Diet, a horse, and thirty pounds a year, Are things that in a youngster's sense sound great. Who, though in silken scarf and cassock dressed, When dinner calls, the implement must wait, And they, though loose, still drag about their chain. A chaplainship served up, and seven years' thrall? The menial thing, perhaps, for a reward Is to some slender benefice preferred, With this proviso bound: that he must wed My lady's antiquated waiting-maid In dressing only skilled, and marmalade. 1 Basket for the scraps of dinner. JOHN DRYDEN. [BORN in 1631, at Aldwincle All Saints, in the valley of the Nen in Northamptonshire, of Puritan parentage; and educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He appears to have become a Londoner about the middle of the year 1657. At the Restoration he changed into an ardent royalist; and towards the close of 1663 married the daughter of a royalist nobleman, the Earl of Berkshire. In 1670 he was appointed Historiographer-Royal and Poet-Laureate. After having hitherto been conspicuous as a dramatist and a panegyrical poet, he in 1681, by the publication of the First Part of Absalom and Achitophel, sprang into fame as a writer of satirical verse. In December 1683 he was appointed Collector of Customs in the port of London. His offices were renewed to him on the accession of King James II, but his pension of 100l. was not renewed till rather more than a year later. About the same time Dryden became a Roman Catholic; and in April 1687, he published The Hind and the Panther. Deprived of both offices and pension by the Revolution of 1688, he again for a time wrote for the stage, but after a few years finally abandoned dramatic composition for translation. Some of his greatest lyrics likewise belong to his later years. He died at his house in Gerard Street, Soho, May 1, 1700, and was buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey.] Dryden has been called the greatest writer of a little age; but it may well be doubted whether he for one would have cared to accept either limb of the antithesis. None of his moral qualities better consorted with his magnificent genius than the real modesty which underlay his buoyant self-assertion. His attitude towards the great literary representative of an age earlier than that to which his own maturity belonged was from first to last one of reverent recognition; and though the lines written by Dryden under Milton's portrait have more sound than point, they should not be forgotten as testifying to the spirit which dictated them. Of Oldham, in both the species of verse to which he owed his reputation infinitely Dryden's inferior, the elder poet wrote that their souls were near allied, and cast in the same poetic mould. To Congreve, his junior by full forty years, he declared that he would gladly have resigned the laureateship, in which he had been supplanted by a Whig poetaster. On the other hand, whatever aspect the Restoration age, either in politics or in literature, may wear in our eyes, in its own it assumed any semblance rather than that of an age of decline. And indeed, to speak of its literature only, it must be admitted that there are not a few considerations to be urged against the acceptance of such a designation. It is common enough to find the literature of the Restoration age set down as essentially a foreign literature, reproduced and imitated. Yet a survey of Dryden's works alone, both dramatic and non-dramatic, should suffice to shake the foundations of any such criticism. The 'heroic plays'-a species in which Dryden had rivals but no equal-differed from the courtly romances of the Scudéry school as full-bodied Burgundy differs from diluted claret. The so-called Restoration comedy—of the later and more perfect growth of which Dryden's efforts were but the precursors-is both for better and for worse as genuinely national as it is unmistakeably real. It would of course be extremely absurd to deny the great influence in this period of French literature upon our own; but it was an influence of much greater importance for the future of our literature, both prose and verse, as to form than as to matter. Yet though the clearness as well as the pointedness of the Restoration style was partly due to French example, these qualities were something very different from the imported fashions of a season. Dryden may be charged with more than his usual audacity when, in a Prologue of 1672, he spoke of 'our wit' as far excelling 'foreign wit,' after, in an Epilogue of 1670, he had extolled his own times as not only wittier but 'more refined and free' in their use of the native tongue than any preceding age. Yet inasmuch as during two centuries English writers have on the whole followed Dryden and his contemporaries instead of reverting to their predecessors of the Elizabethan and earlier Stuart periods, it would savour of rashness contemptuously to dismiss the claims to literary honours of an age which formed for itself a style of so proved a merit. With the aid of this style it virtually called into life a new species of English poetry—that satirical poetry of which Dryden is not indeed the originator, but in which he was the first as he has in most respects remained the greatest master. Whatever view be taken of the general features of the age of which