by Christ: Christ said to Peter, (Sheathe thy sword;'
he said to men, Love one another! ' No, the people of Paris,
this people whose sufferings have been shared, whose unfortunates
have been succored during the siege; this people, so good when
not led astray by the wicked; this people will not burn the
house of a poor minister, whose whole life has been passed in
the exercise of charity. ”
The pastor must have been eloquent and have spoken with
profound conviction, for the federates who were listening to him
began to weep, then seized and embraced him. Meantime the
tenants of the shops in his house had lowered the iron curtains,
which at least was an obstacle against the first throwing of pe-
troleum. This lasted an hour. The federates, evidently softened
and touched by the pastor's despair, remained near him and had
pity upon him. An old sergeant of the National Guard stayed
beside him, as if to bring him help in case of need, and to main-
tain a little order among his subordinates. Some hope revived
in M. Rouville's heart, and he was saying to himself that per-
haps his house would be spared, when some young men, wearing
the braided caps of officers, arrived as if to inspect the fires.
Seeing one house intact, emerging like a little island from an
ocean of flames, they exclaimed. The pastor sprang forward and
wanted to argue with them. It was trouble wasted. One of these
young scamps said to him, “You are an old reactionist: you bore
us with your talking. If you don't like it, we will pin you to
the wall. " Then, turning toward the federates and pointing
to the houses on the Rue de Lille, he cried, "All that belongs
to the people. The people have the right to burn everything. ”
This had perhaps decided the fate of the pastor's house, when
the sergeant of federates interfered, and addressing the officer
said to him, "I have received orders to stop the fire just here. ”
“Show me your order," answered the officer. The sergeant re-
plied, "It is a verbal order. ” Then there was a lively quarrel
between the two men. The sergeant was firm. The officer in-
sisted, and according to the custom of the moment, threatened to
have the rebel shot.
The situation was becoming grave, when an incident resolved
it. A mounted officer galloped up and ordered all the federates
## p. 4955 (#117) ###########################################
MAXIME DU CAMP
4955
to retreat, because they were about to be surrounded by the
troops from Versailles.
Nearly all the National Guards hurried away.
crush by the mere weight and power of the stroke. There was in
truth in those days a certain brutality not only permitted but ex-
pected in the way men spoke of each other, and Dryden conformed
in this as in other respects to the manners and methods of his age.
But of its kind the attack is perfect. The blows of a bludgeon which
make of the victim a shapeless mass kill as effectively as the steel
or poison which leaves every feature undisturbed, and to the common
apprehension it serves to render the killing more manifest.
rate, so long as a person has been done to death, it makes compara-
tively little difference how the death was brought about; and the
object in this instance of Dryden's attack, though a man of no mean
abilities, has never recovered from the demolition which his reputa-
tion then underwent.
In 1685 Charles II. died, and his brother James ascended the throne.
In the following year Dryden went over to the Roman Catholic
Church. No act of his life has met with severer censure. Nor can
At any
(
## p. 4928 (#90) ############################################
4928
JOHN DRYDEN
there be any doubt that the time he took to change his religion
afforded ground for distrusting the sincerity of his motives. A king
was on the throne who was straining every nerve to bring the Church
of England once more under the sway of the Church of Rome. Ob-
viously the adoption of the latter faith would recommend the poet to
the favor of the bigoted monarch, and tend to advance his personal
interests. There is no wonder, therefore, that he should at the time
have been accused of being actuated by the unworthiest of reasons,
and that the charge should continue to be repeated to our day. Yet
a close study of Dryden's life and writings indicates that the step he
took was
a natural if not an inevitable outcome of the processes
through which his opinions had been passing. He had been early
trained in the strict tenets of the Puritan party. From these he had
been carried over to the loose beliefs and looser life that followed
everywhere hard upon the Restoration. By the sentiments then pre-
vailing he was profoundly affected. Nothing in the writings of the
first half of his literary life is more marked — not even his flings at
matrimony – than the scoffing way in which he usually spoke of the
clergy. His tone towards them is almost always contemptuous, where
it is not positively vituperative. His famous political satire began
with this line-
In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin;” -
and a little later in the course of the same poem he observed that -
(Fraud was used, the sacrificer's trade,
the sacrificer” here denoting the priest. This feeling toward the
clergy never in truth deserted him entirely. But no one who reads
carefully his Religio Laici, a poem published in 1982, can fail to
perceive that even then he had not only drifted far away from the
faith of his childhood, but had begun to be tormented and perplexed
by the insoluble problems connected with the life and destiny of
man, and with his relations to his Creator. The subject was not
likely to weigh less heavily upon him in the years that followed.
To Dryden, as to many before and since, it may have seemed the
easiest method of deliverance from the difficulties in which he found
himself involved, to cast the burden of doubts which disquieted the
mind and depressed the heart, upon a Church that undertakes to
assume the whole responsibility for the man's future on condition of
his yielding to it an unquestioning faith in the present.
An immediate result of his conversion was the production in 1687
of one of his most deservedly famous poems, (The Hind and the
Panther. He began it with the idea of assisting in bringing about
the reconciliation between the Panther, typifying the Church of Eng-
land, and the Hind, typifying the Church of Rome. It is apparent
## p. 4929 (#91) ############################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4929
that before he finished it he saw that the project was hopeless. It is
a poem of over twenty-five hundred es, of which the opening up to
line 150 is printed in this volume. Part of the passage here cited
contains, without professing it as an object, and probably without
intending it, the best defense that could be made for his change of
religion. The production in its entirety is remarkable for the skill
which its author displayed in carrying on an argument in verse. In
this he certainly had no superior among poets, perhaps no equal.
The work naturally created a great sensation in those days of fierce
political and religious controversy. Both it and its writer were made
the object of constant attack. A criticism, in particular, appeared
upon it in the shape of a dialogue in prose with snatches of verse
interspersed. It is usually known by the title of “The Town Mouse
and the Country Mouse,' and was exalted at the time by unrea-
soning partisanship into a wonderful performance. Even to the pres-
ent day, this dreary specimen of polemics is described as a very
witty work by those who have never struggled to read it.
