ance, and is nearly the first instance of manly and rhythmical couplets.

It remains for Dryden to give to the critical spirit vigorous form, and for Pope to add to it perfection of artifice. Meanwhile, out of season, in penury, pain, and blindness, Milton produces, as we have seen, the greatest of modern epics, himself a benighted traveller on a dreary road. Near him, in sympathy with him, a kind of satellite, is another Puritan, Marvell, very unequal, but often melodious, graceful, and impressive. Thus after a badinage of courtesy and compliment to his 'coy mistres,' he adds:

'But at my back I always hear

Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found;

Nor in thy marble vault shall sound

My echoing song.'

Unhappily, in common with the Cowleyan sect of writers, he is eminently afflicted with the gift of ingenuity:

'Maria such and so doth hush

The world, and through the evening rush,

No new-born comet such a train

Draws through the sky, nor star new slain.

For straight those giddy rockets fail
Which from the putrid earth exhale,
But by her flames in heaven tried
Nature is wholly vitrified.'

This is a play of the intellectual fancy, in which an extravagant use of words aims to effect the results that living feeling had heretofore produced. The stamp of the age-critical rather than emotional is visible in his natural description, where he is most animated:

'Reform the errors of the spring:

Make that the tulips may have share

Of sweetness, seeing they are fair;
And roses of their thorns disarm:

But most procure

That violets may a longer age endure.

But oh, young beauty of the woods,

Whom nature courts with fruits and flowers,

Gather the flowers, but spare the buds;

Lest Flora, angry at thy crime

To kill her infants in their prime,

Should quickly make the example yours;
And, ere we see,

Nip in the blossom all our hopes in thee.'

And, in the Garden:

'Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy sister dear?
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy companies of men.
Your sacred plants, if here below,
Only among the plants will grow;
Society is all but rude

To this delightful solitude.

No white nor red was ever seen

So amorous as this lovely green.'

This way of treating Nature suits the time,-merely to picture what the eye sees and the ear hears, to produce the forms and colors of things, the movements and the sounds which pervade them. It is the calm, unexcited manner of an inventory. For contrast, take an instance from Keats, when once more, across the next century, it is given to see into the life of things, and seeing, to make us share his insight:

Upon a tranced summer night

Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,
Save from one gradual solitary gust

Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,
As if the ebbing air had but one wave.'

No eye can see deeply into the meaning of Nature, nor hence interpret her truly, unless it has also looked deeply into the moral heart, and sadly, sweetly, into the mystery of human life and human history.

Butler's Hudibras exhibits, in buffoonery, the style which Donne and Cowley practiced in its more serious form. Sir Hudibras is a Presbyterian knight who, with his squire, goes forth to redress all wrongs, and correct all abuses. He is beaten, set in stocks, pelted with rotten eggs, a ridiculous object from first to last, but serenely unconscious that he is laughed at. The author desires to make sport for a winning side, and the Puritans are caricatured, the terrible saints,

Who built their faith upon

The holy text of pike and gun,
Decide all controversies by
Infallible artillery,

And prove their doctrine orthodox

By apostolic blows and knocks."

We can imagine that the general hatred secured a hearing. No poem in fact rose at once to greater reputation. But fashions

DRAMA PREEMINENCE OF COMEDY.

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change; what yesterday was apt may be out of date to-morrow. Hudibras at present attracts few readers. There is in it no action, no nature; much triviality, much filth. It is pitiless, splenetic, exaggerated, discursive. Besides, wit, continued long, fatigues. Incessant surprises become wearisome. Enough remains, however, to render it notable. It is a very hoard of robust English and sententious dicta, many of which are like coins effaced and smoothed by currency. Here are some of the less

familiar:

'He could raise scruples dark and nice,

And after solve 'em in a trice.'

For most men carry things so even
Between this world and hell and heaven,

Without the least offense to either

They freely deal in all together.'

'He that runs may fight again,
Which he can never do that's slain.'

'Fools are known by looking wise,

As men tell woodcocks by their eyes.'

Drama. When the Restoration reopened the theatres, they were invested with the externals of French polish — movable decorations, music, lights, comfort. Pepys writes in his diary, January, 1661: 'To the theatre, where was acted Beggar's Bush, it being very well done, and here, the first time that ever I saw women come upon the stage.' In the reaction from Puritan proscription, they were thronged. The public, we have seen, was transformed. The animal, broken loose, abandons itself to excess, and the stage imitates the orgie. Comedy, dropping its serious and tender tones, wallows in vulgarity and lewdness. The new characters, gross and vicious, are in the taste of the day. Dryden, who still mingles the tragic and humorous, adopts the fashion of society, though not heartily. One of his gallants says: 'I am none of those unreasonable lovers that propose to themselves the loving to eternity. A month is commonly my stint.' Another: 'We love to get our mistresses, and purr over them, as cats do over mice, and let them get a little away; and all the pleasure is to pat them back again.' And a third:

'Is not love love without a priest and altars?

