No More Learning

* Scandal was very busy with Lauderdale's private as well as his public morals; but
there is nothing . convincing' in the caricature. Others thought it intended for
Shaftesbury, who was attacked in similar fashion by Otway.
3 Repartees between Cat and Puss at a Caterwauling.
2
به سوریه نیاز
E, L. VIII.
CH. I.


## p. 18 (#40) ##############################################

18.
Dryden
rime as a proper feature of dramatic verse. This use is defended
in a dedication to lord Orrery—the earliest of Dryden's critical
excursions. It should be remembered that, since Fletcher's short
preface to his Faithfull Shepheardesse (printed 1609 or 1610), such
discussions of dramatic problems as these had fallen out of use,
and that the public was now neither 'railed into approbation,' as
it had formerly been by Ben Jonson, nor gently led on to acquies-
cence in the precepts of its critical guides. Following the example
of Corneille? , Dryden took advantage of the revived interest in the
stage to address its patrons, as it were ex cathedra, but without any
assumption of academical solemnity or rigour. To the subject of
the dramatic use of the heroic couplet which he here broached, he
afterwards returned at greater length, both in his Essay of
Dramatick Poesie and in his Essay of Heroick Plays; but he did
not claim the innovation as primarily his own, and he recalled the
fact that the rimed five foot couplet, in a form approaching as near
as possible to that which it owed to Waller, had been first applied
to its 'noblest use' by D'Avenant in the quasi-dramatic Siege of
Rhodes (1656, enlarged 1662). Dryden, however, was the first to
employ the rimed couplet in the dialogue of an ordinary stage
play, though he, too, only introduced the innovation tentatively.
Etherege went a step further, and, in The Comical Revenge, or
Love in a Tub (acted and printed 1664), put the whole serious
part of the play into heroic couplets. Inasmuch, however, as, in
the same year 1664, lord Orrery's Henry V, which is entirely in
heroic couplets, was performed, Etherege and he must be left to
divide the crown' of having introduced the innovation with
Dryden and D'Avenant. If it could be proved that Orrery’s ‘first
play,' mentioned in king Charles's letter of 22 February 1662 was
Henry V, there would be no doubt as to Orrery's priority over
Etherege.
It does not seem to be necessary here to enter into a re-
examination of the question of the suitableness, or unsuitableness,
6
6
1 See post, p. 23.
i
* See Siegert, E. , Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery u. seine Dramen (Wiener Beiträge
zur Engl. Philologie), Vienna and Leipzig, 1906, p. 19. Orrery claimed to have
written his tragedy The Black Prince 'in a new way,' by which he means the rimed
couplet ; but this play was not acted till 1667, or printed till 1669. Henry V, how-
ever, and Mustapha, which were likewise in rime, were first performed in 1664 and
1665 respectively. See post, p. 22, note. As to Etherege, for whom Gosse (Seventeenth-
Century Studies, ed. 1883, p. 238) claims that he was the first to carry out, though
Dryden was the first to propose, the experiment of writing ordinary plays in rime,
see post, chap. v.


## p. 19 (#41) ##############################################

The Heroic Couplet in the Drama 19
of the heroic couplet as a form of dramatic verse. Not only in
certain kinds of romantic comedy, for which it has been claimed
as a suitable vehicle, but, also, for various eccentric species which
have been or may be invented-such as pantomime, burlesque or
extravaganza-it may readily be allowed to be both well fitted
and effective. As to its use, however, for the purposes of the
regular tragic or comic drama, the case is altered. Partly, of
course, the objection lies in the tendency of the couplet, as treated
by Dryden and his successors, to make against continuity of flow,
to shut up the sense within fixed limits and, because of the con-
sequent demand for precision of statement, to impart to dialogue or
soliloquy a didactic rather than dramatic colouring. And, further,
with regard to the use of rime itself in English dramatic verse, the
caveat of Taine cannot be put aside, that'rime is a different thin
for different races': the Englishman being transported by it into
a world remote from the actual, whereas, for the Frenchman, it is
nothing more than a conventional costume? The heroic couplet,
as used in Dryden's plays and those which followed their example,
therefore, operates against, rather than in favour of, theatrical
illusion and the sway of the imagination on the stage, and helps
to urge the dramatist who employs it in the direction of con-
ventionalism and artificiality. Against this general result, it is
useless to argue that passion, and even mere eloquence, at times
gets the better of the outward form, and, by its driving force,
moves and disturbs the hearer in spite of himself.
No sooner had Dryden, in The Rival-Ladies, produced a tragi-
comedy, containing an element of rimed verse, in which he had
made successful use of his gift of poetical rhetoric, than he was
characteristically ready to take a leading part in evolving an
ulterior dramatic species not precisely new, but with features of
its own so marked as to differentiate it from tragicomedy proper.
The tragicomedy bequeathed to him and the restoration dramatists
in general by their predecessors was wont to possess a double plot,
consisting, to use Dryden's own phraseology? , of one main design,'
serious in kind, executed in verse, and 'an underplot or second
walk of comical characters and adventures subservient to the chief
fable, yet carried along under it and helping to it'; although, in
point of fact, the connection between the two was frequently very
slight. At different stages of his career, he produced three more
1 Hist. de la Littérature Anglaise, bk, i, chap. II, sec. IV,
? A Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (Essays, ed. Ker,
vol. 11, pp. 102 f. ).
242


