No More Learning

4918 (#78) ############################################


JOHN DRYDEN


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4919
JOHN DRYDEN
(1631-1700)
BY THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY
OHN DRYDEN, the foremost man of letters of the period fol-
lowing the Restoration, was born at Aldwinkle, a village of
Northamptonshire, on August 9th, 1631. He died May ist,
1700. His life was therefore coeval with the closing period of the
fierce controversies which culminated in the civil war and the tri-
umph of the Parliamentary party; that, in turn, to be followed suc-
cessively by the iron rule of Cromwell, by the restoration of the
exiled Stuarts, and the reactionary tendencies in politics that accom-
panied that event; and finally with the effectual exclusion from the
throne of this same family by the revolution of 1688, leaving behind,
however, to their successors a smoldering Jacobite hostility that per-
petually plotted the overthrow of the new government and later
broke out twice into open revolt. All these changes of fortune, with
their changes of opinion, are faithfully reflected in the productions of
Dryden. To understand him thoroughly requires therefore an inti-
mate familiarity with the civil and religious movements which char-
acterize the whole period. Equally also do his writings, both creative
and critical, represent the revolution of literary taste that took place
in the latter half of the seventeenth century. It was while he was in
the midst of his intellectual activity that French canons of criticism
became largely the accepted rules, by which the value of English
productions was tested. This was especially true of the drama. The
study of Dryden is accordingly a study of the political and literary
history of his times to an extent that is correspondingly true of no
other English author before or since.
His family, both on the father's and the mother's side, was in full
sympathy with the party opposed to the court. The son was edu-
cated at Westminster, then under the mastership of Richard Busby,
whose relentless use of the rod has made his name famous in that
long line of flagellants who have been at the head of the great Eng-
lish public schools. From Westminster he went to Trinity College,
Cambridge. There he received the degree of A. B. in January 1654.
Later in that same decade the precise date is not known — he took
up his residence in London; and in London the rest of his life was
almost entirely spent.


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JOHN DRYDEN.


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their changes of
Dryden. Tunda
mate familiarity ?
acterize the whole
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in the latter half
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Later in that same nila
up his residence in Li:
almost entirely spent.
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4920
JOHN DRYDEN
Dryden's first published literary effort appeared in a little volume
made up of thirty-three elegies, by various authors, on the death of
a youth of great promise who had been educated at Westminster.
This was Lord Hastings, the eldest son of the Earl of Huntingdon.
He had died of the small-pox. Dryden's contribution was written in
1649, and consisted of but little over a hundred lines. No one ex-
pects great verse from a boy of eighteen; but the most extravagant
anticipations of sorry performance will fail to come up to the reality
of the wretchedness which was here attained. It was in words like
these that the future laureate bewailed the death of the young noble-
man and depicted the disease of which he died :-
«Was there no milder way but the small-pox,
The very filthiness of Pandora's box?
So many spots, like næves, our Venus soil ?
One jewel set off with so many a foil?
Blisters with pride swelled, which through his fesh did sprout
Like rosebuds, stuck in the lily-skin about.
Each little pimple had a tear in it,
To wail the fault its rising did commit;
Which, rebel-like, with its own lord at strife,
Thus made an insurrection 'gainst his life.
Or were these gems sent to adorn his skin,
The cabinet of a richer soul within ?
No comet need foretell his change drew on,
Whose corps might seem a constellation. ”
Criticism cannot be rendered sufficiently vituperative to character-
ize properly such a passage. It is fuller of conceits than ever Cowley
crowded into the same space; and lines more crabbed and inhar-
monious Donne never succeeded in perpetrating. Its production up-
sets all principles of prophecy. The wretchedest of poetasters can
take courage, when he contemplates the profundity of the depth out
of which uprose the greatest poet of his time.
Dryden is, in fact, an example of that somewhat rare class of
writers who steadily improve with advancing years. Most poets write
their best verse before middle life. Many of them after that time go
through a period of decline, and sometimes of rapid decline; and if
they live to reach old age, they add to the quantity of their produc-
tion without sensibly increasing its value. This general truth is con-
spicuously untrue of Dryden. His first work gave no promise of his
future excellence, and it was by very slow degrees that he attained
to the mastery of his art. But the older he grew, the better he
wrote; and the volume published a few months before his death, and
largely composed almost under its shadow, so far from showing the