It was
the production of Charles Montagu, the future Earl of Halifax, and
of Matthew Prior. A story too is still constantly repeated that Dry-
den was much hurt by the attacks of these two young men, to whom
he had been kind, and wept over their ingratitude. If he shed any
tears at all upon the occasion, they must have been due to the morti-
fication he felt that any two persons who had been admitted to his
friendship should have been guilty of twaddle so desperately tedious.
The flight of James and the accession of William and Mary threw
Dryden at once out of the favor of the court, upon which to a large
extent he had long depended for support. As a Jacobite he could
not take the oath of allegiance; but there is hardly any doubt that
under any circumstances he would have been deprived of the offices
of place and profit he held. In the laureateship he was succeeded by
his old antagonist Shadwell; and within a few years he saw the
dignity of the position still further degraded by the appointment to
it of Nahum Tate, one of the worst of the long procession of poetas-
ters who have filled it. Dryden henceforth belonged to the party out
of power. His feelings about his changed relations are shown plainly
in the fine epistle with which he consoled Congreve for the failure
of his comedy of the Double Dealer. ' Yet displaced and unpen-
sioned, and sometimes the object of hostile attack, his literary su-
premacy was more absolute than ever. All young authors, whether
Whigs or Tories, sought his society and courted his favor; and his
seat at Will's coffee-house was the throne from which he swayed the
literary sceptre of England.
After the revolution of 1688 Dryden gave himself entirely up to
authorship. He first turned to the stage; and between 1690 and 1694
IX-309
## p. 4930 (#92) ############################################
4930
JOHN DRYDEN
he produced five plays. With the failure in the last-mentioned year
of his tragi-comedy called Love Triumphant, he abandoned writing
for the theatre. The period immediately following he devoted mainly
to his translation of Virgil, which was published in 1697. It was
highly successful; but far more reputation came to him from a large
folio volume that was brought out in November 1699, under the title
of Fables. Its contents consisted mainly of poetical narratives
founded upon certain stories of the Decameron,' and of the modern-
ization of some of the Canterbury Tales. ' In certain ways these have
been his most successful pieces, and have made his name familiar to
successive generations of readers. Of the tales from Boccaccio, that
of Cymon and Iphigenia' is on the whole the most pleasing. The
modernizations of Chaucer were long regarded as superior to the
original; and though superior knowledge of the original has effect-
ually banished that belief, there is on the other hand no justification
for the derogatory terms which are now sometimes applied to Dry-
den's versions.
The verse in this volume was preceded by a long critical essay in
prose. Many of its views, especially those about the language of
Chaucer, have been long discarded; but the criticism will always be
read with pleasure for the genial spirit and sound sense which per-
vade it, and the unstudied ease with which it is written. Cowley
and Dryden are in fact the founders of modern English prose; and
the influence of the latter has been much greater than that of the
former, inasmuch as he touched upon a far wider variety of topics,
and for that reason obtained a far larger circle of readers in the
century following his death. There was also the same steady im-
provement in Dryden's critical taste that there was in his poetical
expression. His admiration for Shakespeare constantly improved dur-
ing his whole life; and it is to be noticed that in what is generally
regarded as the best of his plays - All for Love,' brought out in the
winter of 1677–78 — he of his own accord abandoned rhyme for blank
verse.
The publication of the Fables) was Dryden's last appearance
before the public. In the following year he died, and was buried in
Westminster Abbey by the side of Chaucer and Cowley. After his
death his fame steadily increased instead of diminishing. For a long
period his superiority in his particular line was ungrudgingly con-
ceded by all, or if contested, was contested by Pope alone. His
poetry indeed is not of the highest kind, though usually infinitely
superior to that of his detractors. Still his excellences were those of
the intellect and not of the spirit. On the higher planes of thought
and feeling he rarely moves; to the highest he never aspires. The
nearest he ever approaches to the former is in his later work, where
## p. 4931 (#93) ############################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4931
religious emotion or religious zeal has ient to expression the aid of
its intensity. There is a striking example of this in the personal
references to his own experiences in the lines cited below from The
Hind and the Panther. ' Something too of the same spirit can be
found, expressed in lofty language, in the following passage from the
same poem, descriptive of the unity of the Church of Rome as con-
trasted with the numerous warring sects into which the Protestant
body is divided :-
« One in herself, not rent by schism, but sound,
Entire, one solid shining diamond,
Not sparkles shattered into sects like you:
One is the Church, and must be to be true,
One central principle of unity.
As undivided, so from errors free;
As one in faith, so one in sanctity.
Thus she, and none but she, the insulting rage
Of heretics opposed from age to age;
Still when the giant brood invades her throne,
She stoops from heaven and meets them half-way down,
And with paternal thunders vindicates her crown.
«Thus one, thus pure, behold her largely spread,
Like the fair ocean from her mother-bed;
From east to west triumphantly she rides,
All shores are watered by her wealthy tides.
The gospel sound diffused from Pole to Pole,
Where winds can carry and where waves can roll,
The selfsame doctrine of the sacred page
Conveyed to every clime, in every age. ”
But though Dryden's poetry is not of the highest class, it is of the
very highest kind in its class. Wherever the pure intellect comes into
play, there he is invariably excellent. There is never any weakness;
there is never any vagueness; there is never any deviation from the
true path into aimless digression. His words invariably go straight to
the mark, and not unfrequently with a directness and force that fully
merit the epithet of “burning” applied to them by the poet Gray.
His thoughts always rise naturally out of the matter in hand; and in
the treatment of the meanest subjects he is not only never mean, but
often falls without apparent effort into a felicity of phrase which
holds the attention and implants itself in the memory.
The benefit
of exercise, for instance, is not a topic that can be deemed highly
poeticai; but in his epistle on country life addressed to his cousin
John Driden, the moment he comes to speak of hunting and its salu-
tary results his expression at once leaves the commonplace, and em-
bodies the thought in these pointed lines:-
## p. 4932 (#94) ############################################
4932
JOHN DRYDEN
“So lived our sires, ere doctors learned to kill,
And multiply with theirs the weekly bill.
The first physicians by debauch were made;
Excess began, and sloth sustains the trade.
By chase our long-lived fathers earned their food;
Toil strung the nerves and purified the blood:
But we their sons, a pampered race of men,
Are dwindled down to threescore years and ten.
Better to hunt in fields for health unbought
Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.