## p. 20 (#42) ##############################################

20
Dryden
X
plays', of various merit, which belonged to this class. Secret Love,
or The Maiden Queen (acted 1667), of which probably because of
the frank gaiety of Nell Gwynn's scenes in it-Charles II approved
so greatly as to dub it ‘his play,' is founded, as to its main plot, on
Le Grand Cyrus, and, as to its comic underplot, partly on that
romance and partly on the same novelist's Ibrahim, ou L'illustre
Bassa. The interest in the serious plot is impaired by the quite
unheroic character of Philocles intended, as Dryden says, to
represent queen Christina of Sweden's favourite Magnus de la
Gardie); and the chief attraction of the play consists in the
'discoursive' passages between Celadon and Florimel. In The
Spanish Fryar, or The Double Discovery, again (acted and printed
1681), which seems certainly to have been designed as a tragi-
comedy by Dryden, the comic effect preponderates over that of
the serious plot, though the latter cannot be said to be without
interest. The interweaving of the two has been praised-perhaps
overpraised—by more than one eminent critic? . The comic
dialogue of this play is excellent, and the character of the friar
by no means a replica of Fletcher's Spanish Curate (though there
are points of resemblance in the two plays), but a new variety of
an unctuous type which, from Chaucer to Dickens, has afforded
unfailing delight to the public, and which it must have given
Dryden, who hated priests and parsons with a consistent hatred,
much satisfaction to elaborate. His last tragicomedy, Love
Triumphant, or Nature will Prevail (acted 1694), in which
there is a large admixture of rime, merely repeated in its main
plot that of Marriage-à-la-Mode, and the play justly proved a
failure.
Dryden, as already noted, had not brought out more than two
plays, in the second of which he had made occasional use of the
rimed five foot couplet, when he was found ready to assist his
brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard in the composition of what may
be described as the first heroic play? The shortcomings in the
1 Marriage-a-la-Mode, of which the main interest lies in the comic action, has been
reckoned above among the comedies. Scott suggests that it may have been at first
designed as a heroic play, but that one effect of The Rehearsal was to induce the
author to recast the piece.
2 Dryden himself, in A Parallel of Poetry and Painting (1695), refuses to defend The
Spanish Fryar on this score, and declares its faults to be those of its genre, which is
of an unnatural mingle' (Ker, vol. II, p. 147).
3 Sir Robert Howard, who was also a politician and a placeman, figured both as a
historical and political writer, and among the poets and playwrights of the age. His
comedy The Committee (1662) satirised ex post facto the doings of the puritan party
whon in power. Of the tragedies for which he was solely responsible, the most
>


## p. 21 (#43) ##############################################

Dryden and the Heroic Play 21
versification of part of this play, which was printed as Howard's,
suggest that it was submitted by him for revision to Dryden, whose
superior skill in the handling of the couplet he freely confessed.
Though devoid of any kind of interest except that which this and
later heroic plays sought in the remoteness and consequent
strangeness of scene, The Indian Queen was successful; and
Dryden was thus encouraged to write a 'sequel' to it under the
title The Indian Emperor, or The Conquest of Mexico by the
Spaniards (acted 1665), by which the success of the new species
was established and his own reputation as a playwright defini-
tively assured. His other plays, which, both in form of verse and
in treatment of subject, fall under the same designation, were
Tyrannick Love, or The Royal Martyr (acted in 1668 or 1669), the
two parts of Almanzor and Almahide, or The Conquest of Granada
(1669 and 1670) and Aureng-Zebe (1676). It will thus be seen
that the number of heroic plays by Dryden was small, and written
at considerable intervals. The earlier of these breaks (1665—8)
was largely due to the closing of the playhouses in consequence of
the plague and the great fire. The later (1670–6) interruption
was, no doubt, partly caused by the appearance of The Rehearsal
(1670). Although that celebrated burlesque cannot be said to have
killed heroic plays, there can be no doubt that, notwithstanding
the brilliant features which some of these plays displayed, the
elements of vitality were wanting in the species. The list of plays
which, as written partly or wholly in the rimed couplet, have any
claim at all to be reckoned as heroic, is small in itself, and, if
reduced by certain obvious omissions, contains, with the exception
of Dryden’s, few works of even secondary significance? . In a word,
Dryden completely dominates the English heroic play.
interesting is The Great Favourite, or The Duke of Lerma (1668), of which the matter
was taken from recent historians. Sir Robert Howard, who had kept himself as
prominent as he could in life, was buried in Westminster abbey. He is the Crites of
An Essay of Dramatick Poesie ; Shadwell ridiculed him under the less courteous
appellation Sir Positive Atall. His brothers Edward and James likewise wrote plays;
the former was author of The Usurper (1668), a tragedy in which Oliver Cromwell
was represented in the character of Damocles, and Hugh Peters appeared as Hugo de
Petra ; the latter perpetrated a version of Romeo and Juliet (1662), with a happy
ending,' which was performed on alternate nights with the catastrophe. James
Howard's comedy Au Mistaken (printed 1672) was acted before Charles II at Trinity
college, Cambridge, in October 1667.
1 See the list in appendix D of Chase, L. N. , The English Heroic Play (New York,
1909). Besides Otway, Crowne and Lee (for certain of their plays), only lord Orrery,
Sir Robert Howard, Elkanah Settle and Banks seem to call for consideration. Of
the latter two, something will be said elsewhere (see post, chap. VII); as to Orrery, a
note may be subjoined in this place. Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery, who, as lord
Broghill, played a part of some importance in Anglo-Irish relations, is, in literature,


## p. 22 (#44) ##############################################

22
Dryden
Like The Indian Emperor, Tyrannick Love treats with much
freedom a theme out of the common track--in this case, the
persecution of the Christians by Maximin and the martyrdom of
St Catharine. The argument of Aureng-Zebe deals, again quite
freely, with a notability of the writer's day, though largely fol-
lowing the course of Racine's Mithridate, and borrowing the
matter of one scene from Le Grand Cyrus. On the other hand,
the most important and the most typical of Dryden's heroic plays,
The Conquest of Granada, is essentially based on Madeleine de
Scudéry's Almahide, while one of its episodes is taken from her
Le Grand Cyrus and another from her Ibrahim. But the im-
portant point is that these subjects, as treated in the plays in
question, all resemble one another in their substance, and, more or
less, in its adjuncts. The plays are all of them ‘heroic' plays, and
the metre which they employ is called the 'heroic'couplet, because
they follow and imitate the example of 'heroic' romance, as set
forth by Ariosto himself. Their themes, like those of heroic poetry
and fiction in general, are the ‘emprises’ and conflicts of absorbing
human passions-love, jealousy and honour-all raised to a trans-
normal height and expressed with a transnormal intensity? . Their
men and women are, if the term may be thus applied, “supermen’
and 'superwomen,' and their master passions are superlove and
superhonour. From these out-of-the-way premisses flow a number
of out-of-the-way results. The actions must be suited to the
motives; their conditions must be unexpected changes and chances
and tumultuous backgrounds, their complications must be in-
soluble except by violent means, and deaths as numerous as
a
most notable as the author of the romance Parthenissa (1654–65). As a dramatist,
he is frigid and uninteresting, though his subjects were unusually varied and treated
in the approved heroic style, and though he was not unskilful in the use of the couplet
which he claimed (not very distinctly) to have first used on the stage. His most effective
play was, perhaps, Mustapha (1665), taken from an episode in Georges de Scudéry's
Ibrahim (founded on his sister's romance); his most interesting drama, The Black Prince,
like all Orrery's plays, in heroic verse, was not acted till 1667. The History of Henry the
Fifth, which ends with an act of heroic renunciation on the part of Owen Tudor, was
the earliest produced by Orrery on the stage, and, probably, the earliest written ky him.
According to Pepys, when Orrery's “heroique plays could do no more wonders,' he turned
to comedy. But it was too late. (For a full account of him, see Siegert, E. , u. s. )
See the magnificently audacious passage in An Essay of Heroick Plays (Essays,
ed. Ker, vol. 1, p. 150): ‘I opened the next book that lay by me, which was an Ariosto
in Italian ; and the very first two lines of that poem, gave me light to all I could desire :
Le donne, i cavalier, l'arme, gli amori,
Le cortesie, l'audaci imprese io canto,' etc.
2 · When I invent a History,' says one of the characters in Clélie, 'I think I should
make things much more perfect than they are. All Women should be admirably fair,
and all Men as valiant as Hector. ' (Cited by Hill, H. W. , u. s. p. 29. )
&