The temples are inanimate, and know not

What vows are made in them; the priest stands ready
For his hire, and cares not what hearts he couples.'

Etherege is the first to depict manners only-the careless pleasures of the human mass. He defines a gentleman to be one who 'ought to dress well, dance well, fence well, have a talent for loveletters, a pleasant voice in a room, to be always very amorous, sufficiently discreet, but not too constant.' But the hero of the libertine outburst is Wycherley. His best play is the Country Wife. Is it possible that king and nobles, beaux and belles, the elite of London, could come and listen to such scenes? What may we extract, that is not at war with beauty and delicacy? Horner, who has returned from France with the cavaliers, is a vile rogue, to whom a lady says: Drink, thou representative of a husband. Damn a husband.' Another avows: 'Our virtue is like the statesman's religion, the quaker's word, the gamester's oath, the great man's honour; but to cheat those that trust us.' To a third he declares: 'I cannot be your husband, dearest, since you are married.' And she replies: '0, And she replies: 'O, would you make me believe that? Don't I see every day at London here, women leave their first husbands, and go and live with other men as their wives? pish, pshaw!' Viola, in Plain Dealer, makes an appointment to meet a friend, but unexpectedly meets her husband, who comes in from a journey; kisses him, and says, aside: 'Ha! my husband returned! and have I been throwing away so many kind kisses on my husband, and wronged my lover already?' She sends him off on an improvised errand, and when he is gone, she cries exultingly: 'Go, husband, and come up, friend: just the buckets in the well; the absence of one brings the other. But I hope, like them too, they will not meet in the way, jostle, and clash together.' She had already tired of another, defied him, declaring herself to be married. To his question, 'Did you love him too?' she had answered: Most passionately; nay, love him now, though I have married him.' She refused to surrender the diamonds he had given her, and justified the deception she had practised: "Twas his money: I had a real passion for that. Yet I loved not that so well, as for it to take him; for as soon as I had his money I hastened his departure like a wife, who, when she has made the most of a dying husband's breath, pulls away his pillow.' If this is the Zenith, judge of the Nadir! Need we analyze these dramas-recount their plots? Their chief merit is the liveliness of their dialogue, and their only originality

is their profligacy. Nothing to raise, console, or purify. In the ten selected by Mr. Hunt from the three hundred and eight Maxims and Reflections, written by Wycherley in old age, we find but two which seem to us to be in any degree novel, just, and wise:

'The silence of a wise man is more wrong to mankind than the slanderer's speech.' 'Our hopes, though they never happen, yet are some kind of happiness; as trees, whilst they are still growing, please in the prospect, though they bear no fruit.' Congreve is perhaps less natural, but more scholarly, more highly bred, more brilliant, more urbane. Yet French authors are his masters, and experience supplies the colors of his portraits, which display both the innate baseness of primitive instincts, and the refined corruption of worldly habits. In Love for Love, Miss Prue is left in the room with a dolt of a sailor, who wants to make love:

'Come, mistress, will you please to sit down? for an you stand astern a that'n, we shall never grapple together. Come, I'll haul a chair; there, an you please to sit I'll sit by you.

Prue. You need not sit so near one; if you have anything to say I can hear you farther off; I an't deaf.

Ben. Why, that's true, as you say; nor I an't dumb; I can be heard as far as another; I'll heave off to please you.

Prue. I don't know what to say to you, nor I don't care to speak with you at all.

Ben. Mayhap you may be shamefaced? some maidens, tho'f they love a man well enough, yet they don't care to tell'n so to's face: if that's the case, why silence gives

consent.

Prue. But I am sure it is not so, for I'll speak sooner than you should believe that; and I'll speak truth, though one should always tell a lie to a man; and I don't care, let my father do what he will; I'm too big to be whipped, so I'll tell you plainly I don't like you, nor love you at all, nor never will, that's more: so there's your answer for you; and don't trouble me no more, you ugly thing!

Ben. Flesh! who are you? You heard t'other handsome young woman speak civilly to me of her own accord: whatever you think of yourself, gad I don't think you are any more to compare to her than a can of small beer to a bowl of punch.

Prue. Well, and there's a handsome gentleman, and a fine gentleman, and a sweet gentleman, that was here, that loves me, and I love him; and if he sees you speak to me any more he'll thrash your jacket for you, he will, you great sea-calf!

Ben. What, do you mean that fair-weather spark that was here just now? will he thrash my jacket ?- let'n-let'n. But an he comes near me, mayhap I may giv'n a salt cel for's supper, for all that. What does father mean to leave me alone with such a dirty dowdy? Sea-calf! I an't calf enough to lick your chalked face, you cheese-curd you.'

The sweet and handsome man is Tattle, who instructs her, and finds her an apt scholar:

'You must let me speak, miss, you must not speak first; I must ask you questions, and you must answer.

Prue. What, is it like the catechism? Come then, ask me.
Tattle. D'ye think you can love me?

Prue. Yes.

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