Great Jonson did by strength of judgment please; Etherege his courtship, Southerne's purity, O that your brows my laurel had sustained! For Tom the second reigns like Tom the first. Time, place, and action, may with pains be wrought; [more. To Shakspeare gave as much; she could not give him ALEXANDER'S FEAST; OR, THE POWER OF MUSIC. AN ODE, IN HONOUR OF ST. CECILIA'S DAY. In [A LONG interval elapsed between the publication of the Britannia Rediviva and this celebrated Ode, which was written for the anniversary of St. Cecilia, in 1697. In the meanwhile, some reverses had happened to Dryden, and important changes had taken place in his pursuits. August, 1689, he had been deprived by the Revolution of his offices of Poet Laureate and Historiographer, which were bestowed on his ancient adversary, Shadwell. By this deprivation he lost £300 a year. Necessity now compelled him, after an absence of four or five years from the stage, to turn to it again; and within the succeeding five years he produced five plays. His last play, Love Triumphant, with which he took his final leave of the theatre, was brought out in 1694. In the summer of that year he commenced his translation of Virgil. Other translations, in prose and verse, were also undertaken during that period. The Ode on Alexander's Feast was written at the solicitation of the stewards of the festival. Ill as Dryden could spare the abstraction of his thoughts from the labours on which he was employed, he appears to have engaged in it without any expectation of pecuniary advantage. The society, however, are said to have paid him £40 for it. The music was considered so unworthy of the poetry that it was never published; another composer attempted the task with no better success nearly twenty years later; and it was finally reserved for Handel to marry the immortal verse to a congenial strain. Dr. Birch says that this Ode occupied Dryden a fortnight in composing and correcting it.' St. John, afterwards Lord Bolingbroke, says that it was written in a single night. He called on Dryden in the morning, and found him unusually agitated. 'I have been up all night,' said the old bard; 'my musical friends made me promise to write them an Ode for their feast of St. Cecilia, and I was so struck with the subject which occurred to me, that I could not leave it till I had completed it; here it is, finished at one sitting.' Sir Walter Scott seeks to reconcile these statements by supposing that Dryden may have completed the Ode at one sitting, and yet have employed a fortnight in correcting it. There is no necessity to resort to this solution. Every writer, who has the opportunity, corrects his works. In this case the probability is entirely on the side of Bolingbroke's anecdote, which has the advantage of being a direct testimony, while that of Birch is derived only at second-hand. Internal evidence also is in favour of the supposition that the Ode was written off at once without pause or break, It has all the suddenness, vehemence, and rapidity of an inspiration uttered, so to speak, in the moment of conception. That Dryden should have taken a fortnight to correct it is scarcely to be credited. That he re-touched it, as painters re-touch a finished picture, might 6 be assumed of this as of any other composition; but that he did not introduce any material alterations may be inferred from the curious discovery made by Dr. Johnson that there are some lines without corresponding rhymes, a defect,' he adds, which I never detected but after an acquaintance of many years, and which the enthusiasm of the writer might hinder him from perceiving.' It bears the evidence of this enthusiasm as clearly in its breadth and energy as in its negligence of rhyme; so that, upon the whole, we may consider ourselves fairly justified in concluding that it was the work of a single sitting; and this Ode, which, more than any other production of Dryden, displays those qualities of freshness, vigour, and eagerness, which are usually regarded as the characteristics of youth, was written in the 67th year of his age. The lines alluded to by Dr. Johnson will be found in the 1st, 2nd, 5th, and 6th stanzas. Mr. Hallam dissents from the dictum which has pronounced this Ode the finest in our language. It would be difficult, however, to persuade the majority of readers to adopt this judgment. There is no work of Dryden so universally known, or so frequently repeated. Many of its lines have passed into household words, and are familiarly quoted by thousands of people ignorant of their source. The great popularity of the poem may be referred to the simplicity and obviousness of its structure, and to that idiomatic strength and clearness of expression which strikes the understanding at once. It is, perhaps, little to the purpose, but worth preserving amongst the memorabilia connected with it, that Dryden himself esteemed it the best of all his poetry.'] I "TWAS at the royal feast, for Persia won 'TW By Philip's warlike son: Aloft, in awful state, On his imperial throne; His valiant peers were placed around; Their brows with roses and with myrtles bound: (So should desert in arms be crowned.) The lovely Thais, by his side, Sate like a blooming Eastern bride, None but the brave, None but the brave deserves the fair. CHORUS. Happy, happy, happy pair! None but the brave, None but the brave deserves the fair. 2 Timotheus, placed on high Amid the tuneful quire, With flying fingers touched the lyre: The song began from Jove, Who left his blissful seats above, When he to fair Olympia pressed: And while he sought her snowy breast: Then, round her slender waist he curled, [world. And stamped an image of himself, a sovereign of the The listening crowd admire the lofty sound, A present deity, they shout around; A present deity, the vaulted roofs rebound: The monarch hears, And seems to shake the spheres. |