## p. 23 (#45) ##############################################

An Essay of Dramatick Poesie
23
>
leaves in Vallombrosa. Furthermore, the personages of these
dramas must conduct themselves in a manner wholly unlike the
usages obtaining in the daily round of life; it must be a manner
appropriate to spheres into which the imagination alone can trans-
plant us ancient Rome, Jerusalem, or Troy, or, still better, because
-still less familiar, Mexico or the east Indies. Finally, the verse, as
well as the words, must be suited to the action, and the 'heroic'
couplet must serve the purpose of a sort of 'cothurnated,' which is
interpreted 'stilted,' speech'.
It was inevitable that a succession of plays of this type should
soon pall upon the spectator, because of the sameness of their
method (one of Dryden's most persistent assailants, Martin Clifford,
accused him of 'stealing from himself'), unless each new pro-
duction sought to force the pace, and to outvie its predecessors.
The interest in the action, cut adrift, as it was, from probability
and from the sympathy which probability begets, had to be sus-
tained by all sorts of adventitious expedients—supernatural
apparitions and magic processes, with fantastic songs, serenades
and dances. But, notwithstanding the resources of Dryden's
rhetorical genius, and the wonderful mental buoyancy with which
he carried out any task undertaken by him, the species was
doomed to self-exhaustion, nor can its master long have deceived
himself on this head.
Dryden's apologetic Essay of Heroick Plays was preceded in
date of publication by his Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668),
written in reply to Sir Robert Howard's preface to his Foure New
Plays (1665). The earlier essay is in that dialogue form which
had preserved its popularity in the literatures of Europe since it
had been revived by Erasmus and others in the renascence period,
with which Dryden's age was familiar from both Spanish and
French precedents, and which was practised by many contem-
porary English writers, including Clarendon and Burnet. But
there can be little doubt that Dryden derived the most direct
impulse to the composition of the essays in dramatic and other
literary criticism with which he enriched the library of English
prose from the three Discours severally prefixed by Corneille to
the three volumes of the 1660 collection of his plays, and the
Examens which, in the same edition, preceded each drama”.
* All this is put at length in some valuable papers entitled “Dryden's heroisches
Drama,' contributed by Holzhausen, F. , to Englische Studien, vols. x—XVI (1889–92).
See Ker, u. s. introduction, p. xxxvi, as to Martin Clifford's charge against Dryden
of pilfering from other French critical writers.


## p. 24 (#46) ##############################################

24
Dryden
may be.
.
Dryden's famous essay is written with great spirit, and with a
fusion of vigour and ease altogether different from the vivacity
by which literary critics appealing to a wider public at times
strive to hide their thoroughness, or the want of it, as the case
The dialogue form is employed with Platonic grace,
the venue being laid under the sound of the guns discharged in
the battle of Solebay, and audible in the Thames 'like the noise
of distant thunder or swallows in a chimney. ' The conclusions
reached may be described as eclectic and, at the same time, as
based upon experience, albeit the latter was, necessarily, of a very
limited range. As a matter of fact, Dryden's opinions on most
subjects and not the least on dramatic theory-were sufficiently
fluid to respond without reluctance to the demands of common-
sense ; nor did he ever take pride in a doctrinaire consistency-
even with himself. The arguments, in this Essay, of Neander
(who represents Dryden's own views) lead to the conclusion that
observance of the timehonoured laws of dramatic composition, as
reasonably modified by experience—in other words, adherence to
the principle of the unities as severally interpreted by Corneille-
is reconcilable with the greater freedom of treatment assumed by
the masters of the English drama; while the plea for the use of the
rimed couplet, based on its dramatic capabilities, especially in
tragedy, comes in as a sort of corollary!
The immediate occasion for Dryden's Essay had been the
confession of a doubt by Sir Robert Howard (who, as Crites,
reproduces it in the dialogue) with regard to the appropriateness
of the use, in which he had formerly taken part, of the rimed
couplet in dramatic verse. Howard having replied to Dryden's
answer in the preface to his play The Great Favourite, or The
Duke of Lerma (1668), without losing his temperas why should
he have done, except to give grounds for the persistent misrepre-
sentation of a literary difference as a personal quarrel ? -Dryden
wound up the controversy by A Defence of an Essay of Drama-
tick Poesie (1668), prefixed to the second edition of The Indian
Emperor, from later editions of which, however, he omitted it.
This piece, which is an admirable example of light raillery, though
with just a suspicion of a sting, adds little to the previous force
of his argument; but the incidental remark that 'poetry only
1 As Ker says, the substance of the Essay is aptly summed up by the triplet in
Dryden's Prologue to Secret Love (1667):
The Unities of Action, Place and Time,
The Scenes unbroken, and a mingled chime
Of Jonson's manner and Corneille's rhyme.