Dryden was the chief literary ornament-while Milton's muse, like the blind poet himself, dwelt apart—it is certain that this age speaks to us from the pages of its most brilliant writer. He was not formed, as a man or as a poet, to live out of his times. Yet neither was he, in character or in genius, one of those who merely give back what they have received, more or less changed in form or intensified in manner. He has been decried as a time server in politics, as a turncoat in religion, and in literature as the flexible follower of a succession of schools. The reasons for and against these charges cannot be examined here; and there seems something specially unsuitable in treating of Dryden in a tone of apology. At the same time both his life and works, the relations between which are peculiarly intimate, often require to be protected from some of the commentaries with which they have been visited. Many of our poets have been subjected to ungenerous criticism; but none has, so to speak, been hansardised' so mercilessly as Dryden. He was the descendant of Puritan ancestors on both the father's and the mother's side; his own father-according to an adversary of the poet's—was a Committee-man, and one of his maternal cousins was a peer of Oliver's creation. Nothing could therefore be more natural or becoming than that on the Protector's death, Dryden, then a young man of twenty-seven, should have sung the praises of 'our Prince,' generally selecting for celebration qualities which even Cromwell's angriest enemies would not have denied him to have possessed. That the author of the Heroic Stanzas should with the Restoration have blossomed forth as a royalist implies no tergiversation at all. It should not be forgotten that the Restoration was not a mere party act; and that much had happened between it and the death of Oliver Cromwell. Whatever may have been the hereditary politics of Dridens and Pickerings, John Dryden was a born royalist, and with the Restoration his political changes were at an end. Panegyrical poetry was the fashion of the age, and the exuberant inventiveness and felicitous readiness of Dryden's genius made it easy for him to excel in this kind of composition. To be sure, even the most willing and the most fluent muse must rapidly exhaust such a theme as the virtues of King Charles II; and in his Threnodia Augustalis, written on the King's death, Dryden found little to add to what he had sung in the Astræa Redux, composed in honour of the Restoration,-except that his Majesty died hard. In shorter pieces in honour of the King, the Duchess of York, and Lord Clarendon, Dryden displayed the same talent for waving gorgeous banners of courtly praise, till in Britannia Rediviva he hailed the birth of a prince whom half the nation regarded as a pretender before he and his parents were exiles. No laureate has ever earned like Dryden the butt of sack which the economy of King James’ new reign cut off from his salary. Of all the tours de force executed by him, however, the most extraordinary is that in which he undertook to flatter the nation, as well as the dynasty, to the top of their bent. The fire and spirit of the Annus Mirabilis are nothing short of amazing, when the difficulties which beset the author (though partly by his own choosing) are remembered. There was, first, the difficulty of his subject, which, as a perusal of the poem cannot fail to reveal to the most unsuspecting reader, was by no means made up altogether of materials for congratulation. Yet the Annus Mirabilis must really have 'done good' to the public; even at the present day it agreeably warms the John Bull sentiment, compounded of patriotism and prejudice, in the corner of an Englishman's heart. Another difficulty, but in this instance a self-imposed one, was the form of verse in which the poem was written. It was chosen for the sake of its dignity, but (as Dryden well knew, and told Davenant, from whose Gondibert it was borrowed) it put a far greater strain upon the ingenuity and skill of the author. Thus though Dryden has written much that is more thoroughly enjoyable, he has written nothing that is more characteristic of himself than this long series of quatrains. The glorious dash of the performance is his own, and so is the victorious struggle against the drag of a difficult and rather dull metre. But it was a yet different kind of poem by which the loyal adherent of the Stuart throne first became a force in English politics. No modern reader, whether his sympathies be with the Jebusites, or whether he think that there may be something to be said even in favour of the Solymæan rout, is likely to refuse his admiration to the greatest-greatest without even a suggestion of rivalry of English political satires. This position in a literature rich in contributions of the same kind to political controversy Absalom and Achitophel (or rather the First Part of the satire) owes to the reason which made it so singularly effective at the season of its publication. Besides being executed with incomparable vigour and verve, and as finished in detail as it is impetuous in flow, it has the supreme merit (for a work of this kind) of being completely adapted to its special purpose. Absalom and Achitophel is a political satire pure and simple, not, like Hudibras, |