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JOHN DRYDEN
4921
slightest sign of failing power, contains a great deal of the best
poetry he ever produced.
As Dryden's relatives were Puritans, and some of them held place
under the government, it was natural that upon coming to London
he should attach himself to that party. Accordingly it is no surprise
to find him duly mourning the death of the great Protector in cer-
tain Heroic Stanzas Consecrated to the Memory of Oliver Cromwell. ”
The first edition bears the date of 1659, and so far as we know, the
production was Dryden's second venture in poetry. It was written
in the measure of Davenant's Gondibert,' and is by no means a poor
piece of work, though it has been sometimes so styled. It certainly
pays not simply a high but a discerning tribute to the genius of
Cromwell. Before two years had gone by, we find its author greet-
ing the return of Charles with effusive loyalty, and with predictions
of prosperity and honor to attend his reign, which events were soon
woefully to belie. The poet has been severely censured for this
change of attitude. It is a censure which might be bestowed with as
much propriety upon the whole population of England. The joyful
expectations to which he gave utterance were almost universal; and
no other charge can well be brought against him than that he had
the ability and took the occasion to express sentiments which were
felt by nearly the entire nation.
From this time on, Dryden appears more and more in the public
eye, and slowly but steadily forged his way to the front as the rep-
resentative man of letters of his time. In 1670 he was appointed to
the two distinct offices of poet laureate and historiographer royal.
Thenceforward his relations with the court became close, and so
they did not cease to be until the expulsion of James II. In 1683 he
received a further mark of royal favor, in being made collector of
customs of the port of London. In the political controversies which
subsequently arose, Dryden's writings faithfully represented the sen-
timents of the side he had chosen, and expressed their prejudices
and aversions not merely with force but also with virulence. His
first literary activity, however, was on neutral ground. After eigh-
teen years of compulsory closing, the Restoration opened wide once
more the doors of the theatre. Dryden, like every one else possessed
of literary ability, began to write for the stage. His first play, a
comedy entitled “The Wild Gallant,' was brought out in February
1663; and for the eighteen years following, it was compositions of
such nature that occupied the main portion of his literary life. Dur-
ing that time he produced wholly or in part twenty-two comedies
and tragedies. His pieces must from the outset have met with a
fair degree of success, otherwise the King's Company would not have
entered into a contract with him, as it did in 1667, to furnish for


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4922
JOHN DRYDEN
them each year a fixed number of plays, in consideration of his
receiving a certain share of the profits of the theatre.
Yet it cannot be said that Dryden was in any respect a dramatist
of a high order. As a writer of comedy he was not only inferior to
contemporaries and immediate successors like Wycherley, Congreve,
Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, but in certain ways he was surpassed by
Shadwell, the very man whom he himself has consigned to a disagree-
able immortality as the hero of the MacFlecknoe. ' His comedies
are not merely full of obscenity, — which seems to have been a neces-
sary ingredient to suit them to the taste of the age,— but they are
full of a peculiarly disagreeable obscenity. One of his worst offenses in
this direction, and altogether his most impudent one, was his adapta-
tion for the stage of Shakespeare's “Tempest. The two plays are
worth reading together for the sake of seeing how easily a pure and
perfect creation of genius can be vulgarized in language and spirit
almost beyond the possibility of recognition. ' In his tragedies,
however, Dryden was much more successful. Yet even these, in spite
of the excellence of occasional passages, do not attain to a high rank.
Indeed, thought and expression are at times extravagant, not to say
stilted, to an extent which afterward led him himself to make them
the subject of ridicule. It was in them, however, during these years
that he perfected by degrees his mastery of heroic verse, of which
later he was to display the capabilities in a way that had never pre-
viously been seen and has never since been surpassed.
A controversy in regard to the proper method of composing plays
brought forward Dryden, at an early period in his literary career, as
a writer of prose. In this he at once attained unusual eminence. In
him appear for the first time united the two characters of poet and
of critic. Ben Jonson had in a measure preceded him in this respect;
but Jonson's criticism was not so much devoted to the examination
of general principles as to the exposure of the hopeless, helpless
obtuseness of the men who had a different opinion of his works from
what he himself entertained. The questions discussed by Dryden were
of a more general nature. With the Stuarts had come in French
literary tastes and French literary methods. The age was supposed
to be too refined to be pleased with what had satisfied the coarse
palates of preceding generations. In stage-writing in particular, the
doctrine of the unities, almost uniformly violated by Shakespeare and
most of the Elizabethans, was now held up as the only correct
method of composition that could be employed by any writer who
sought to conform to the true principles of art. Along with this
came the substitution in the drama of rhyme for blank verse. Upon
the comparative merits of these two as employed in tragedy, arose
the first controversy in which Dryden was engaged. This one was
6mposing