## p. 25 (#47) ##############################################

The Conquest of Granada.
The Rehearsal 25
instructs as it delights' explains the failure of many attempts
made in defiance of the truth conveyed by the saying.
J
The Conquest of Granada (1669–70) may be justly described
as the heroic play par excellence, and exhibits Dryden as exult-
antly carrying through a prolonged effort such as only the splendid
vigour of his peculiar genius could have sustained throughout at
so tremendous a pitch as is here essayed. The colouring of the
whole is gorgeous, and the hero, Almanzor, combines, on Dryden's
own showing, the imposing features of the Achilles of the Iliad,
Tasso's Rinaldo and the Artaban of La Calprenède's Cléopâtre.
Dryden had now reached the height of his popularity-it was in
the year 1670 that he was appointed poet laureated. With an
arrogance which Almanzor himself could hardly have surpassed-
though it is hidden behind the pretence that
not the poet, but the age is praised -
the Epilogue to the Second Part declares the dramatist superior
to all his predecessors, including Jonson, in 'wit' and power of
diction. The poets of the past could not reply; but, among the
critics of the day who took up the challenge, Rochester, for one,
retorted with a rough tu quoque which is not wholly without
point? Other protests may have ensued; at all events, Dryden
did not allow the hot iron time to cool, but followed up his
rodomontade (for it deserves no other name) by A Defence of the
Epilogue, or An Essay on the Dramatick Poetry of the last Age
(1672), which cannot be called one of the happiest, and is certainly
one of the least broadly conceived, of his critical efforts. Finding
fault with a series of passages in the chief Elizabethan and Jaco-
bean dramatists was not the way to make good the general
contention on which he had ventured. He appealed once more
to his own generation against its predecessors; but he was wise
enough not to appeal to posterity.
Meanwhile (in December 1671), the nemesis provoked by the
arrogance of success had descended upon Dryden, though in no
more august shape than in that of a burlesque dramatic concoction
by a heterogeneous body of wits. The Rehearsal, as the mock
play with its running commentary was called, had gone through a
period of incubation spread over nine or ten years, and among
the contributors to the joke were the duke of Buckingham,
Thomas Sprat (already mentioned), Martin Clifford, master of the
a
i See, as to the date, Malone, Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of Dryden,
vol. 1, part i, p. 87.
? Cited in Scott-Saintsbury edition, vol. iv, p. 244.


## p. 26 (#48) ##############################################

26
Dryden
Charterhouse, a very learned and foulmouthed writer, and, it is
said, though without proof, Samuel Butler. They included in their
ridicule anything which seemed to offer them a chance in any
of Dryden's plays; but they also impartially ransacked the pro-
ductions of other dramatists ; indeed, it would seem that, before
Dryden, D'Avenant and Sir Robert Howard, had, in turn, been
thought of as the central figures of the farce, and that it was only
the triumphant success of The Conquest of Granada which had
concentrated the attack upon its author. The recent appointment
of Dryden to the poet laureateship, of course, suggested the name
Bayes, which the lampooners continued to apply to him for the
rest of his literary career.
The Rehearsal, which, if the long line of its descendants,
including Sheridan's Critic, be taken into account, proved an
important contribution to the literature of the stage, is an
amusing revue of now for the most part forgotten productions,
diversified by humorous sallies of which the spirit of burlesque
always keeps a store for use. Its satire against heroic plays is
incidental, except in so far as they carried artificiality, exaggeration
and bombast further than had any other of the species of plays
ridiculed. Its satire against Dryden himself glanced off, practically
harmless, from a personality in which there was nothing to provoke
a
derision, and from a genius to which no adversary could seriously
impute poverty of invention or sameness of workmanship. Thus, he
was able to treat the satire, so far as it concerned him personally,
with more or less goodhumoured contempt”; and his revanche on
Buckingham, when it came, was free from spite. As for heroic
plays, he certainly did not leave off writing them because of The
Rehearsal ; nor did it deter him from publishing a reasoned essay
in defence of the species. But he could not expect to outdo his
chief effort of the kind; and no other playwright was likely to
seek to surpass him in a combination of treatment and form which
he had made peculiarly his own.
In 1672, The Conquest of Granada was published in company
with a prefatory essay Of Heroick Plays. The essay opens with the
assertion—the latter half of which Dryden was afterwards himself
a
14
· Sprat and Mat' afterwards assisted Settle in his Absalom Senior, or Achitophel
Transpros'd. Cf. Malone, u. s.
? He even made occasional use of the fun of the piece by way of illustration ; but,
when, in his Discourse on Satire (1693), he sought to depreciate the force of the satire,
he was not very happy, or, at:least, remains rather obscure (vol. 11, p. 21, Ker's edition).
It is curious that, in the scene cited by Chase (The English Heroic Play, appendix C)
from Arrowsmith's Reformation, & comedy (1673) satirising rimed tragedy, there
should not be any apparent reference to Dryden.


## p. 27 (#49) ##############################################

Aureng-Zebe and
27
Other Plays
to help to refute—that heroic verse was already in possession of
the stage, and that 'very few tragedies, in this age' would be
received without it. ' For the rest, this essay only develops
propositions previously advanced, besides fearlessly engaging in
a defence of the non plus ultra of the heroic character-type,
Almanzor, the Drawcansir of The Rehearsal.
It was not till three (or four) years later that Dryden took
a final leave of heroic tragedy with Aureng-Zebe, or The Great
Mogul (acted 1675, and printed in the following year). As the
prologue, one of the noblest of Dryden's returns upon himself,
confesses, he was growing 'weary of his long-loved mistress,
Rhyme,' and, while himself abandoning dramatic for other forms of
composition, inclined to‘yield the foremost honours' of the stage
to the early masters on whose want of refinement he had previously
insisted? The play itself, while already less rigidly adhering to
the self-imposed rules of the species, is visibly influenced by the
example of the refinement and restraint of Racine.
Between The Conquest of Granada and Aureng-Zebe, Dryden
had produced, besides two comedies already noted, a tragedy
d'occasion, of which the plot is, indeed, as in a heroic play, based
upon amorous passion, but which was thrown upon the stage to
inflame popular feeling against the Dutch (with whom the country
was now at war). Amboyna, or The Cruelties of the Dutch to the
English Merchants, a production unworthy of its author, was
hastily written in prose, with an admixture of blank verse.
On
the other hand, in the opera The State of Innocence and Fall of
Man (printed in 1674, shortly after the death of Milton) Dryden
had, no doubt, taken his time in 'tagging the verses' of Paradise
Lost; for his dramatic version of the poem was meant as a
tribute to its great qualities and not intended for performance on
the stage, any more than Milton's own contemplated dramatic
treatment of his theme would have been. The Author's Apology
for Heroick Poetry and Poetic Licence, which accompanies the
published 'opera,' does little more than vindicate for the treatment
of sublime themes the use of a poetic diction from which convention
shrinks; but it is valuable, if for nothing else, for its opening
definition of true criticism, which they wholly mistake 'who think
its business is principally to find fault. ' The ‘operatic' version of
Paradise Lost must be pronounced a failure, not the least in
1
-Spite of all his pride, & secret shame
Invades his breast at Shakespeare's sacred name.
A more magnanimous literary confession was never made.