The wise for cure on exercise depend;
God never made his work for man to mend. ”
In a similar way in Cymon and Iphigenia' the contempt which
Dryden, in common with the Tories of his time, felt for the English
militia force, found vent in the following vigorous passage, really
descriptive of them and their conduct though the scene is laid in
Rhodes:
«The country rings around with loud alarms,
And raw in fields the rude militia swarms;
Mouths without hands; maintained at vast expense,
In peace a charge, in war a weak defense:
Stout once a month they march, a blustering band,
And ever, but in times of need, at hand:
This was the morn when, issuing on the guard,
Drawn up in rank and file they stood prepared
Of seeming arms to make a short essay,
Then hasten to be drunk, the business of the day. ”
and power.
men
In a world where what is feeble in expression is so often supposed
to indicate peculiar delicacy; where what is vague is so often deemed
peculiarly poetical; and where what is involved and crabbed and
hard to comprehend is thought to denote peculiar profundity,- it is
a pleasure to turn to a writer with a rank settled by the consensus
of successive generations, who thought clearly and wrote forcibly,
who knew always what he had to say and then said it with directness
There are greater poets than he; but so long as
continue to delight in vividness of expression, in majesty of numbers,
in masculine strength and all-abounding vigor, so long will Dryden
continue to hold his present high place among English authors.
The writings of Dryden constitute of themselves a literature.
They treat of a vast variety of topics in many different departments
of intellectual activity. The completest edition of his works was first
published in 1808 under the editorship of Walter Scott. It fills twenty-
one volumes, the first of which however is devoted to a biography.
The notes to this edition are generally excellent; the text is very
## p. 4933 (#95) ############################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4933
indifferent. A revised edition of it has been recently published un-
der the editorship of George Saintsbury. But easily accessible is
a single-volume edition of the poems alone, edited by W. D. Chris-
tie, which furnishes a superior text, and is amply supplied with all
necessary annotations.
Thomas R Leunsbury.
FROM "THE HIND AND THE PANTHER)
A
MILK-WHITE Hind, immortal and unchanged,
Fed on the lawns and in the forest ranged;
Without unspotted, innocent within,
She feared no danger, for she knew no sin.
Yet had she oft been chased with horns and hounds,
And Scythian shafts, and many winged wounds
Aimed at her heart; was often forced to fly,
And doomed to death, though fated not to die.
Not so her young; for their unequal line
Was hero's make, half human, half divine.
Their earthly mold obnoxious was to fate,
The immortal part assumed immortal state.
Of these a slaughtered army lay in blood,
Extended o'er the Caledonian wood,
Their native walk; whose vocal blood arose
And cried for pardon on their perjured foes.
Their fate was fruitful, and the sanguine seed,
Endued with souls, increased the sacred breed.
So captive Israel multiplied in chains,
A numerous exile, and enjoyed her pains.
With grief and gladness mixed, their mother viewed
Her martyred offspring and their race renewed;
Their corps to perish, but their kind to last,
So much the deathless plant the dying fruit surpassed.
Panting and pensive now she ranged alone,
And wandered in the kingdoms once her own.
The common hunt, though from their rage restrained
By sovereign power, her company disdained,
Grinned as they passed, and with a glaring eye
Gave gloomy signs of secret enmity.
'Tis true she bounded by and tripped so light,
They had not time to take a steady sight;
## p. 4934 (#96) ############################################
4934
JOHN DRYDEN
For truth has such a face and such a mien
As to be loved needs only to be seen.
The bloody Bear, an independent beast,
Unlicked to form, in groans her hate expressed.
Among the timorous kind the quaking Hare
Professed neutrality, but would not swear.
Next her the buffoon Ape, as atheists use,
Mimicked all sects and had his own to chuse;
Still when the Lion looked, his knees he bent,
And paid at church a courtier's compliment.
The bristled ba ist Boar, impure as he,
But whitened with the foam of sanctity,
With fat pollutions filled the sacred place,
And mountains leveled in his furious race;
So first rebellion founded was in grace.
But since the mighty ravage which he made
In German forests had his guilt betrayed,
With broken tusks and with a borrowed name,
He shunned the vengeance and concealed the shame,
So lurked in sects unseen. With greater guile
False Reynard fed on consecrated spoil;
The graceless beast by Athanasius first
Was chased from Nice, then by Socinus nursed,
His impious race their blasphemy renewed,
And Nature's King through Nature's optics viewed;
Reversed they viewed him lessened to their eye,
Nor in an infant could a God descry.
New swarming sects to this obliquely tend,
Hence they began, and here they all will end.
What weight of ancient witness can prevail,
If private reason hold the public scale ?
But gracious God, how well dost thou provide
For erring judgments an unerring guide!
Thy throne is darkness in the abyss of light,
A blaze of glory that forbids the sight.
O teach me to believe thee thus concealed,
And search no farther than thy self revealed;
But her alone for my director take,
Whom thou hast promised never to forsake!
My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires;
My manhood, long misled by wandering fires,
Followed false lights; and when their glimpse was gone,
My pride struck out new sparkles of her own.
Such was I, such by nature still I am;
Be thine the glory and be mine the shame!
## p. 4935 (#97) ############################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4935
Good life be now my task; my doubts are done;
What more could fright my faith than Three in One ?
Can I believe eternal God could lie
Disguised in mortal mold and infancy,
That the great Maker of the world could die ?
And after that, trust my imperfect sense
Which calls in question his omnipotence ?
Can I my reason to my faith compel,
And shall my sight and touch and taste rebel?
Superior faculties are set aside;
Shall their subservient organs be my guide ?
Then let the moon usurp the rule of day,
And winking tapers show the sun his way;
For what my senses can themselves perceive
I need no revelation to believe.
Can they, who say the Host should be descried
By sense, define a body glorified,
Impassible, and penetrating parts ?
Let them declare by what mysterious arts
He shot that body through the opposing might
Of bolts and bars impervious to the light,
And stood before his train confessed in open sight.
For since thus wondrously he passed, 'tis plain
One single place two bodies did contain;
And sure the same omnipotence as well
Can make one body in more places dwell.
Let Reason then at her own quarry fly;
But how can finite grasp infinity ?
'Tis urged again, that faith did first commence
By miracles, which are appeals to sense,
And thence concluded, that our sense must be
The motive still of credibility.
For latter ages must on former wait,
And what began belief must propagate.
But winnow well this thought, and you shall find
'Tis light as chaff that flies before the wind.