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JOHN DRYDEN
4923
with his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard; for in 1663 Dryden had
become the husband of the daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, thus
marrying, as Pope expressed it, “misery in a noble wife. ” Dryden
was an advocate of rhyme; and the controversy on this point began
with the publication in 1668 of his Essay of Dramatic Poesy. It
was afterward carried on by both parties, in prefaces to the plays
they successively published. The prefaces to these productions regu-
larly became later the place where Dryden laid down his critical
doctrines on all points that engaged his attention; and whether we
agree with his views or not, we are always sure to be charmed with
the manner in which they are expressed.
In 1667 Dryden published a long poem entitled Annus Mirabilis. '
It was in the same measure as the stanzas on Oliver Cromwell. It
gave him a good deal of reputation at the time; but though it is far
from being a despicable performance, few there are now who read it
and still fewer who re-read it. Far different has been the fate of
his next work. It was not until 1681, when England was beginning
to emerge slowly from the excitement and agitation growing out of
the alleged Popish plot, that he brought out his `Absalom and Achi-
tophel,' without question the greatest combined poetical and political
satire to be found in our tongue. Here it was that for the first time
he fully displayed his mastery over heroic verse. The notion once
so widely prevalent — for the vogue of which, indeed, Dryden him-
self is mainly responsible - that Waller and Denham brought this
verse to perfection, it now requires both extensive and special igno-
rance of our earlier authors to entertain; but on the other hand,
there is no question that he himself imparted to the line a variety,
vigor, and sustained majesty movement such as the verse in ts
modern form had never previously received. There is therefore a
fairly full measure of truth in the lines in which he was character-
ized by Pope: -
«Waller/ was
smooth/; but Dryden taught/to join
The varging versq. the fulll resounding line,
The long majestic marel/ and enfergy divine. ”
These lines of Pope, it may be added, exemplify purposely two pecul-
iarities of Dryden's versification, — the occasional use of the triplet
instead of the regular couplet, and of the Alexandrine, or line of six
feet, in place of the usual line of five.
The poem is largely an attack upon the Earl of Shaftesbury,
who in it bears the title of Achitophel. The portrayal of this states-
man, which is given in this volume, is ample evidence of that skill of
the poet in characterization which has made the pictures he drew
immortal. Perhaps even more effective was the description of the


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4924
JOHN DRYDEN
Duke of Buckingham, under the designation of Zimri. For attacking
that nobleman Dryden had both political and personal reasons. Buck-
ingham had now joined the opponents of the court. Ten years previ-
ously the poet himself had been brought by him on the stage, with
the aid of others, in the play called The Rehearsal. ' His usual
actions had been mimicked, his usual expressions had been put into
the mouth of the character created to represent him, who was styled
Bayes. This title had been given him because Dryden figuratively
wore the bays, or laurel, as poet laureate. The name henceforward
stuck. Dryden's turn had now come; and it was in these, following
lines that he drew the unfaded and fadeless picture of this noble-
man, whose reputation even then was notorious rather than famous,
and whose intellect was motley-minded rather than versatile:-
«Some of their chiefs were princes of the land;
In the front rank of these did Zimri stand,
A man so various that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome:
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
Was everything by starts and nothing long,
But in the course of one revolving moon
Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon;
Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.
Blest madman, who could every hour employ
With something new to wish or to enjoy!
Railing and praising were his usual themes,
And both, to show his judgment, in extremes:
So over-violent or over-civil
That every man with him was God or Devil.
In squandering wealth was his peculiar art:
Nothing went unrewarded but desert.
Beggared by fools whom still he found too late,
He had his jest, and they had bis estate.
As an example of the loftier and more majestic style occasionally
found in this poem, is the powerful appeal of Achitophel to Absalom.
The latter, it is to be said, stands for the Duke of Monmouth, the
eldest of the illegitimate sons of Charles II. Him many of the so-
called country party, now beginning to be styled Whigs, were
endeavoring to have recognized as the next successor to the throne,
in place of the Roman Catholic brother of the king, James, Duke of
York. As a favorite son of the monarch, he, though then in opposi-
tion, is treated tenderly by Dryden throughout; and this feeling is
plainly visible in the opening of the address to him put into the
mouth of Achitophel, in these words:-