## p. 28 (#50) ##############################################

28
Dryden
what it adds to its original; its chief interest in connection with
Dryden's literary progress lies in his skilful handling of certain
celebrated argumentative passages.
With Dryden's remaniement of Milton's greatest work may be
compared his handling, before and after this well meant attempt, of
two Shakespearean dramas. In the case of The Tempest, or The
Enchanted Island (acted 1667, but not printed till 1670), Dryden's
own preface, dated 1 December 1669, shows that the workmanship
was mainly D'Avenant's, who, as Dryden, with his habitual generous
frankness, declares, 'first taught him to admire Shakespeare. ' To
D'Avenant was owing the grotesque notion of providing a male
counterpart for Miranda, a sister for Caliban and a female com-
panion for Ariel; and he would appear to have generally revised
- the work of his younger partner? Quite otherwise, Dryden's
All for Love, or The World Well Lost is not an adaptation of
Antony and Cleopatra, but a free treatment of the same subject
on his own lines. The agreeable preface which precedes the
published play, written in a style flavoured by the influence of
Montaigne, which was perceptibly growing on Dryden, takes the
censure of his production, as it were, out of the mouths of the
critics, and then turns upon the poetasters with almost cruel
ridicule, which may have helped to exasperate Rochester, evidently
the principal object of attack. In All for Love, Dryden, with as
little violence as might be, was reverting from the imitation of
French tragedy to Elizabethan models. The dramatist seems as
fully as ever to reserve to himself the freedom which he claims as
his inherent right; if he pays attention to the unities, especially to
that of place, it is with more exactness 'than perhaps the English
theatre requires'; and, if he has 'disencumbered himself' from
rime, it is not because he condemns his “former way. His
purpose was to follow—we may probably add, to emulate-
Shakespeare, treating the subject of a Shakespearean tragedy in
his own way, uninvidiously, but with perfect freedom. In the
result, Dryden has little to fear from comparison in the matter of
construction; and, though, in characterisation, he falls short of his
exemplar, at all events so far as the two main personages are
concerned, there is much in the general execution that calls for
1 So, in act III, sc. 1, the vision suggested to Eve by the whisperings of Satan.
2 In 1673, The Tempest was turned into an opera by Shadwell, who shifted the scenes,
and added, besides at least one new song, an entirely new masque at the close. It is this
version, and not D'Avenant and Dryden's, printed in 1670, which was printed in the
1674 and all subsequent editions of the restoration Tempest. This rectification of a
longstanding blunder is due to the researches, conducted independently in each case,
of W. J. Lawrence and Sir Ernest Clarke: see bibliography, post, p. 398.
6
6


## p. 29 (#51) ##############################################

The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy 29
2
9
the highest praise. He was conscious of his achievement, and
declared that he 'never writ anything for himself but Antony and
Cleopatra! /
Once again, in Troilus and Cressida, or Truth Found too Late
(printed 1679), Dryden concerned himself with a Shakespearean
play, this time, however, adapting his original plot with scant
piety-in his own words, 'new-modelling the plot, throwing out
many unnecessary Persons; improving those characters which
were begun and left unfinished, as Hector, Troilus, Pindarus and
Thersites, and adding that of Andromache. ' It cannot be gainsaid
that Shakespeare, for whatever reason, failed to carry through the
action of his Troilus and Cressida with vigour and completeness ;
but what he left was marred rather than mended in Dryden's
adaptation, the catastrophe being altered and the central idea of
the play, the fickleness of the heroine, botched in the process—and
all to what ends ?
With this attempt, which must be classed among Dryden's
dramatic failures, was printed the remarkable Preface concerning
the Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy, which, although not actually
the last of Dryden's contributions to dramatic criticism, may be
said to complete their cycle. Here, at last, we find a plain and
reasonable application of the fundamental Aristotelian theory of
tragedy to the practice of the English drama. Shakespeare and
Fletcher—the former in particular-are set down as deficient in
'the mechanic beauties of the plot; but, in the 'manners' of
their plays, in which the characters delineated in them are com-
prehended, the two great masters of the English drama are
extolled at the expense of their French rivals. Although ex-
ception must be taken to the distinction between Shakespeare
and Fletcher as excelling respectively in the depiction of the
more manly and the softer passions, 'to conclude all,' we are told,
'Fletcher was a limb of Shakespeare'-in other words, the less!
is included in the greater. Thus, though neither of much length
nor very clearly arranged, this essay signally attests the soundness
of Dryden's critical judgment, with his insight into the fact that
the most satisfactory dramatic theory is that which is abstracted
from the best dramatic practice. It was not given to him to
1 See A Parallel of Poetry and Painting (Essays, ed. Ker, vol. II, p. 152).
* I. e. working them up for stage purposes. Betterton played Troilus, and spoke
the prologue in the character of the ghost of Shakespeare (Thomas Betterton, by
Lowe, R. , p. 123).
3 Cf. Delius, N. , 'Dryden und Shakespeare,' in Jahrbuch d. deutschen Shakespeare.
Gesellschaft, vol. 1v (1869).
<


## p. 30 (#52) ##############################################

30
Dryden
exemplify by his own dramatic works the supreme freedom
claimed by the greatest masters of the art; but he was not to
end his theatrical career without having come nearer than he
had as yet approached to his own ideals.
From this point of view, two tragedies may be passed by in
which the unbalanced, but not wholly uninspired, powers of Lee
cooperated with the skill and experience of Dryden? Oedipus
(acted 1678), though provided with an underplot, threw down a
futile challenge to both Sophocles and Corneille. In The Duke
of Guise (acted in December 1682), Dryden's share seems to have
been mainly confined to the furbishing up of what he had written
many years before? Whatever he might say in the elaborate
Vindication of the Duke of Guise (printed in 1683), the political
intention of the play, as a picture of the now discomfited intrigues
of Shaftesbury in favour of Monmouth, was palpable, and not
disproved by the fact that the authority of Davila had been more
or less closely followed, or by the other fact that the parallel
might, in some respects, have been pressed further than would
have been pleasing to king Charles3.
In Albion and Albanius, Dryden committed himself to a still
lower descent-hardly to be excused by the 'thought-depressing'
quality of opera mentioned by Dryden (who, on this head, agreed
with Saint-Évremond) in the interesting preface which gives a short
account of the early history of musical drama. After many delays,
the chief of them being due to the death of Charles II, in com-
pliment to whom the opera had been first put together, it was at
last performed on 3 June 1685. Ten days later, the news arrived
of Monmouth's landing at Lyme, and the unlucky piece, with its
jingling rimes, music by L. Grabut and all, was finally withdrawn.
Saintsbury describes it as, to all intents and purposes, a masque;
but it lacks all the beauties of which that kind of composition is
capable, and which are not made up for by the grotesquely
ridiculous supernatural machinery to which here, as in The Duke
of Guise, the author condescended to have recourse. Dryden was
not, however, deterred from carrying out his intention of writing
the ‘dramatic opera’ of King Arthur or The British Worthy, to
which Albion and Albanius had been designed as a prelude. It
was produced in 1691, with music by Purcell; but, notwith-
standing the claim put forth in the preface, little or no proof is
6
6
>
1 As to Lee, see post, chap. VII.
2 See ante, p. 16.
3 The not very skilful passage in honour of the king's brother of Navarre'
(act v, so. 1) must have been foisted in as a tribute to the duke of York.
C