Were all those wonders wrought by power Divine
As means or ends of some more deep design?
Most sure as means, whose end was this alone,
To prove the Godhead of the Eternal Son.
God thus asserted: Man is to believe
Beyond what Sense and Reason can conceive,
And for mysterious things of faith rely
On the proponent Heaven's authority.
## p. 4936 (#98) ############################################
4936
JOHN DRYDEN
If then our faith we for our guide admit,
Vain is the farther search of human wit;
As when the building gains a surer stay,
We take the unuseful scaffolding away.
Reason by sense no more can understand;
The game is played into another hand.
Why choose we then like bilanders to creep
Along the coast, and land in view to keep,
When safely we may launch into the deep?
In the same vessel which our Savior bore,
Himself the pilot, let us leave the shore,
And with a better guide a better world explore.
Could he his Godhead veil with fresh and blood
And not veil these again to be our food ?
His grace in both is equal in extent;
The first affords us life, the second nourishment.
And if he can, why all this frantic pain
To construe what his clearest words contain,
And make a riddle what he made so plain?
To take up half on trust and half to try,
Name it not faith, but bungling bigotry.
Both knave and fool the merchant we may call,
To pay great sums and to compound the small,
For who would break with Heaven, and would not break for all ?
Rest then, my soul, from endless anguish freed:
Nor sciences thy guide, nor sense thy creed.
Faith is the best insurer of thy bliss;
The bank above must fail before the venture miss.
TO MY DEAR FRIEND MR. CONGREVE
ON His COMEDY CALLED "THE DOUBLE DEALER)
W
ELL then, the promised hour is come at last;
The present age of wit obscures the past :
Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ:
Conquering with force of arms and dint of wit:
Theirs was the giant race before the flood;
And thus, when Charles returned, our empire stood.
Like Janus, he the stubborn soil manured,
With rules of husbandry the rankness cured;
Tamed us to manners, when the stage was rude,
And boisterous English wit with art endued.
## p. 4937 (#99) ############################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4937
Our age was cultivated thus at length,
But what we gained in skill we lost in strength.
Our builders were with want of genius curst;
The second temple was not like the first;
Till you, the best Vitruvius, come at length,
Our beauties equal, but excel our strength.
Firm Doric pillars found your solid base,
The fair Corinthian crowns the higher space;
Thus all below is strength, and all above is grace.
In easy dialogue is Fletcher's praise;
He moved the mind, but had not power to raise.
Great Jonson did by strength of judgment please,
Yet, doubling Fletcher's force, he wants his ease.
In differing talents both adorned their age,
One for the study, t'other for the stage.
But both to Congreve justly shall submit,
One matched in judgment, both o'ermatched in wit.
In him all beauties of this age we see:
Etherege his courtship, Southern's purity,
The satire, wit, and strength of manly Wycherley.
All this in blooming youth you have achieved;
Nor are your foiled contemporaries grieved.
So much the sweetness of your manners move,
We cannot envy you, because we love.
Fabius might joy in Scipio, when he saw
A beardless Consul made against the law,
And join his suffrage to the votes of Rome,
Though he with Hannibal was overcome.
Thus old Romano bowed to Raphael's fame,
And scholar to the youth he taught became.
O that your brows my laurel had sustained !
Well had I been deposed, if you had reigned:
The father had descended for the son,
For only you are lineal to the throne.
Thus, when the State one Edward did depose,
A greater Edward in his room arose:
But now, not I, but poetry, is curst;
For Tom the second reigns like Tom the first.
But let them not mistake my patron's part,
Nor call his charity their own desert.
Yet this I prophesy: Thou shalt be seen,
Though with some short parenthesis between,
High on the throne of wit, and seated there,
Not mine — that's little — but thy laurel wear.
## p. 4938 (#100) ###########################################
4938
JOHN DRYDEN
Thy first attempt an early promise made;
That early promise this has more than paid.
So bold, yet so judiciously you dare,
That your least praise is to be regular.
Time, place, and action may with pains be wrought,
But genius must be born, and never can be taught.
This is your portion, this your native store:
Heaven, that but once was prodigal before,
To Shakespeare gave as much; she could not give him more.
Maintain your post: that's all the fame you need;
For 'tis impossible you should proceed.
Already I am worn with cares and age,
And just abandoning the ungrateful stage:
Unprofitably kept at Heaven's expense,
I live a rent-charge on His providence:
But you, whom every Muse and grace adorn,
Whom I foresee to better fortune born,
Be kind to my remains; and oh, defend,
Against your judgment, your departed friend!
Let not the insulting foe my fame pursue,
But shade those laurels which descend to you:
And take for tribute what these lines express;
You merit more, nor could my love do less.
ODE
TO THE PIOUS MEMORY OF THE ACCOMPLISHED YOUNG LADY
MRS. ANNE KILLIGREW,
EXCELLENT IN THE TWO SISTER ARTS OF POESY AND PAINTING.
THU
HOU youngest virgin daughter of the skies,
Made in the last promotion of the blest;
Whose palms, new-plucked from Paradise,
In spreading branches more sublimely rise,
Rich with immortal green above the rest :
Whether, adopted to some neighboring star,
Thou roll'st above us in thy wandering race,
Or in procession fixed and regular
Moved with the heaven's majestic pace,
Or called to more superior bliss,
Thou tread'st with seraphims the vast abyss :
Whatever happy region be thy place,
Cease thy celestial song a little space;
## p. 4939 (#101) ###########################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4939
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 practice here,
When thy first fruits of poesy were given,
To make thyself a welcome inmate there;
While yet a young probationer,
And candidate of Heaven.
If by traduction came thy mind,
Our wonder is the less to find
A soul so charming from a stock so good;
Thy father was transfused into thy blood:
So wert thou born into the tuneful strain
(An early, rich, and inexhausted vein).
But if thy pre-existing soul
Was formed at first with myriads more,
It did through all the mighty poets roll
Who Greek or Latin laurels wore,
And was that Sappho last, which once it was before.
If so, then cease thy flight, О heaven-born mind!
Thou hast no dross to purge from thy rich ore:
Nor can thy soul a fairer mansion find
Than was the beauteous frame she left behind:
Return, to fill or mend the quire of thy celestial kind.
May we presume to say that at thy birth
New joy was sprung in heaven, as well as here on earth ?
