before he had lauded and rejoiced in, is discreditable, and must have been an interested change. Almost all his virulent abuse of Shaftesbury, the great leader of opposition in the latter years of the reign of Charles the Second, is in flagrant contradiction to his former praises of the policy of the Cabal Ministry, the war with Holland, and Clifford, Shaftesbury's colleague of the Cabal government. It would be difficult in any case to give Dryden credit for perfect sincerity and disinterestedness in his adoption of the Roman Catholic religion, after James the Second became king; but his antecedents and general character make this altogether impossible. Dryden's temperament was by no means of that sort which engenders sudden conversions. He was not impulsive, and he had no enthusiasm. His clear sharp intellect, and his strong critical faculty, made it easy for him to see faults and flaws, and protected him against all fanaticism. His 'Religio Laici,' is the mature expression of a faith which is more of the head than of the heart it is the religion of a calm and clear-sighted man, who has reasoned himself into accepting a quantum of theology, and desires as little dogma as possible. How great the leap from this philosophical religion to Romanism, when a Roman Catholic king ascended the throne !

Dryden, in his literary character, is known to the multitude chiefly as a poet, but he is to be regarded and remembered also as a prose writer, as a translator, and as the leading wit in his own age of London literary society. His place among English poets is high, if not the highest, in the second class, the first being that of Chaucer and Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, in whom genius transcends art, and the 'faculty divine' is ever apparent above subject and execution, and whose poetry streams from a full-welling fountainhead' of inner imagination. In Dryden, as in Pope, we admire reason, language, argument, wit, and art. Dryden is a great master of language and of verse. He is the most vigorous and polished of satirists, combining subtle refinement with fervour; and he is unequalled as a reasoner in rhyme. Absalom and Achitophel,' superior as a poem, yet presents no samples of his satirical invective equal to 'The Medal,' and

‘Mac Flecknoe.' 'Religio Laici,' 'The Hind and the Panther,' and likewise 'Absalom and Achitophel,' display his power of arguing in verse, another fine example of which is to be found in the theological discussion of Maximin, Apollonius, and St. Catherine, in 'Tyrannic Love.' The fierce satirist was an exquisite song writer; some of the songs interspersed in his plays are gems of art, which have been much hidden from view by the deterring grossness of many of the plays, and of many of the songs themselves, which has prevented them from being separately collected. Dryden as an author would seem to have had two natures. He could be correct and dignified when he chose, and it was easy and seemed pleasant to him to be gross and coarse. The polished style of most of his Prologues and Epilogues for the academical audience of Oxford University is in marked contrast with the prurient indecency of the addresses which he prepared for the loose, dissolute courtiers and vulgar cits of London. Gracefully in one of the Oxford Prologues has he discriminated between the University and the Town.

'Our poet, could he find forgiveness here,
Would wish it rather than a plaudit there.

He owns no crown from those Prætorian bands,
But knows that right is in this Senate's hands.
Kings make their poets whom themselves think fit,
But 'tis your suffrage makes authentic wit.' m

The plays of Dryden, as plays, contribute little to his fame. They were mostly hastily composed, and written as moneymaking tasks. But there are scattered through them many beautiful passages of pure and noble thought, and many lines which fasten on the memory and are quoted from mouth to mouth, often without knowing where they come from—an unfailing test of poetic power. The following, which has been often quoted, and cannot be quoted too often, is one of many 'beauties' of 'Aurengzebe':—

m

Prologue to the University of Oxford, 1673, p. 420 of Globe edition.

When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat,

Yet fooled with hope, men favour the deceit,
Trust on, and think to morrow will repay;
To-morrow's falser than the former day,
Lies worse,
and while it says we shall be blest
With some new joys, cuts off what we possest.
Strange cozenage! none would live past years again,
Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain,
And from the dregs of life think to receive
What the first sprightly running could not give.
I'm tired of waiting for this chymic gold,

Which fools us young and beggars us when old.'

To one of Dryden's plays, the Second Part of 'The Conquest of Granada,' we owe

'Forgiveness to the injured does belong,

But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong.'