## p. 31 (#53) ##############################################

Don Sebastian and Cleomenes
31
furnished of Dryden's familiarity with Arthurian romance; and,
in spite of the magic, there is not much fire in the piece,
while the figure of the blind Emmeline is an unpleasing experi-
ment. Perhaps, as the tag suggests, the poet was, for once, almost
losing heart.
After the close of king James II's reign, however, two plays
were produced by Dryden, which may be regarded as a worthy
consummation of his dramatic development. Yet Don Sebastian
(acted 1690) is incorrectly regarded as marking his emancipation
from the traditions either of tragicomedy or of the heroic play,
though it is blank verse which, in this piece, alternates with
prose. On the contrary, the serious action of Don Sebastian is
a romantic fiction-an attempt to account by a love-story, ending
with a most astonishing recognition, both for the well known dis-
appearance of Don Sebastian in the battle of Alcazar and for the
rumour that he lived for some time afterwards as an anchorite.
The comic action of the mufti is repulsive, though noticeable as
illustrating Dryden's animus against all kinds of clergy? The
only real attempt at drawing character is to be found in the
figure of Dorax, particularly in a scene which has met with
universal praise
Although the tragedy Cleomeness, the Spartan Hero (acted
1692) is not usually deemed equal to its predecessor, it is finely
conceived, and, on the whole, finely carried through on the lines of
French classical tragedy, without any comic or other adventitious
admixture. The character of the hero (performed by Betterton),
though probably modelled on Hengo in Fletcher's Bonduca, is
drawn with vivacity, and, in the earlier part of the rather long
drawn out catastrophe, with pathos. Plutarch's abundant material
is supplemented from other sources; and, though, viewing Dryden's
dramatic work as a whole, it is impossible to regret that he should
not earlier have engaged in a wholehearted imitation of French
tragedy, his one complete attempt in that direction must be pro-
nounced a noble play. With it, our survey of his career as a
dramatist may fitly end; for it is unnecessary to do more than
refer to the Secular Masque written by him, together with a
prologue and epilogue, to grace the revival, for his own benefit,
of Fletcher's Pilgrim, which actually took place in June 1700,
little more than a fortnight after the beneficiary's death. The
1. Priests of all religions are the same,' Absalom and Achitophel, part 1, v. 99.
? Act iv, sc. 3.
3 Dryden, with Corneille and Racine in his ear, accentuates Cleoménes.


## p. 32 (#54) ##############################################

32
Dryden
6
>
6
tone of gentle pessimism audible in the masque recurs in the
epilogue, where, without the acrimony with which he had assailed
'Quack Maurus' (Sir Richard Blackmore) in the prologue, he
defends himself against the censures preferred against the con-
temporary drama in Jeremy Collier’s Short View of the Immorality
and Profanity of the English Stage (1698). Dryden's defence-
truthful so far as it goes (which is not very far)—is the evil
influence of ways of thought and life brought over by a 'banished
court'; a far nobler attitude than this of uneasy apology had been
the open avowal of shame made by him many years earlier in the
ode To the Pious Memory of Mrs Anne Killigrew (1686)".
Dryden's association with the stage was not a source of pride
to himself, and can be regarded only with qualified satisfaction by
the admirers of his poetic genius. That he attained to a very
notable degree of success in almost every branch of dramatic
literature which he essayed cannot be held surprising ; but it
was only in the heroic play, in which he strained every nerve to
'surpass the life,' that he distanced all his rivals and followers.
Although, at times, carried away by the impetus of his own genius,
Dryden could not often put his heart into his dramatic com-
position, least of all into the comic side of it. He wearied of play-
writing from the outset—frequently passing from one kind of play
to another, and back again, but rarely satisfied with any phase of
his endeavours. When, after a long interval of absence he returned
to the arena in whose contests he had taken a prominent part,
- about whose theory and practice he had speculated widely and
written at length, but which, at times, like Ben Jonson he was
led to call the 'loathed stage, it was with a sense of fatigued
unwillingness which even the most overworked and blasé of
modern playwrights, 'still condemned to dig in those exhausted
mines,' would be slow to avow?
This, of course, is not to say that Dryden failed to enrich
English dramatic literature by much magnificent writing-more
especially in his heroic plays-or to deny that at least one comedy
Dryden's best balanced utterance on the subject is, perhaps, that in the preface
to the Fables (Essays, ed. Ker, vol. II, pp. 272—3); but neither does this ring true.
As to Collier's attack (and as to previous invective against the stage) see Ward, A. W. ,
History of English Dramatic Literature, etc. , vol. ni, pp. 509 ff. , and cf. , for an account
of the controversy, The Life of Jeremy Collier' in vol. I of the 1845 edition of
his Ecclesiastical History, pp. xv ff. Of Collier, something will be said in vol. ix of
the present work.
See the account of the reasons which had made him utterly weary of the theatre,
in the preface to Don Sebastian (Works, ed. Saintsbury, vol. vni, p. 307), where he
applies to himself the phrase cited above.
1