For sure the milder planets did combine
On thy auspicious horoscope to shine,
And even the most malicious were in trine.
Thy brother angels at thy birth
Strung each his lyre, and tuned it high,
That all the people of the sky
Might know a poetess was born on earth;
And then, if ever, mortal ears
Had heard the music of the spheres.
And if no clustering swarm of bees
On thy sweet mouth distilled their golden dew,
'Twas that such vulgar miracles
Heaven had not leisure to renew :
For all the blest fraternity of love
Solemnized there thy birth, and kept thy holiday above.
## p.
4940 (#102) ###########################################
4940
JOHN DRYDEN
O gracious God! how far have we
Profaned thy heavenly gift of Poesy!
Made prostitute and profligate the Muse,
Debased to each obscene and impious use,
Whose harmony was first ordained above,
For tongues of angels and for hymns of love!
Oh wretched we! why were we hurried down
This lubric and adulterate age,
(Nay, added fat pollutions of our own,)
To increase the steaming ordures of the stage ?
What can we say to excuse our second fall ?
Let this thy Vestal, Heaven, atone for all:
Her Arethusian stream remains unsoiled,
Unmixed with foreign filth and undefiled;
Her wit was more than man, her innocence a child.
Art she had none, yet wanted none,
For Nature did that want supply:
So rich in treasures of her own,
She might our boasted stores defy:
Such noble vigor did her verse adorn
That it seemed borrowed, where 'twas only born.
Her morals too were in her bosom bred,
By great examples daily fed,
What in the best of books, her father's life, she read.
And to be read herself she need not fear;
Each test and every light her Muse will bear,
Though Epictetus with his lamp were there.
Even love (for love sometimes her Muse exprest)
Was but a lambent flame which played about her breast;
Light as the vapors of a morning dream,
So cold herself, whilst she such warmth exprest,
'Twas Cupid bathing in Diana's stream.
Born to the spacious empire of the Nine,
One would have thought she should have been content
To manage well that mighty government;
But what can young ambitious souls confine ?
To the next realm she stretched her sway,
For Painture near adjoining lay,
A plenteous province and alluring prey.
A Chamber of Dependences was framed,
As conquerors will never want pretense,
(When armed to justify the offense,)
And the whole fief in right of Poetry she claimed.
## p. 4941 (#103) ###########################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4941
The country open lay without defense;
For poets frequent inroads there had made,
And perfectly could represent
The shape, the face, with every lineament,
And all the large demains which the dumb Sister swayed;
All bowed beneath her government,
Received in triumph wheresoe'er she went.
Her pencil drew whate'er her soul designed,
And oft the happy draught surpassed the image in her mind;
The sylvan scenes of herds and flocks
And fruitful plains and barren rocks;
Of shallow brooks that flowed so clear,
The bottom did the top appear;
Of deeper too and ampler floods
Which, as in mirrors, showed the woods;
Of lofty trees, with sacred shades
And perspectives of pleasant glades,
Where nymphs of brightest form appear,
And shaggy satyrs standing near,
Which them at once admire and fear.
The ruins too of some majestic piece,
Boasting the power of ancient Rome or Greece,
Whose statues, friezes, columns, broken lie,
And, though defaced, the wonder of the eye;
What nature, art, bold fiction, e'er durst frame,
Her forming hand gave feature to the name.
So strange a concourse ne'er was seen before,
But when the peopled Ark the whole creation bore.
The scene then changed; with bold erected look
Our martial King the sight with reverence strook:
For, not content to express his outward part,
Her hand called out the image of his heart:
His warlike mind, his soul devoid of fear,
His high-designing thoughts were figured there,
As when by magic ghosts are made appear.
Our phonix Queen was portrayed too so bright
Beauty alone could beauty take so right:
Her dress, her shape, her matchless grace,
Were all observed, as well as heavenly face.
With such a peerless majesty she stands,
As in that day she took the crown from sacred hands;
Before a train of heroines was seen,
In beauty foremost, as in rank the Queen.
## p. 4942 (#104) ###########################################
4942
JOHN DRYDEN
Thus nothing to her genius was denied,
But like a ball of fire, the farther thrown,
Still with a greater blaze she shone,
And her bright soul broke out on every side.
What next she had designed, Heaven only knows:
To such immoderate growth her conquest rose
That Fate alone its progress could oppose.
Now all those charms, that blooming grace,
The well-proportioned shape and beauteous face,
Shall never more be seen by mortal eyes;
In earth the much-lamented virgin lies.
Not wit nor piety could Fate prevent;
Nor was the cruel Destiny content
To finish all the murder at a blow,
To sweep at once her life and beauty too;
But, like a hardened felon, took a pride
To work more mischievously slow,
And plundered first, and then destroyed.
O double sacrilege on things divine,
To rob the relic, and deface the shrine!
But thus Orinda died:
Heaven by the same disease did both translate;
As equal were their souls, so equal was their fate.
Meantime, her warlike brother on the seas
His waving streamers to the winds displays,
And vows for his return with vain devotion pays.
Ah, generous youth! that wish forbear,
The winds too soon will waft thee here!
Slack all thy sails, and fear to come;
Alas! thou knowest not, thou art wrecked at home.
No more shalt thou behold thy sister's face;
Thou hast already had her last embrace.
But look aloft, and if thou ken’st from far,
Among the Pleiads, a new-kindled star,
If any sparkles than the rest more bright,
'Tis she that shines in that propitious light.
When in mid-air the golden trump shall sound,
To raise the nations under ground;
When in the Valley of Jehoshaphat
The judging God shall close the book of Fate,
And there the last assizes keep
For those who wake and those who sleep;
## p. 4943 (#105) ###########################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4943
When rattling bones together fly
From the four corners of the sky;
When sinews o'er the skeletons are spread,
Those clothed with flesh, and life inspires the dead;
The sacred poets first shall hear the sound,
And foremost from the tomb shall bound,
For they are covered with the lightest ground;
And straight, with inborn vigor, on the wing,
Like mounting larks, to the new morning sing.
There thou, sweet saint, before the quire shalt go,
As harbinger of Heaven, the way to show,
The way which thou so well hast learned below.
A SONG
F"
AIR, sweet, and young, receive a prize
Reserved for your victorious eyes:
From crowds whom at your feet you see,
Oh pity and distinguish me!