To another play, 'All for Love,' we owe—

Men are but children of a larger growth:

Our appetites as apt to change as theirs,

And full as craving too, and full as vain.'

10

It is Almanzor in the First Part of 'The Conquest of Granada' who exclaims, addressing the King Boabdallin—

Obeyed as sovereign by thy subjects be,
But know that I alone am king of me;

I am as free as Nature first made man,

Ere the base laws of servitude began,

When wild in woods the noble savage ran.'

Candiope, in The Maiden Queen,' describes the retired

courtier longing to return to court—

Those who like you have once in courts been great,
May think they wish, but wish not, to retreat.
They seldom go but when they cannot stay;
As losing gamesters throw the dice away.
E'en in that cell where you repose would find,
Visions of court will haunt your restless mind;
And glorious dreams stand ready to restore,
The pleasing shades of all you had before.'

.D

Max nin says, in 'Tyrannic Love,'—

'Fate's dark recesses we can never find,

But Fortune at some hours is always kind;

The lucky have whole days, which still they chouse,
The unlucky have but hours, and these they lose.'

These are a few specimens of many passages of power and beauty in Dryden's little-read and generally inferior plays. His faculty of placing words is wonderful, and conspicuous in prose as well as in poetry. He was specially fitted for a translator. The faults of his translation of Virgil are mostly faults of haste and carelessness. Wanting money, he finished in three years what he rightly told Tonson that it would require seven years to do well.

We learn from Pope, through Dean Lockier, that Dryden made Will's coffee-house, in Russell Street, Covent Garden, the great resort of all the wits in London, and that some years after his death Addison carried the wits away from Will's to another coffee-house in the same street, and on the opposite side of it, Button's ". Pope, who was but twelve years old when Dryden died, had been taken once to Will's in Dryden's last year to get a sight of the poet. Addison succeeded to Dryden's critical chair, and the mantle of the poet fell in a little ti ne on Pope, who regarded Dryden as his teacher of versific tion, and whose first poems, the Pastorals, were published ine years after Dryden's death.

Notices of the early editions of the poems comprised in this volume are subjoined, as important in connexion with the history of the text :

Heroic Stanzas on Oliver Cromwell. The date on the tit' -page of the first edition is 1659, but it was doubtless publis d before the end of 1658. There are two editions of 165, The first was probably published with two other

poems on the same subject by Waller and Sprat, the volume having the title, 'Three Poems upon the Death of his late Highness, Oliver, Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland, written by Mr. Edm. Waller, Mr. Jo. Dryden, Mr. Sprat of Oxford: London, Printed by William Wilson, and are to be sold in Well-yard, near Little St. Bartholomew's Hospital: 1659.' Dryden's poem is printed first in this collection, with the separate heading of 'Heroic Stanzas consecrated to the Glorious Memory of his Most Serene and Renowned Highness, Oliver, late Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, &c. Written after the celebration of his Funeral.' In the other edition of 1659 Dryden's poem is printed alone; it has the same publisher. There is considerable difference of spelling and punctuation between the two, but none of words. During the reigns of Charles the Second and James the Second, Dryden did not republish this poem, or include it in any list of his works; but it was reprinted in 1682 by a political foe. In the reign of William, Jacob Tonson, Dryden's publisher and friend, republished the poem in 1695 from the separate edition of 1659. It was afterwards printed in the first volume of the 'State Poems,' with several corruptions of the text; and this corrupt reprint was reproduced in the edition of the 'Miscellany Poems' in 1716. Several later editors followed this corrupt copy. The editions of 1659

contain the correct text.

Astræa Redux. This was originally published in 1660 in folio, by Henry Herringman. Dryden's name is printed Driden on the title-page. The poem was republished in 1688, in quarto, by Tonson, together with the Panegyric on Charles the Second at the Coronation, the Address to Lord Chancellor Clarendon on New Year's Day, 1662, and the Annus Mirabilis; and then in 1688. The spelling Driden was preserved on the title-page of Astræa Redux.' The text of the folio edition of 1660 is perfectly reliable.

Annus Mirabilis. The first edition of 1667 is a little volume in small octavo, 'printed by Henry Herringman at the Anchor of the Lower Walk of the New Exchange, 1667.'