## p. 33 (#55) ##############################################

Prologues and Epilogues 33
3
(as we may call The Spanish Fryar) and one tragedy (Au for
Love) from his hand permanently hold their own among dramatic
masterpieces of their respective kinds. It is of greater importance
that, in Taine's words, Dryden's work as a dramatist 'purified and
clarified his own style' by teaching him closeness of dialectics and
precision in the use of words; that, in it and by it, under the
guidance of Corneille, he learnt the art of political oratory and
debate, and, at the same time, attained to that mastery of the
heroic couplet of which he was to make superb use in his satirical
poems. Dryden, who, in these poems, was to show an unsurpassed
power of drawing character, rightly recognised in its presentation
the supreme function of the dramatist; but, the secret of exhibiting
the development of character by action he was not able, unless
exceptionally, to compass, and it was thus that he came to fall
short of the highest dramatic excellence.
Reserving, for the moment, a reference to the lyrics in Dryden's
dramas, we must not take leave of these without a word as to his
3
prologues and epilogues. There was no species of composition in
which he more conspicuously excelled, or in which those who
came after him more decidedly failed to reach his eminence; but
many circumstances help to account for the signal success with
which, in the present instance, he exerted his innate power of 'im-
proving' every literary opportunity that came in his way. The age
.
which preceded Dryden's was, above everything, a pamphleteer-
ing age;. and his own generation had retained at least a full
freedom of unlicensed allusion—whether political or other. When
we further remember that the mode of the day was a frankness of
\ tongue in which dukes and duchesses did their utmost to imitate
linkmen and orangewomen, it is not difficult to understand why
the prologue and epilogue, instead of adhering to their humbler
task of commending to attention and favour a particular play,
became accepted vehicles of political praise and blame, intermixed
with current social satire of all sorts. In the relatively small area
of restoration London, of which the court was the acknowledged
centre, these sallies were always transparent and always welcome.
The licence which the prologues, and, still more, the epilogues,
allowed themselves was, consequently, wide, and was duly repre-
hended by censors of the stage like Jeremy Collier. Their delivery
was generally entrusted to stage favourites, who were assured of
a hearing and 'might say what they liked. Very frequently, as in
the case of many of Dryden's, these addresses were composed by
leading authors for less known writers, or, again, by personages
3
E. L. VIII.
CH. I.


## p. 34 (#56) ##############################################

34
Dryden
who wished to remain free from direct responsibility. Their
importance may, perhaps, have been exaggerated; but, printed as
broadsides, they must often have added to the attractions of a
performance, and have been carried home as an enduring re-
membrance. Thus, the composition of them was assiduously
cultivated, and remunerated by a handsome feel
The examples of this kind of composition remaining from
Dryden's hand amount to nearly one hundred. They attest his
inventive powers in the way of conception and arrangement
including the variety of ‘prologues made to be dialogues,' burlesqued
in The Rehearsal in the 'prodialogue' between Thunder and
Lightning”; they also attest his power, both of more playful
sarcasm (as in his multiform jests against the critics) and of
condensed invective or admonition. Among them may be included
three prologues spoken on definite political occasions, unconnected
with the production of particular stage-plays; one of these, the
Prologue to the Duchess (of York] on her return from Scotland
(1682) is a charming example of reckless flattery.
We now resume our general summary of Dryden’s life and
literary work from the time of the beginning of his labours as
a dramatist, which it seemed most convenient to survey con-
tinuously. His simultaneous appointments in 1668 as poet laureate
(in succession to D'Avenant) and as historiographer royal (for
which latter post his qualifications, doubtless, were found in Annus
Mirabilis) imposed no duties 'hereafter to be done,' nor were any
performed by him in either of his official capacities; for his trans-
lation of Maimbourg's History of the League (1684), at the request
of Charles II, can hardly be regarded as a service to English
historiography. Thus, he went on writing for and about the stage,
adding to his modest income by dedications, prologues, intro-
ductory essays and prefaces. But, though criticism often meant
controversy, and a constantly growing reputation drew the eyes of
Londoners and strangers on the famous man of letters, as he sat in
his accustomed seat in Will's coffee house, at the corner of Russell
street and Bow street, Covent Garden, everything seems to show
6
1 The usual fee was five guineas, till Dryden charged Southerne ten for a
prologue and epilogue to The Loyal Brother, or The Loyal Prince (see Scott-
Saintsbury's edition, vol. 1, p. 245). Both are very hard on the • Whiggs,' and Dryden
scarcely ever wrote anything coarser.
? Cited in A Study of the Prologue and Epilogue in English Literature from
Shakespeare to Dryden, by G. 8. B. (1884), to which the reader may be referred for a
careful treatment of an interesting subject.


## p. 35 (#57) ##############################################

The · Rose-alley Ambuscade'
35
that, by disposition, and in his ways of life, he was a quiet and
retiring man, plain in his habiliments, and averse from the broils
which disgraced the republic of letters. Those in which, in his
earlier days, he was implicated do not seem to have been of his
own seeking; but the existing methods of literary, and, more
especially, theatrical, competition, and the consequent necessity of
securing the patronage of leaders of society and fashion, made it
all but impossible to be in the town' and not of it. Noblemen of
Rochester's stamp, and others of a more sober sort, took pride in
displaying their more or less arbitrary patronage of men of letters.
This condition of things may almost be said to have culminated in
the ‘Rose-alley ambuscade,' one of the most shameless episodes in
English literary history. On the suspicion of his having assisted
John Sheffield, earl of Mulgrave (afterwards duke of Buckingham-
shire) in a passage in his Essay on Satire reflecting on Rochester's
'want of wit,' Dryden was brutally assaulted by hirelings of that
patron of letters, who had recently transferred his favours, such as
they were, to other writers (1679) 1.
It would not serve any purpose to dwell upon the general mori-
geration of Dryden, who, in this as in other respeots, was 'hurried
down' the times in which he lived, to the leaders of politics and
fashion, to the king's ministers, favourites and mistresses, or upon
the flatteries which, in dedications and elsewhere, he heaped upon
the king himself, and upon his brother the duke. The attempts,
however, which have been made to show that his pen was 'venal'
-in any sense beyond that of his having been paid for his compli-
ments, or, at least, for a good many of them—may be said to have
broken down; and the fact that he may have received payment
from the king for writing The Medal does not prove that he was
inspired by the expectation of personal profit when he first attacked
the future medallist in Absalom and Achitophel.
In undertaking the composition of this great satire, whether or
not at the request of Charles II, Dryden had found his great
literary opportunity; and, of this, he took advantage in a spirit far
removed from that of either the hired bravos or the spiteful
lampooners of his age. For this opportunity he had been uncon-
sciously preparing himself as a dramatist; and it was in the
nature of things, and in accordance with the responsiveness of his
There is small comfort in & parallel; but, in noting the light thrown by this
incident upon the relations between society and letters in Dryden's age, it may be
added that the date of a not dissimilar brutal insult to Voltaire by a member of the
house of Rohan was 1725.
3_2