As I from thousand beauties more
Distinguish you, and only you adore.
Your face for conquest was designed,
Your every motion charms my mind;
Angels, when you your silence break,
Forget their hymns to hear you speak;
But when at once they hear and view,
Are loth to mount, and long to stay with you.
No graces can your form improve,
But all are lost, unless you love;
While that sweet passion you disdain,
Your veil and beauty are in vain:
In pity then prevent my fate,
For after dying all reprieve's too late.
LINES PRINTED UNDER MILTON'S PORTRAIT
IN Tonson's Folio EDITION OF THE PARADISE LOST,' 1688
TRE
THREE poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.
The first in loftiness of thought surpassed,
The next in majesty, in both the last:
The force of Nature could no farther go;
To make a third she joined the former two.
## p. 4944 (#106) ###########################################
4944
JOHN DRYDEN
ALEXANDER'S FEAST; OR, THE POWER OF MUSIC
A SONG IN HONOR OF St. Cecilia's DAY: 1697
I
'T™AS
WAS at the royal feast for Persia won
By Philip's warlike son:
Aloft in awful state
The godlike hero sate
On his imperial throne;
His valiant peers were placed around;
Their brows with roses and with myrtles bound:
(So should desert in arms be crowned. )
The lovely Thais, by his side,
Sate like a blooming Eastern bride,
In flower of youth and beauty's pride.
Happy, happy, happy pair!
None but the brave,
None but the brave,
None but the brave deserves the fair.
CHORUS
Happy, happy, happy pair!
None but the brave,
None but the brave,
None but the brave deserves the fair.
II
Timotheus, placed on high
Amid the tuneful quire,
With flying fingers touched the lyre:
The trembling notes ascend the sky,
And heavenly joys inspire.
The song began from Jove,
Who left his blissful seats above,
(Such is the power of mighty love. )
A dragon's fiery form belied the god:
Sublime on radiant spires he rode,
When he to fair Olympia pressed:
And while he sought her snowy breast,
Then round her slender waist he curled,
And stamped an image of himself, a sovereign of the world.
## p. 4945 (#107) ###########################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4945
The listening crowd adınire the lofty sound
A present deity, they shout around;
A present deity, the vaulted roofs rebound:
With ravished ears
The monarch hears,
Assumes the god,
Affects to nod,
And seems to shake the spheres.
CHORUS
With ravished ears
The monarch hears,
Assumes the god,
Affects to nod,
And seems to shake the spheres.
III
The praise of Bacchus then the sweet musician sung,
Of Bacchus ever fair, and ever young.
The jolly god in triumph comes;
Sound the trumpets, beat the drums;
Flushed with a purple grace
He shows his honest face:
Now give the hautboys breath; he comes, he comes.
Bacchus, ever fair and young,
Drinking joys did first ordain;
Bacchus's blessings are a treasure,
Drinking is the soldier's pleasure;
Rich the treasure,
Sweet the pleasure,
Sweet is pleasure after pain.
CHORUS
Bacchus's blessings are a treasure,
Drinking is the soldier's pleasure;
Rich the treasure,
Sweet the pleasure,
Sweet is pleasure after pain.
IV
Soothed with the sound, the king grew vain;
Fought all his battles o'er again;
And thrice he routed all his foes, and thrice he slew the slain
IX-310
## p. 4946 (#108) ###########################################
4946
JOHN DRYDEN
The master saw the madness rise,
His glowing cheeks, his ardent eyes;
And while he heaven and earth defied,
Changed his hand, and checked his pride.
He chose a mournful Muse,
Soft pity to infuse;
He sung Darius great and good,
By too severe a fate,
Fallen, fallen, fallen, fallen,
Fallen from his high estate,
And weltering in his blood;
Deserted at his utmost need
By those his former bounty fed;
On the bare earth exposed he lies,
With not a friend to close his eyes.
With downcast looks the joyless victor sate,
Revolving in his altered soul
The various turn of chance below;
And now and then a sigh he stole,
And tears began to flow.
CHORUS
Revolving in his altered soul
The various turns of chance below;
And now and then a sigh he stole,
And tears began to flow.
The mighty master smiled to see
That love was in the next degree;
'Twas but a kindred sound to move,
For pity melts the mind to love.
Softly sweet, in Lydian measures,
Soon he soothed his soul to pleasures.
War, he sung, is toil and trouble;
Honor but an empty bubble,
Never ending, still beginning,
Fighting still, and still destroying:
If the world be worth thy winning,
Think, oh think it worth enjoying:
Lovely Thais sits beside thee;
Take the good the gods provide thee;
The many rend the skies with loud applause;
So Love was crowned, but Music won the cause.
## p. 4947 (#109) ###########################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4947
The prince, unable to conceal his pain,
Gazed on the fair
Who caused his care,
And sighed and looked, sighed and looked,
Sighed and looked, and sighed again;
At length, with love and wine at once oppressed,
The vanquished victor sunk upon her breast.
CHORUS
The prince, unable to conceal his pain,
Gazed on the fair
Who caused his care,
And sighed and looked, sighed and looked
Sighed and looked, and sighed again;
At length, with love and wine at once oppressed,
The vanquished victor sunk upon her breast.
VI
Now strike the golden lyre again;
A louder yet, and yet a louder strain.
Break his bands of sleep asunder,
And rouse him, like a rattling peal of thunder.
Hark, hark, the horrid sound
Has raised up his head;
As awaked from the dead,
And amazed, he stares around.
Revenge, revenge, Timotheus cries,
See the Furies arise;
See the snakes that they rear,
How they hiss in their hair,
And the sparkles that flash from their eyes!
Behold a ghastly band,
Each a torch in his hand!
Those are Grecian ghosts, that in battle were slain,
And unburied remain
Inglorious on the plain :
Give the vengeance due
To the valiant crew.
Behold how they toss their torches on high,
How they point to the Persian abodes,
And glittering temples of their hostile gods!
The princes applaud with a furious joy;
## p. 4948 (#110) ###########################################
4948
JOHN DRYDEN
And the king seized a flambeau with zeal to destroy;
Thais led the way,
To light him to his prey,
And like another Helen, fired another Troy.
CHORUS
And the king seized a flambeau with zeal to destroy:
Thais led the way,
To light him to his prey,
And like another Helen, fired another Troy.
