In my style I have professed to imitate the divine Shakespeare; which that I might perform more freely, I have disincumbered myself from rhyme. . . Yet, I hope, I may affirm, and without vanity, that, by imitating him, I have excelled myself throughout the play; and particularly, that I prefer the scene betwixt Antony and Ventidius in the first act, to anything which I have written in this kind.'

Accordingly, it is not difficult to find parts that are ShakeFor instance:

spearean.

'Gone so soon!

Is Death no more? He used him carelessly,
With a familiar kindness; ere he knocked,
Ran to the door and took him in his arms,

As who should say, "You're welcome at all hours,

A friend need give no warning."'

These words of Antony are at once noble and natural:

For I am now so sunk from what I was,

Thou find'st me at my lowest water-mark.
The rivers that ran in and raised my fortunes

Are all dried up, or take another course:
What I have left is from my native spring;

I've a heart still that swells in scorn of Fate,

And lifts me to my banks.'

Seeing him cast down, the veteran Ventidius, who loves his general, weeps:

'Vent. Look, emperor; this is no common dew;

I have not wept this forty years; but now

My mother comes afresh into my eyes;

I cannot help her softness.

Ant. By heaven, he weeps! poor, good old man, he weeps!
The big round drops course one another down

The furrows of his cheeks. Stop them, Ventidius,
Or I shall blush to death; they set my shame,
That caused them, full before me.

Vent. I'll do my best.

Ant. Sure there's contagion in the tears of friends;
See, I have caught it too. Believe me, 'tis not
For my own griefs, but thine.'

Octavia, come to reclaim her husband, brings Antony a pardon, and is accused of basely begging it. She answers in a style worthy of a lofty soul:

'Poorly and basely I could never beg,

Nor could my brother grant.

My hard fortune

Subjects me still to your unkind mistakes.
But the conditions I have brought are such,
You need not blush to take: I love your honour,
Because 'tis mine; it never shall be said,
Octavia's husband was her brother's slave.
Sir, you are free; free, even from her you loath:
For though my brother bargains for your love,
Makes me the price and cement of your peace,

I have a soul like yours; I cannot take

Your love as alms, nor beg what I deserve.

I'll tell my brother we are reconciled;

He shall draw back his troops, and you shall march

To rule the east: I may be dropt at Athens;

No matter where. I never will complain,

But only keep the barren name of wife,
And rid you of the trouble.'

The drama was not Dryden's true domain. He was too much of a dialectician and a schoolmaster. His muse was happier in the exercise of the critical faculty,—in methodical discussion, well-delivered retort, eloquence and satire. It is therefore as a satirist and a pleader that he is best known. receipt for the first:

He gives his own

'How easy it is to call rogue and villain, and that wittily! but how hard to make a man appear a fool, a blockhead, or a knave, without using any of those opprobrious terms! . . . This is the mystery of that noble trade. . . . Neither is it true that this fineness of raillery is offensive: a witty man is tickled while he is hurt in this manner, and a fool feels it not. . . . There is a vast difference between the slovenly butchering of a man and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its place.'

When he entered into the strife of political parties, he wrote Absalom and Achitophel against the Whigs. Under these names he describes the pliant and popular Duke of Monmouth, eldest-born of Charles II, and the treacherous Earl of Shaftesbury, who stirs up the son against the father. The latter, 'the false Achitophel' is the hero of the poem:

'A name to all succeeding ages curst:

For close designs and crooked counsels fit,
Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit,
Restless, unfixed in principle and place,
In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace:
A fiery soul, which, working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy body to decay,

And o'er-informed the tenement of clay. . .

In friendship false, implacable in hate;
Resolved to ruin or to rule the state."

Never was portrait of pen sharper than this of the Duke of

Buckingham:

'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 shew 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:

Beggared by fools, whom still he found too late,

He had his jest, and they had his estate.'

Poignancy atones for its severity, while discretion renders it more cutting. If he falls into virulent ribaldry, it is less the fault of the man than of the age, which spared no invective however libellous, and no allusion however coarse. His coarsest satire is levelled against attacks which were themselves brutal; as in the case of Shadwell, who is represented, in Mac Flecknoe, as heir to the throne of stupidity. Flecknoe,' the king of nonsense, deliberating on the choice of a worthy successor, cries:

"Tis resolved, for Nature pleads that he
Should only rule who most resembles me.
Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dulness from his tender years;
Shadwell alone of all my sons is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.

The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.
Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,
Strike through and make a lucid interval;
But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray;
His rising fogs prevail upon the day.

Besides, his goodly fabric fills the eye,

And seems designed for thoughtless majesty.'

When he became a convert to Romanism, he wrote The Hind and the Panther in defence of his new creed. Written in the hey-day of exultation, in the interest of what he dreamed to be the winning side, his argumentative talents nowhere appear to so great advantage. The first lines, descriptive of the Romish Church, are among the most musical in the compass of poetry:

'A milk-white hind, immortal and unchanged,
Fed on the lawns, and in the forest ranged;
Without unspotted, innocent within,

She feared no danger, for she knew no sin.'

