he adds:

THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM, AS ZIMRI.

'Some of their chiefs were princes of the land;

In the first 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 chemist, 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.

Beggar'd by fools, whom he still found too late,
He had his jest, and they had his estate.
He laugh'd himself from court, then sought relief
By forming parties, but could ne'er be chief;
For, spite of him, the weight of business fell
On Absalom and wise Achitophel.'

He then dismisses the rest of the faction, as

'Titles and names 'twere tedious to rehearse

Of lords, below the dignity of verse.

Kind husbands, and mere nobles all the rest;'

35

and the rascal rabble, Shimei and Corah, are all among the 'friends of every sort' to delude Absalom, and induce him to forsake the court.

In the midst of this powerful satire, an exquisite apostrophe to the memory of the gallant Earl of Ossory relieves the strained feelings of the reader. The panegyric on Lord Ossory touches the heart the more deeply that it was so entirely merited. Evelyn, his oldest friend, relates how that Lord Ossory had been stung to the quick by a proposal to send him with an unequal force to relieve Tangiers. 'I would

36

LORD OSSORY, HIS DEATH.

go,' he said, 'if his Majesty commanded me, with ten men, but I cannot bear up against this unkindness;'—so sensitive was the gallant subject, with whose loyalty Charles thus trifled. Ossory was seized with a malignant fever; he became delirious, yet in the intervals of reason, received the Holy Communion; then sank away, and died. Evelyn stayed, he tells us, 'night and day by his bed-side to his last gasp, and closed his dear eyes.'

Dryden thus immortalizes this brave nobleman, happy, at all events, in two such friends, Dryden and Evelyn.

'His eldest hope, with ev'ry grace adorned,

By me (so Heaven will have it) always mourned,
And always honour'd, snatch'd in manhood's prime,
B' unequal fates, and Providence's crime;

Yet not before the goal of honour won;

All parts fulfilled of subject and of son;

Swift was the race, but short the time to run.

O narrow circle, but of power divine,
Scanted in space, but perfect in thy line!

By sea, by land, thy matchless worth was known,
Arms thy delight, and war was all thy own;
Thy force infus'd the fainting Tyrians propped,
And haughty Pharaoh found his fortune stopped.
Oh! ancient honour! oh! unconquered hand,
Whom foes unpunished never could withstand!
But Israel was unworthy of his name,
Short is the date of all immoderate fame;
It looks as Heaven our ruin had design'd,

And durst not trust thy fortune and thy mind.

Now, free from earth, thy disencumbered soul

Mounts up, and leaves behind the clouds and starry pole,
From thence thy kindred legions mayst thou bring,
To aid the guardian angel of thy king.'

Dr. Johnson, referring to the poem of Absalom and Achitophel,' complains that after all the characters are arrayed, and the interest excited, a speech from the throne has the marvellous effect of reconciling all parties and subduing the whole phalanx of opposition.'

Certainly in this poem we want a catastrophe; but Dryden

DAVID'S SPEECH AT THE CLOSE OF THE POEM.

6

37

has thus explained the deficiency in his preface. He owns, in the first place, that he could write severely with more ease than gently.' The violent, he owned, would condemn the character of Absalom, yet it was not the 'violent he wished to please. David himself,' he added, 'could not be more tender of the young man's life than he was of his reputation.'

The conclusion of the story was not given, 'because the poet could not obtain from himself to see Absalom unfortunate. The frame of it,' he added, 'was cut out but for a picture to the waist, and if the draught be so far true, 'tis as much as I designed. Were I the inventor, who am only the historian, I should certainly conclude the piece with the reconcilement of Absalom to David; and who knows but this may come to pass? Things were not brought to extremity when I left the story; there seems yet to be room left for a composure, hereafter there may be only for pity. I have not so much as an uncharitable wish against Achitophel, but am content to be accused of a good-natured error, and to hope, with Origen, that the devil himself may at last be saved; for which reason, in this poem, he is neither brought to set his house in order, nor to dispose of his person afterwards as he in wisdom shall think fit.'