VII
Thus long ago,
Ere heaving bellows learned to blow,
While organs yet were mute,
Timotheus, to his breathing Aute
And sounding lyre,
Could swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire.
At last divine Cecilia came,
Inventress of the vocal frame;
The sweet enthusiast, from her sacred store,
Enlarged the former narrow bounds,
And added length to solemn sounds,
With Nature's mother wit, and arts unknown before.
Let old Timotheus yield the prize,
Or both divide the crown:
He raised a mortal to the skies;
She drew an angel down.
GRAND CHORUS
At last divine Cecilia came,
Inventress of the vocal frame;
The sweet enthusiast, from her sacred store,
Enlarged the former narrow bounds,
And added length to solemn sounds,
With Nature's mother wit, and arts unknown before.
Let old Timotheus yield the prize,
Or both divide the crown:
He raised a mortal to the skies;
She drew an angel down.
## p. 4949 (#111) ###########################################
JOHN DRYDEN
4949
ACHITOPHEL *
From (Absalom and Achitophel)
T'
His plot, which failed for want of common-sense,
Had yet a deep and dangerous consequence:
For as when raging fevers boil the blood,
The standing lake soon floats into a flood,
And every hostile humor, which before
Slept quiet in its channels, bubbles o'er;
So several factions from this first ferment
Work up to foam, and threat the government.
Some by their friends, inore by themselves thought wise,
Opposed the power to which they could not rise.
Some had in courts been great, and thrown from thence,
Like fiends were hardened in impenitence.
Some, by their monarch's fatal mercy, grown
From pardoned rebels kinsmen to the throne,
Were raised in power and public office high;
Strong bands, if bands ungrateful men could tie.
Of these the false Achitophel was first;
A name to all succeeding ages curst:
For close designs and crooked councils fit;
Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit;
Restless, unfixed in principles and place;
In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace:
A fiery soul, which, working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy body to decay,
And o'er-informed the tenement of clay.
A daring pilot in extremity:
Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high
He sought the storms; but for a calm unfit,
Would steer too nigh the sands to boast his wit.
Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide;
Else why should he, with wealth and honor blest,
Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?
Punish a body which he could not please;
Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease ?
And all to leave what with his toil he won,
To that unfeathered two-legged thing, a son;
Got while his soul did huddled notions try,
And born a shapeless lump, like anarchy.
*Lord Shaftesbury.
## p. 4950 (#112) ###########################################
4950
JOHN DRYDEN
In friendship false, implacable in hate;
Resolved to ruin or to rule the State.
To compass this the triple bond he broke,
The pillars of the public safety shook,
And fitted Israel for a foreign yoke:
Then, seized with fear yet still affecting fame,
Usurped a patriot's all-atoning name.
So easy still it proves in factious times,
With public zeal to cancel private crimes.
How safe is treason, and how sacred ill,
Where none can sin against the people's will!
Where crowds can wink, and no offense be known,
Since in another's guilt they find their own!
Yet fame deserved no enemy can grudge;
The statesman we abhor, but praise the judge.
In Israel's courts ne'er sat an Abethdin
With more discerning eyes, or hands more clean,
Unbribed, unsought, the wretched to redress;
Swift of dispatch, and easy of access.
Oh! had he been content to serve the Crown,
With virtues only proper to the gown;
Or had the rankness of the soil been freed
From cockle that oppressed the noble seed;
David for him his tuneful harp had strung,
And heaven had wanted one immortal song.
But wild Ambition loves to slide, not stand,
And Fortune's ice prefers to Virtue's land.
Achitophel, grown weary to possess
A lawful fame, and lazy happiness,
Disdained the golden fruit to gather free,
And lent the crowd his arm to shake the tree.
Now, manifest of crimes contrived long since,
He stood at bold defiance with his prince;
Held up the buckler of the people's cause
Against the Crown, and skulked behind the laws.
The wished occasion of the plot he takes;
Some circumstances finds, but more he makes.
By buzzing emissaries fills the ears
Of listening crowds with jealousies and fears
Of arbitrary counsels brought to light,
And proves the king himself a Jebusite.
## p. 4951 (#113) ###########################################
4951
MAXIME DU CAMP
(1822-1894)
Shy have I always felt happy, filled with the spirit of content
and of infinite independence, whenever I have slept in the
tent or in the ruins of foreign lands? ). The love of ange
and adventure has been the spring of Du Camp's life, a life whose
events are blended so intimately with his literary achievement, that
to know the one is to know the other. This practical man of the
world has an imaginative, beauty-loving side to his nature, which
craves stimulus from tropical unfamiliar nature and exotic ways.
So, after the usual training of French
boys in lycée and college, _“in those hid-
eous houses where they wearied our child-
hood, as he says,--the just-emancipated
youth of twenty-two left his home in Paris
for an eighteen-months' trip in the far East.
The color and variety of the experience
whetted his love of travel, and very soon
after his return he began a serious study of
photography in view of future plans.
Then came the revolution of 1848, the
overthrow of Louis Philippe; and Du Camp
had an opportunity to prove
his
courage
and patriotism in the ranks of the National MAXIME DU CAMP
Guard. In his Souvenirs de l'Année 1848,
he tells the story with color and interest, and with the forceful logic
of an eye-witness.
His bravery and a serious wound won him the red ribbon of the
Legion of Honor, bestowed by General Cavaignac. This drew atten-
tion to him, and led the minister of public instruction to intrust him
a few months later with a mission of exploration to Egypt, Nubia,
Palestine, and Asia Minor; a result of which trip was his first literary
success. Utilizing his photographic knowledge, he collected a great
many negatives for future development. Upon his return he pub-
lished a volume of descriptive sketches, Le Nil, Egypte, et Nubie,'
generously illustrated with printed reproductions of these pictures.
This first combination of photography and typography was popular,
and was speedily imitated, initiative of many illustrated books.
)
## p. 4952 (#114) ###########################################
4952
MAXIME DU CAMP
Later, Du Camp's warlike and exploring instincts led him at his
own expense into Sicily with Garibaldi, where he collected matter
and photographs for (Les Deux Siciles,' another successful volume.
