Church of England against the dissenting sects. It is one of the noblest poems of the kind in any language. However, he must have regretted his outspoken partisanship "The Hind before very long; for, in 1686, he joined the Church and the of Rome. It is impossible to believe that this was Panther" the mere tergiversation of a courtier, consequent upon (1687). the king's change of faith; although there is an unfortunate and suspicious coincidence between the two events, which goes far to make out a case against Dryden's sincerity. It is not improbable that James II did all that lay in his power to convert his Poet Laureate it is equally probable that the Poet Laureate, not blessed with political prudence, lent a ready car to his solicitations from motives of policy, and was finally convinced by the doctrines which he had at first heedlessly embraced. At any rate, The Hind and the Panther (1687) was a sincere and logical defence of the side which he had adopted; and, as a satire, is second only to Absalom and Achitophel, although its ingenuity is almost unpleasantly farfetched. In the following year came the catastrophe of the Revolution. Under William and Mary no Romanist Dryden's or partisan of absolute monarchy could hope for the fall after royal favour. Dryden was guilty on both counts, the Revoand his position was irretrievable. He had the mortification of seeing Shadwell take his place as Laureate; but even this fall could not arrest his activity or damp his fire. Between 1690 and 1694 he produced five new dramas of various merit. In 1693 appeared his version of Juvenal and Persius, whom he was admirably calculated to translate. It contained the whole of Persius and five select Satires of Juvenal. In addition to these, the seventh Satire and the fourteenth Satire were translated by his two sons, and inserted in the work. Charles, his eldest son, who was responsible for the first of these, became chamberlain to Pope Innocent XII, and, in 1704, while on a visit to England, was drowned in the Thames near Windsor. John, the second, beside his share in this work, was the independent author of a comedy; and a third son, Erasmus Henry, became a Dominican.

lution.

From 1694 to 1697 Dryden was employed upon his famous translation of Virgil, the poet to whom, in style and by predilection, he was most nearly akin. This seems to have The "Virbeen one of his most profitable literary ventures, for gil" (1697) he is reported to have made £1200 by it. Although and later he was at this time in his sixty-seventh year, his poems. Virgil was not his last work. In the very year of his death he produced his Tales and Fables, a collection of stories, partly borrowed and modernised from Chaucer, partly versified from Boccaccio. These, strange to relate, exhibit his invention, fire, and power of harmony at their very best; and in this volume appeared not only a specimen translation of the first book of the Iliad, interesting to students of Pope, but that noble and

Death of

immortal Ode in Honour of St. Cecilia's Day, which, under its first title of Alexander's Feast, is probably, to most readers, the poem most representative of its author's genius. But on May 1, 1700, the great poet died at his house in Gerrard Street, Soho, the cause of death being a mortification Dryden. of the leg, combined with dropsy. He was buried in the south transept of Westminster Abbey, sacred to poets, and Dr. Samuel Garth, the physician and poet, made an oration over his grave. He was followed by the universal admiration of his countrymen, who saw that in him they had lost incomparably their greatest poet. His old friend, John Sheffield, then Duke of Buckinghamshire, had the word "Dryden " inscribed above his place of burial.

work.

1. His dramas.

§ 5. Dryden's voluminous work divides itself into Classification three categories-the drama of his early days, the of Dryden's poetry of his maturity, and that flexible prose, whose equable current runs the same from first to last. In the drama, Dryden is the chief representative of that great revolution in taste which followed the Restoration, supplanting the free and powerful style of the Elizabethan drama by an imitation of French models. Dryden, however, is on the boundary line, and combines much of the romantic spirit of the earlier age with the formal affectations of the later type. We shall speak in another chapter of the character of the Restoration drama. Here it is His place among post- enough to say that it reflected only too faithfully the Restoration profligacy of the Court. The stage is, unfortunately, dramatists. too obvious to the invasion of immorality, and, with the departure of Puritan severity, the theatre renewed its existence with the aid of shameless licence. Dryden's plays are especially open to this prevailing charge of lewdness. It is only fair to remark that, while Wycherley and Congreve painted vice as virtue, Dryden now and then attempted to satirise it; but he he had not the peculiar humour which is necessary for that task. His comic scenes were dull and obscure; their point was lost in their grossness, and they gave no compensation for their stupidity. His comedy of Limberham (1678), which he appears to have written with excellent intentions, was a flagrant instance of failure. It was prohibited as too indecent for the stage; but, by general consent, it is too hopelessly dull for anything. Previously, his Marriage à la Mode had been damned with faint praise his Assignation-both pieces were acted in 1672-had been hissed off the boards. The Spanish Friar, or the Double Discovery (1681) was more successful, and contains scenes and characters of great merit. Unfortunately, Dryden was a time-server, and was only too ready to prostitute his pure and classic genius to the debauched fashions of his day. He was, at any rate, justly ashamed of himself; for, when Collier made his famous attack on the stage, and rebuked him for the indecency and irreligion of his plays, he submitted silently to the reproach.