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JOHN DRYDEN
4925
1
“Auspicious prince, at whose nativity
Some royal planet ruled the southern sky,
Thy longing country's darling and desire,
Their cloudy pillar and their guardian fire,
Their second Moses, whose extended wand
Divides the seas and shows the promised land,
Whose dawning day in every distant age
Has exercised the sacred prophet's rage,
The people's prayer, the glad diviner's theme,
The young men's vision and the old men's dream,-
Thee savior, thee the nation's vows confess,
And never satisfied with seeing, bless. ”
Dryden followed up the attack upon Shaftesbury with a poem en-
titled “The Medal. ” This satire, which appeared in March 1682, was
called forth by the action of the partisans of the Whig leader in hav-
ing a medal struck commemorating his release from the Tower, after
the grand jury had thrown out the charge of treason which had been
brought against him. Both of these pieces were followed by a host
of replies. Some of them did not refrain from personal attack, which
indeed had a certain justification in the poet's own violence of denun-
ciation. The most abusive of these was a poem by Thomas Shadwell,
entitled (The Medal of John Bayes. ' Such persons as fancy Dryden's
subsequent punishment of that dramatist, unwarranted in its severity
should in justice read this ferociously scurrilous diatribe, in which
every charge against the poet that malice or envy had concocted and
rumor had set afloat, was here industriously raked together; and to
the muck-heap thus collected, the intimacy of previous acquaintance
was doubtless enabled to contribute its due quota of malignant asser-
tion and more malignant insinuation. Shadwell was soon supplied,
however, with ample reason to regret his action. Dryden's first and
best known rejoinder is MacFlecknoe, or a Satire on the True Blue
Protestant Poet T. S. This production has always had the reputation
in literature of being the severest personal satire in the language;
but it requires now for its appreciation an intimate acquaintance
with Shadwell's plays, which very few possess. It is further disfig-
ured in places by a coarseness from which, indeed, none of the poet's
writings were certain to be free. Its general spirit can be indicated
by a brief extract from its opening paragraph. Flecknoe, it is to be
said, was a feeble poet who had died a few years before. He is
here represented as having long reigned over the kingdom of dullness,
but knowing that his end was close at hand, determines to settle the
succession to the State. Accordingly he fixes upon his son Shadwell
as the one best fitted to take his place in ruling over the realm of
nonsense, and in continuing the war with wit and sense. The an-
nouncement of his intention he begins in the following words:--


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4926
JOHN DRYDEN
« – 'Tis resolved, for Nature pleads that he
Should only rule who most resembles me.
Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness from his tender years;
Shadwell alone of all my sons is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.
The rest, to some faint meaning make pretense,
But Shad well neper deviates into sense. ”
Far more bitter, however, was the renewed attack which a month
later Dryden inserted in the two hundred lines he contributed to the
continuation of Absalom and Achitophel' that was written by Nahum
Tate. In this second part, which came out in November 1682, he de-
voted himself in particular to two of his opponents, Settle and Shad-
well, under the names respectively of Doeg and Og—"two fools,” he
says, in his energetic way,-
<< That crutch their feeble sense on verse;
Who by my Muse to all succeeding times
Shall live in spite of their own doggerel rhymes. ”
Of Settle, whose poetry was possessed of much smoothness but
little sense, he spoke in a tone of contemptuous good-nature, though
the object of the attack must certainly have deemed the tender mer-
cies of Dryden to be cruel. It was in this way he was described, to
quote a few lines:-
«Spiteful he is not, though he wrote a satire,
For still there goes some thinking to ill-nature.
Let him be gallows-free by my consent,
And nothing suffer, since he nothing meant;
Hanging supposes human soul and reason,
This animal's below committing treason:
Shall he be hanged who never could rebel?
That's a preferment for Achitophel.
Let him rail on; let his invective Muse
Have four-and-twenty letters to abuse,
Which if he jumbles to one line of sense,
Indict him of a capital offense. ”
But it was not till he came to the portraiture of Shadwell that he
gave full vent to the ferocity of his satire. He taunted him with the
unwieldiness of his bulk, the grossness of his habits, with his want
of wealth, and finally closed up with some lines into which he con-
centrated all the venom of his previous attacks:
« But though Heaven/made him poor, with (reverence speaking.
He never was a poet of God's (nidking;


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JOHN DRYDEN
4927
The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull,
With this prophetic blessing - Be thou dull;
Drink, swear, and roar, forbear no lewd delight
Fit for thy bulk; do anything but write.
Thou art of lasting make, like thoughtless men;
A strong nativity – but for the pen;
Eat opium, mingle arsenic in thy drink,
Still thou mayest live, avoiding pen and ink.
I see, I see, 'tis counsel given in vain,
For treason, botched in rhyme, will be thy bane;
Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck;
'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck.
"A double noose thou on thy neck dost pull,
For writing treason and for writing dull;
To die for faction is a common evil,
Put to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.
Hadst thou the glories of thy King exprest,
Thy praises had been satires at the best;
But thou in clumsy verse, unlicked, unpointed,
Hast shamefully defied the Lord's anointed.
I will not rake the dungbill of thy crimes,
For who would read thy life that reads thy rhymes ?
But of King David's foes be this the doom, -
May all be like the young man Absalom;
And for my foes may this their blessing be,-
To talk like Doeg and to write like thee. ”
Refinement of tone is not the distinguishing characteristic of satire
of this sort. It does not attack its object by delicate insinuation or
remote suggestion. 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
(


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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


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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


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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.