In 1851 he associated with others to found the Revue de Paris, for
which he wrote regularly until its suspension in 1858. He has also
written a great deal for the Revue des Deux Mondes, in which for
several years he continued a series of historical studies upon the gov-
ernment of Paris. The six volumes upon (Paris: its Organs, its
Functions, its Life, during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Cen-
tury,' form one of his chief achievements. His personal knowledge
on the subject, and his access to valuable unpublished documents,
give it authoritative value.
In 'Les Ancêtres de la Commune,' and 'Les Convulsions de Paris,'
he has accomplished much more in the same line. The latter, a brill-
iant circumstantial exposition of the Commune, a logical condemna-
tion of its folly and ignorance, brought him gratitude from the French
Academy, and aided his election to that body in 1880. For this exten-
sive work on contemporary politics, for his illustrated travels, and his
artistic and literary criticism, he is better known than for his two or
three novels and volumes of poetry.
Du Camp's may be characterized as a soldierly style, strong, direct,
and personal. He loves to retrace old scenes with the later visible
sequence of cause and effect. Always straightforward, sometimes
bluntly self-assertive, he is sometimes eloquent. Perhaps his great
charm is spontaneity.
A STREET SCENE DURING THE COMMUNE
From (The Convulsions of Paris)
T"
HERE were strange episodes during this terrible evening. At
half-past eight, M. Rouville, a Protestant minister, was at
home in a house he owns on the Rue de Lille. He heard
an alarm, the cry, “Everything is burning! Escape! ” Then he
went down, saw the street in flames, and the poor people weep-
ing as they escaped. Just as he was returning to rescue a few
valuables, some federates rushed into the court, crying, “Hurry!
They are setting the place on fire! » He took some money and
the manuscript of the sermons he had preached. Mechanically
he seized his hat and cane. Then, throwing a last look around
the apartment where he had long lived, invoking the memory
of the great Biblical destructions familiar to him in Holy Writ,
## p. 4953 (#115) ###########################################
MAXIME DU CAMP
4953
weak and trembling with emotion, he descended the staircase
from his home.
There was indescribable tumult in the street, dominated by
the cry of women; a shrill wordless involuntary cry of terror,
vibrating above the uproar like a desperate appeal to which no
supernatural power replied. Pastor Rouville stopped. The house
next his own was in fames. They were setting fire to the one
opposite. The houses between the Rue de Beaune and the Rue
du Bac, red from cellar to garret, were vomiting flame from all
the broken windows.
The pastor's family were not at Paris. He was alone with a
faithful maid, who did not leave him for a moment. This doubt.
less determined his resolution, and gave him courage to brave all
to save his house. If he had felt his wife and daughter near, he
would have thought only of their safety, and would have hastened
to get them away from the place, where, he said, “One could
die of horror. ”
Pastor Rouville is a small man, whose great activity keeps
him young and remarkably energetic. He belongs to the strong
race of Southern Protestants, which has resisted everything to
guard its faith. I should not be surprised if he has had some
nimble Cévennole, companion of Jean Cavalier, among his an-
cestors. Chaplain in the prisons of the Seine, accustomed to
sound doubtful spirits, to seek in vicious hearts some intact
fibres which could re-attach them to virtue; fervent in faith, elo-
quent, with a high voice which could rise above the tumult,
knowing by experience that there is no obscurity so profound
that light cannot be made to penetrate it,- he had remained on
duty at his post during the Commune; for the prisoners had
more need of spiritual aid, now that the regular administration no
longer watched over them. He had been indignant at the incar-
ceration of Catholic priests, and had signed the fine protest
demanding the liberty of the archbishop, which the ininisters
had carried to the Hôtel de Ville.
Alone in the presence of the great disaster which threatened
him, he commended his spirit to God, remembering that the
little stone of David had killed the giant Philistine, and he de-
cided to fight for his home. He encamped energetically before
the door, to forbid access; and using the weapons bestowed upon
him by Providence and study, he spoke. The federates stopped
before this man, whose simplicity rendered him heroic. One may
guess what he said to them:
## p. 4954 (#116) ###########################################
4954
MAXIME DU CAMP
(
Why strike the innocent and tender, as if they were execra-
ble? Why be enraged with a Protestant, a minister, whose
religion, founded on the dogma of free examination, is naturally
allied to republican ideas? The faith he teaches is that promul-
gated by Christ: Christ said to Peter, (Sheathe thy sword;'
he said to men, Love one another! ' No, the people of Paris,
this people whose sufferings have been shared, whose unfortunates
have been succored during the siege; this people, so good when
not led astray by the wicked; this people will not burn the
house of a poor minister, whose whole life has been passed in
the exercise of charity. ”
The pastor must have been eloquent and have spoken with
profound conviction, for the federates who were listening to him
began to weep, then seized and embraced him. Meantime the
tenants of the shops in his house had lowered the iron curtains,
which at least was an obstacle against the first throwing of pe-
troleum. This lasted an hour. The federates, evidently softened
and touched by the pastor's despair, remained near him and had
pity upon him. An old sergeant of the National Guard stayed
beside him, as if to bring him help in case of need, and to main-
tain a little order among his subordinates. Some hope revived
in M. Rouville's heart, and he was saying to himself that per-
haps his house would be spared, when some young men, wearing
the braided caps of officers, arrived as if to inspect the fires.
Seeing one house intact, emerging like a little island from an
ocean of flames, they exclaimed. The pastor sprang forward and
wanted to argue with them. It was trouble wasted. One of these
young scamps said to him, “You are an old reactionist: you bore
us with your talking. If you don't like it, we will pin you to
the wall. " Then, turning toward the federates and pointing
to the houses on the Rue de Lille, he cried, "All that belongs
to the people. The people have the right to burn everything. ”
This had perhaps decided the fate of the pastor's house, when
the sergeant of federates interfered, and addressing the officer
said to him, "I have received orders to stop the fire just here. ”
“Show me your order," answered the officer. The sergeant re-
plied, "It is a verbal order. ” Then there was a lively quarrel
between the two men. The sergeant was firm. The officer in-
sisted, and according to the custom of the moment, threatened to
have the rebel shot.
The situation was becoming grave, when an incident resolved
it. A mounted officer galloped up and ordered all the federates
## p. 4955 (#117) ###########################################
MAXIME DU CAMP
4955
to retreat, because they were about to be surrounded by the
troops from Versailles.
Nearly all the National Guards hurried away.