If he was not personally a man of high spirit, he at least showed by this that he had the grace to be ashamed of faults which he had not the virtue to avoid.

scenes.

The tragedy of the day showed as much of purity and elevation as the comedy showed of profligacy. And nowhere is the strength and weakness of the age shown more clearly than in Dryden's tragedies, with their noble rhetoric, and with their sentimental exaggeration of the virtue of His tragedies. self-sacrifice. He knew very little about the tender emotions, and could not delineate character in the least; and of all this he was thoroughly conscious. But he did his best to compensate for these deficiencies. If striking, unexpected, and picturesque incidents, powerful declamatory dialogue, and a majesty, ease and splendour of versification can make up for the absence of deeper and more essential qualities, then Dryden achieved a great success. He is at his best in scenes which embody quarrels and violent recriminations, and end Dramatic with reconciliation-scenes like the quarrel between effect of Brutus and Cassius in Shakespeare, and like many individual others in Corneille and Racine. Conscious of his power, he repeated such situations over and over again. There is, for instance, the dispute between Antony and Ventidius in All for Love (1678), the play which he founded upon Antony and Cleopatra. Of another similar scene in Don Sebastian (1690), the quarrel of Dorax and the King, the late Mr. Roden Noel said, with some exaggeration, that it is unsurpassed in Shakespeare. It presents a credible, though marvellous translation of a proud, injured, embittered man to love and loyalty." These are the words of a professed devotee of Restoration tragedy. If we cannot assent to them, we must at ali events confess that the scene is as fine as anything in Fletcher, far finer than Massinger's most elaborate anatomy of theatrical passion. Dryden himself, with his constant craving for novelty, was tempted to underrate his Jacobean predecessors, although, at times, he expressed a vehement admira- Dryden's opinion and tion for their work. While he praised Jonson and treatment Fletcher, he spoke of Heywood and Shirley with of earlier boundless contempt. If he could admire, he had, on the other hand, little veneration. In conjunction with D'Avenant, he condescended, in 1667, to alter and make additions to Shakespeare's Tempest, transforming that pure and ideal creation into a brilliant and meretricious opera, full of scenic effects. To Caliban he added Sycorax, and beside Miranda he placed a young man who had never seen a woman, thus corrupting the play with prurient allusions, and seeking applause by a contrivance which is little less than shameful. The play was published in 1670, after D'Avenant's death. In exactly the same way he transformed Milton's Paradise Lost into an operatic entertainment called The State of Innocence (1674), which he addressed to Mary of Modena, then Duchess of York, in more

dramatists.

than his ordinary tones of flattery. The State of Innocence was, however, far too innocent for decent exhibition, and the play was merely published, but not acted. In those days prologues and

His prologues and epilogues.

epilogues accompanied every play as a matter of course, and were written with great skill, containing either allusions to the topics of the moment or judgments on the great authors of the earlier stage. When delivered by a fascinating actress or great tragedian they were received with enthusiastic applause. Dryden was equally adroit and fertile in this class of composition, and many of his prologues and epilogues are masterpieces in the comic and elevated styles. He wrote not only for his own plays, but for those of his friends, and for revivals of Elizabethan pieces. Thus he wrote the epilogue for his son's comedy; and Lee, Southerne, Mrs. Behn, and Sir George Etherege availed themselves of his services. Among his lines for revived plays are the prologue and epilogue to Jonson's Silent Woman, spoken by the actor, Hart, before the University of Oxford. These verses were recited by the finest actors and actresses of the day. Betterton introduced and dismissed Beaumont and Fletcher's Prophetess : Mrs. Bracegirdle and Nell Gwyn were among the actresses who spoke to the public in Dryden's name. And we must not forget that some of Dryden's plays owed an additional attraction to the incidental music of the great Henry Purcell. § 6. Even in Dryden's earliest productions-in his Heroic Stanzas in praise of Cromwell-it is easy to recognise that force,