All the heretical sects, as beasts of prey, worry her. The English Church is

'The Panther, sure the noblest, next the hind,

And fairest creature of the spotted kind;
Oh, could her inborn stains be washed away,
She were too good to be a beast of prey!'

1A scribbler who died in 1678. Mac, the Celtic for son.

Then he introduces the bloody Bear, an Independent; the quaking Hare, for the Quakers; then the bristled Baptist Boar. The reader can imagine the bitterness which envenoms the controversy.

Having no personal philosophy to develop, Dryden was soon reduced to the clothing of foreign ideas. He translated Persius, Ovid, Juvenal, Lucretius, Virgil, and Homer; but he could not perhaps no one can reproduce their spirit. The dawn of credulous thought can scarcely reappear in the harsh light of a learned and manly age. His version of the Eneid was long considered his highest glory. The nation seemed interested in the event. One gave him the different editions, another supplied him with notes, Addison furnished him with the arguments of the several books, great lords vied with one another in offering him hospitality, and, notwithstanding the inherent difficulties of the subject, he produced, says Pope, 'the most noble and spirited translation. that I know in any language.' He also modernized several tales of the long-neglected Chaucer. But, as he worked under contract, haste availed only to dilute, and the childlike simplicity of the original is smothered in verbiage. Thus:

The busy larke, messager of day,
Saluteth in her song the morwe gray;
And fyry Phebus riseth up so bright

That al the orient laugheth of the light.'

How artless, yet how expressive! Now compare the modernization, which loses at once the freshness of idea and the felicity of phrase:

The morning lark, the messenger of day,
Saluted in her song the morning gray;

And soon the sun arose with beams so bright

That all the horizon laughed to see the joyous sight.'1

He is too reflective and stringent for the delicacies of his master; too cold and solid for his self-abandoning tenderness and his graceful gossip.

Though he never wrote extensively in prose, his prefaces and dedications, which, to increase their value, usher in each of his poems and plays, have made him famous as a critic. Most of his criticism relates to the drama, with which he was very conversant. To afford a glimpse of his exact and simple manner, as well as of the spirit which he carried into art, we briefly quote from the earliest statement of his critical system. It will be seen that he

Fables, consisting of stories from Chaucer and Boccaccio.

was more excellent in theory than he has proved in practice, where he alternately ventures and restrains himself, pushed in one direction by his English bias and drawn in the other by his French rules:

The beauties of the French poesy are the beauties of a statue, but not of a man, because not animated with the soul of poesy, which is imitation of humour and passions.

He who will look upon their plays which have been written till these last ten years, or thereabouts, will find it an hard matter to pick out two or three passable humours amongst them. Corneille himself, their arch-poet, what has he produced except the Liar? and you know how it was cried up in France; but when it came upon the English stage, though well translated, . . . the most favourable to it would not put it in competition with many of Fletcher's or Ben Jonson's. . . . Their verses are to me the coldest I have ever read, . . . their speeches being so many declamations. When the French stage came to be reformed by Cardinal Richelieu, those long harangues were introduced, to comply with the gravity of a churchman. Look upon the Cinna and the Pompey; they are not so properly to be called plays as long discourses of reasons of state; and Polyeucte, in matters of religion is as solemn as the long stops upon our organs. Since that time it is grown into a custom, and their actors speak by the hour-glass, like our parsons. . . . I deny not but this may suit well enough with the French; for as we, who are a more sullen people, come to be diverted at our plays, so they, who are of an airy and gay temper, come thither to make themselves more serious.'1

He who began in empty mouthing, and who had gradually acquired the energy of satire, ended by acquiring the rapture of the lyric. Amidst the infirmities of age and the greatest sadness, he wrote the brilliant ode of Alexander's Feast, in honor of St. Cecilia's day. The hero is on his throne, his valiant captains before him, the lovely Thais by his side. Timotheus, placed on high, sings:

'Of Bacchus ever fair, and ever young.
The jolly god in triumph comes;

Sound the trumpets, beat the drums;
Flushed with a purple grace

He shows his honest face:

Now give the hautboys breath; he comes, he comes.

Bacchus, ever fair and young,

Drinking joys did first ordain;

Bacchus' blessings are a treasure,

Drinking is the soldier's pleasure;

Rich the treasure,

Sweet the pleasure,

Sweet is pleasure after pain.'

Moved by the stirring sounds, the monarch fights his battles over, madness rises, he defies heaven and earth. A sad air depresses him, then a tender one dissolves him in sighs, and he sinks upon the breast of the fair. Now strike the golden lyre again:

'A louder yet, and yet a louder strain.

Break his bands of sleep asunder,

1 An Essay of Dramatic Poesy.