## p. 36 (#58) ##############################################

36
Dryden
6
9)
genius to the calls made upon it by time and circumstance, that,
in the season of a great political crisis, he should have rapidly per-
ceived his chance of decisively influencing public opinion by an
exposure of the aims and methods of the party of revolution.
This he proposed to accomplish, not by a poetic summary of the
rights of the case, or by a sermon in verse on the sins of factious-
ness, corruption and treason, but by holding up to the times and
their troubles, with no magisterial air or dictatorial gesture, a
mirror in which, under a happily contrived disguise, the true friends
and the real foes of their king and country should be recognised.
This was the “Varronian' form of satire afterwards commended
by him, with a well warranted self-consciousness, as the species,
mixing serious intent with pleasant manner, to which, among the
ancients, several of Lucian's Dialogues and, among the moderns,
the Encomium Moriae of Erasmus belong. Of the same kind is
“Mother Hubberd's Tale" in Spenser, and (if it be not too vain
to mention anything of my own) the poems of "Absalom” and
“MacFlecknoel. ”'
The political question at issue, in the troubled times of which
the names 'whig' and 'tory' still survive as speaking mementoes,
was that of the succession of the Catholic heir to the throne, or of
his exclusion in favour of some other claimant-perhaps the king's
son Monmouth, whom many believed legitimate (the Absalom of
the poem). For many months, Shaftesbury, who, after serving and
abandoning a succession of governments, had passed into opposi-
tion, had seemed to direct the storm. Two parliaments had been
called in turn, and twice the Exclusion bill had been rejected by
the lords. Then, as the whig leader seemed to have thrown all hesi-
tation to the winds, and was either driving his party or being driven
by it into extremities from which there was no return, a tremor of
reaction ran through the land, the party round the king gathered
confidence, and, evidence supposed sufficient to support the charge
having been swept in, Shaftesbury was committed to the Tower on
a charge of high treason. It was at this time of tension, while a
similar charge was being actually pressed to the gallows against
a humbler agent of faction (the ‘Protestant joiner’ Stephen College),
that Dryden's great effort to work upon public opinion was made.
Part I of Absalom and Achitophel, which seems to have been
taken in hand quite early in 1681, was published on 17 November
in that year. Shaftesbury, it is known, was then fearing for his
life. A week later, in spite of all efforts to the contrary, the bill
14 Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (Essays, ed. Ker,
vol. 11, p. 67).
-


## p. 37 (#59) ##############################################

Absalom and Achitophel
37
was ignored by the Middlesex grand jury. Great popular rejoicing
followed, and a medal was struck in Shaftesbury's honour, repre-
senting the sun emerging from the clouds, with the legend Laeta-
mur. But, this momentary triumph notwithstanding, the game
was all but up; and, within a few months, Monmouth, in his turn,
was under arrest, and Shaftesbury a fugitive in Holland.
Without a mention of this well known sequence of events, the
fact might, perhaps, be overlooked that part 1 of Absalom and
Achitophel' is complete in itself, being intended to help in pro-
ducing a direct result at a given moment, and that it is in no sense
to be regarded as a mere instalment of a larger whole, or as an in-
troduction to it. Part II was a mere afterthought, and, being only
to a relatively small extent by Dryden, should, in the first instance,
be left out of consideration.
Absalom and Achitophel veils its political satire under the
transparent disguise of one of the most familiar episodes of Old
Testament history, which the existing crisis in English affairs
resembled sufficiently to make the allegory apposite and its inter-
pretation easy. The attention of the English public, and, more
especially, that of the citizens of London, with whom the decision
of the immediate political issue lay, was sure to be arrested by a
series of characters whose names and distinctive features were
borrowed from the Old Testament; and the analogy between
Charles II's and David's early exile and final triumphant establish-
ment on the throne was a commonplace of restoration poetry.
Indeed, the actual notion of an adaptation of the story of Achito-
phel's wiles as the Picture of a wicked Politician' was not new to
English controversial literature; in 1680, a tract entitled Absalom's
Conspiracy had dealt with the supposed intentions of Monmouth;
and a satire published in 1681, only a few months before Dryden's
poem, had applied the name Achitophel, with some other oppro-
brious names, to Shaftesbury. For the rest, Dryden, with the
grandezza habitual to him, was careless about fitting the secondary
figures of his satire exactly with their Scriptural aliases, or boring
the reader by a scrupulous fidelity or even consistency of detail.
Absalom and Achitophel remains the greatest political satire
in our literature, partly because it is frankly political, and not in-
tended, like Hudibras, by means of a mass of accumulated detail,
to convey a general impression of the vices and follies, defects and
extravagances, of a particular section or particular sections of the
nation. With Dryden, every hit is calculated, and every stroke
1 It was not, of course, when first published, called part r’ at all.
: E. g. in the allegorical use of the names Hebron and Jordan.
2
1
6


## p. 38 (#60) ##############################################

38
Dryden
goes home; in each character brought on the scene, those features
only are selected for exposure or praise which are of direct
significance for the purpose in hand. It is not a satirical narrative
complete in itself which is attempted; the real dénouement of the
piece falls not within, but outside, its compass; in other words, the
poem was to lead up, as to an unavoidable sequitur, to the trial
and conviction of its hero. The satirist, after the fashion of a
great parliamentary orator, has his subject and his treatment of it
well in hand; through all the force of the invective and the fervour
of the praise, there runs a consciousness of the possibility that the
political situation may change. This causes a constant self-control
and wariness in the author, who is always alive to his inspiration
and never unmindful of his cue. Instead of pouring forth a stream
of Aristophanic vituperation or boyish fun in the vein of Canning,
he so nicely adapts the relations of the more important of his
characters to the immediate issue that the treatment, both of the
tempter Achitophel and of the tempted Absalom, admitted of
manipulation when, before the appearance of the poem in a
second edition', the condition of affairs had changed.
Chapter and verse could, without difficulty, be found for every
item in Johnson's well known panegyric of Absalom and Achitophel
in his Life of Dryden. The incomparable brilliancy of its diction
and versification are merits which, to be acknowledged, need only
to be mentioned. Still, its supreme excellence lies in its de-
scriptions of character, which, no doubt, owed something to his
dramatic practice, and more to the development which this kind of
writing had experienced during a whole generation of English
prose literature, reaching its full height in Clarendon. Dryden's
exquisite etchings cannot be compared with the finest of the
full-length portraits from the hand of the great historical writer;
but, thanks, no doubt, in part, to the Damascene brightness and
keenness into which the poet had tempered his literary instrument,
and thanks, also, to the imaginative insight which, in him, the literary
follower of the Stewarts, was substituted for the unequalled experi-
ence of their chosen adviser, Clarendon, the characters of the poem
live in the memory with unequalled tenacity. How unmistakably is
the preeminence of Achitophel among the opponents of the royal
government signalised by his being commissioned, like his prototype 2
when charged with the temptation and corruption of mankind, to
1 The story according to which the tribute to Shaftesbury's merits as a judge was
inserted because he had presented one of Dryden's sons to the Charterhouse was
a fabrication as baseless as it was stupid.