2. His poems.

vigour, and tuneful majesty of style which distinguish him from all the other writers of his own age, and, in

a certain sense, place him above the writers of any age in English literature. The poet who inspired him and attracted his genius was pre-eminently Virgil: to mention his style is to recall inevitably its Virgilian character, the quality which made him the obvious translator of the Latin poet. The classical movement which Waller and Cowley had inaugurated in English poetry reached its highest point in the spontaneous verse of Dryden. His poetry, with all its classical formalism, hits the happy mean between superfluous symmetry and deliberate romanticism of style; it avoids on the one hand the studied neatness of the Dutch garden, and, on the other, the unkempt disorder of the wilderness; it is formal, but natural ; vigorous and impetuous, but symmetrical. It is in some ways widely different from his dramatic style, which, although fettered by the form of rhyme, is closely allied, in its unrestrained expression, to the romantic conventionalities of the Elizabethan era. This tendency to rant and bombast is never to be noticed in Dryden's poetry; his worst faults, his hyperbolical flattery and the consequent exaggeration of phrase, are intellectual, not mechanical errors. In all his best poems his style is invariably easy and, at the same time, commanding his turbulent lines sweep along imperiously in a full flood of splendid phrase and

glittering eloquence. In some of his first attempts he adopted the form of the stanza. D'Avenant's Gondibert had a remarkable influence upon him, and the four-lined stanza with alternate rhymes of which it was composed suggested Early adop the metre of his Annus Mirabilis. In his preface, quatrain. tion of the inscribed to Sir Robert Howard (who had been

Ultimate

his collaborator in The Indian Queen), he praises the quatrain as "more noble, and of greater dignity, both for sound and number, than any other verse in use amongst us." But he ultimately preferred the rhymed heroic couplet of tensyllable lines, and carried it to the highest per- adoption of fection of which it is capable. Even in his four-lined the heroic stanzas we may see the essential elements of this couplet. last form of versification, for each may be resolved into two sonorous couplets. This metre, wielded with singular force and mastery, is the ultimate criterion of his style; whether he reasons, or describes, or declaims, or narrates, he moves with perfect freedom; and the regularity of the structure of his verse, and the recurrence of the rhyme, so far from appearing to shackle his movements, seem only to give majesty and impetus to his march. Frequently he adopts the expedient of adding another line to rhyme with his couplet, thus transforming it into a triplet; and this third line, which is often an alexandrine of twelve instead of ten syllables, winds up the period with a roll of noble harmony.

and Achito

$7. Among his longer poems, the greatest is Absalom and Achitophel. From the historical side this satire is a portraitgallery of Dryden's contemporaries, in which the pictures are arranged with a wonderful continuity and "Absalom with strict regard to the main lines of the structure. phel" (1681). Every reader will remember the portraits of Shaftesbury, the dissembling Achitophel himself; of Buckingham, the versatile and mutable Zimri; of Settle, Doeg, "whom God for mankind's mirth has made"; of Shadwell, the drunken Og, "round as a globe, and liquor'd every chink"; and of Oates, who figures as Corah, a "monumental brass." The description of Zimri received fresh immortality in the thirty-eighth chapter of Scott's Peveril of the Peak; while the characters of Og and Doeg, which form the greater part of Dryden's share in the second book, were not improved upon in any single passage of The Dunciad. The vast difference between Dryden's poetic and dramatic style is obvious when we compare these brilliant and vivacious paintings with the lay figures whose woodenness does duty for human nature in too many of his plays. Of course, the poem can be fully appreciated only when it is read side by side with contemporary history, and the innumerable allusions to the questions and persons of the day are carefully followed out; but even the general student, who will examine it simply as a piece of literature, will find in it all the highest qualities of English poetry in its capacity for argument and description. The