David's speech at the close of the poem was commended, it is said, by Charles; and the success of Absalom and Achitophel was so great that the king had again recourse to Dryden's aid, and offering him a hundred broad pieces for the task, entrusted him with the office of putting down sedition. 'The Medal,' a satire against sedition, was the result.

6

Before we quit Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel,' it is necessary to state that a key was published with it some time afterwards. A few of the characters, besides those already specified, are important to be known, such as Abdael, General Monk; Agag, Sir Edmundbury Godfrey; Amri, the then Lord Chancellor Finch; Corah, Titus Oates; Michael,

38

DRYDEN STATES HIS SERVICES.

Queen Katherine; Saul, Oliver Cromwell; and Shimei, Sheriff Bethel.

The services of Dryden to the royal cause met with but a variable, and often inefficient repayment, whilst other friends were offended, and avoided the poet. At length Dryden, feeling the evils of poverty most-as we all do, when they begin to affect our children-wrote to Hyde, Earl of Rochester, the King's uncle, a remonstrance, in which he thus alluded to his family.

After pleading his services, he says: My conscience assures me that I may write boldly, though I cannot speak to you. I have three sons, growing up to man's estate; I breed them up to learning beyond my fortune, but they are too hopeful to be neglected, though I want. Be pleased to look on me with an eye of compassion: some small employment would make my condition easy.' His salary as laureate had been in arrears, henceforth it was paid from a bare treasury,' as Dryden wrote; and Gideon's fleece has there been moistened when all the ground was dry.' 'Such,' writes Sir Walter Scott, in his honest enthusiasm for Dryden, was the recompense of the merry monarch and his connections to one whose productions had strengthened the pillars of his throne, as well as renovated the literary taste of the nation.'

6

Charles the Second died, and Dryden occupied himself with a Masque, 'Albion Albanus:' it had been commenced before the late king's short illness, and the performance was going on when news arrived that the Duke of Monmouth had landed to invade England at Lyme in Dorsetshire. The audience immediately left the theatre, and the piece was never brought on the stage again.

Soon after the accession of James, Dryden professed his conversion to Romanism. Interested motives, of course, have been assigned for a change of faith so remarkable at such a moment; but it had probably been a long-cherished conviction in the heart of the poet. Two classes of persons

HIS CONVERSION TO ROMANISM.

39

are the most liable to the misfortune-for such I must consider it-of returning into darkness out of the pure light of the Reformation. These are the very thoughtless, who have never comprehended the reasons of their faith;—and the puritanical; and in most of the conversions which have taken place in our own time such has been the case, with some remarkable, but few exceptions. Dryden, in his Hind and Panther,' has touchingly referred to those circumstances which palliated his renunciation of the Church of England.

'My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires,

My manhood, long misled by wand'ring 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.'

With this part of Dryden's life we have little to do, or with the work in which the exposition of doubts, previous to his change, was drawn up-his Religio Laici.' Sir Walter Scott, always benign, always wise, believes that Dryden's conversion relieved him from the misery of Deism, or, at all events, of doubt. 'He did not unloose,' he says, 'from the secure haven to moor in the perilous road; but being tossed on the billows of uncertainty, he dropped his anchor in the first moorings to which winds, waves, and perhaps an artful pilot chanced to convey his bark.'

Dryden's Ode on St. Cecilia,' for her festival, and his 'Ode on the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew,' were the only pieces of general poetry which he composed for several years. Inspired by the fine hymns of the Catholic ritual, he translated the favourite hymn of St. Francis Xavier, Veni, Creator Spiritus,'-a magnificent composition. To Dryden is ascribed the translation of the Te Deum retained in our churches, and of another hymn, that of the Vigil of St. John.*

'We have been fortunate,' says Scott, 'to have retained one

* Sir Walter Scott's 'Life of Dryden,' vol. i. p. 343.