And rouse him, like a rattling peal of thunder.

Hark, hark, the horrid sound

Has raised up his head,

As awaked from the dead,

And, amazed, he stares around.

"Revenge, revenge!" Timotheus cries;

"See the Furies arise;

See the snakes that they rear,

How they hiss in their hair,

And the sparkles that flash from their eyes!

Behold a ghastly band,

Each a torch in his hand!

Those are Grecian ghosts, that in battle were slain,

And unburied remain

Inglorious on the plain:

Give the vengeance due

To the valiant crew.

Behold how they toss their torches on high,

How they point to the Persian abodes,

And glittering temples of their hostile gods."

The princes applaud with a furious joy;

And the king seized a flambeau with zeal to destroy;

Thais led the way,

To light him to his prey,

And, like another Helen, fired another Troy.'

So did the bard realize the saying of his own Sebastian,

'A setting sun

Should leave a track of glory in the skies.'

Style.-Harmonious, rapid, and vehement, pointed and condensed, with—

"The varying verse, the full-resounding line,
The long majestic march, and energy divine.'

Symmetrical and precise, as of one who studied rather than felt; yet uneven, as of one who was negligent of parts because confident that the good would overbalance the bad. In prose, airy and animated, easy without being feeble, and careless without being harsh; having that conversational elasticity which comes of familiarity with the drawing-room-companionship with men and women of the world.

Rank.-Though few eminent writers are so little read, few names are more familiar. By the suffrages of his own and succeeding generations, his place is first in the second class of English poets. Perhaps his fame would have suffered little, if he had written not one of his twenty-eight dramas. He could not produce correct representations of human nature, for his was an examining rather than a believing frame of mind; and he

wrought literature more as one apprenticed to the business than as one under the control of inspiration: he attained, however, the excellences that lie on the lower grade of the satirical, didactic, and polemic. Not to be numbered with those who have sounded the depths of soul, he is incomparable as a reasoner in verse. Pope, his imitator and admirer, has outshone him in neatness, in brilliancy, and finish, but has not approached him in flexible vigor, in fervor, or in sweep and variety of versification. His faults,' says Cowper, are numberless, and so are his beauties. His faults are those of a great man, and his beauties are such (at least sometimes) as Pope with all his touching and retouching could never equal.' Making a trade of his genius, he wrote too much; as a whole, heavy and tedious, never quite equal to his talent. Says Voltaire of him, 'An author who would have had a glory without a blemish, if he had only written the tenth part of his works.'

6

If he could not depict artless and delicate sentiments or arouse subtle sympathies, he had, beyond most, the gift of the right word, and this in common with the few great masters,—that the winged seeds of his thought embed themselves in the memory, and germinate there. Few have minted so many phrases that are still a part of our daily currency. For example:

None but the brave deserves the fair.'

'Men are but children of a larger growth.'
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.'
'Love either finds equality or makes it.'
'Passions in men oppressed are doubly strong.'
'Few know the use of life before 'tis past.'
'Time gives himself and is not valued.'
'That's empire, that which I can give away.'
'The greatest argument for love is love."
'Why, love does all that's noble here below.'
"That bad thing, gold, buys all good things.'
"Trust in noble natures obliges them the more.'

'Death in itself is nothing; but we fear
To be we know not what, we know not where.'

'The cause of love can never be assigned,
'Tis in no face, but in the lover's mind.'

"The secret pleasure of the generous act
Is the great mind's great bribe.'

He was the literary lion of his day; and no rustic, of any taste for letters, thought his round of sight-seeing complete without a visit to Will's coffee-house, where in a snug arm-chair, carefully placed in winter by the fireside and in summer on the balcony, sat 'glorious John,' pipe in hand, expounding the law on disputed points in literature and in politics. Happy was the young poet or university student who could boast to his admiring friends that he had got in a word, or extracted a pinch of snuff from the great man's box.

He forms the connecting link between the prose writers of the days of James I and those of Queen Anne. He gave a hand to the age before and to that which followed, the age of solitary imagination and invention, and the age of reasoning and conversation. Pope saw him, Addison drank with him; he visited Milton, and was intimate with those who could tell him of Jonson from personal recollection.

Character. His manner of life was that of a solid and judicious mind which thinks not of amusing and exciting itself, but of learning, reflecting, and judging. He had no taste for field sports, and felt more pleasure in argument than in landscape, in the rhythm of the epigram than in the melodies of birds. Though he watched the conflict of parties keenly, he did not, as did Milton, mix personally in the turmoil. Without being reserved, he was diffident, and neither would nor could in the circles of fashion cut the brilliant figure which Pope, his great disciple, made. He rose early, spent the morning in writing or reading, dined with his family, and in the afternoon repaired to Will's coffee-house, that common resort of wits, pamphleteers, poets, and critics. Says Congreve, who knew him familiarly:

'He was of a nature exceedingly humane and compassionate, ready to forgive injuries, and capable of a sincere reconciliation with those who had offended him. His friendship, where he professed, went beyond his professions. He was of a very easy, of very pleasing access: but somewhat slow, and, as it were, diffident, in his advances to others; he had that in nature which abhorred intrusion into any society whatever. He was therefore less known, and consequently his character became more liable to misapprehensions and misrepresentations.'

Yet he was conscious of his own value, and 'probably did not offer his conversation because he expected it to be solicited.' His confidence in himself amounted almost to reverence. Of Alexander's Feast, he said that an ode of equal merit had never been

produced and never would be. This feeling of easy superiority made him the mark for much jealous vituperation. Of their lampoons and libels, he says: 'I am vindictive enough to have repelled force by force, if I could imagine that any of them had ever reached me.' He was reproached with boasting of his intimacy with the great.

Of himself:

'My conversation is slow and dull, my humour saturnine and reserved: In short, I am none of those who endeavour to break jests in company or make repartees.' Notwithstanding, he was a rapid composer. He says:

"Thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only difficulty is to chuse or to reject, to run them into verses, or to give them the other harmony of prose: I have so long studied and practiced both, that they are grown into a habit, and become familiar to me.'

Less fluent, he would have been less slovenly. Fond of splendor, he was indifferent to neatness. Faults of affectation, time in a measure corrected; but faults of negligence, never. To the last, rather than wait for the fittest word, he seized the readiest.

His reading was extensive, and his memory tenacious. Understanding was preponderant. He delighted to talk of liberty and necessity, destiny, and chance.

On the other hand, he was deficient in lofty or intense sensibility. He was a stranger to the transports of the heart. Hence, though he could describe character in the abstract, he could not embody it in the drama.

His genius matured slowly. At thirty-two he had given little, if aught, to warrant an augury of his greatness. But he grew steadily. His imagination quickened as he increased in years, and his intellect was pliable at seventy. Old age yielded, on the whole, the best of him. As every innovator must have, he had many enemies. 'More libels,' he says, 'have been written against me than almost any man now living.' Later:

'What Virgil wrote in the vigour of his age, in plenty and at ease, I have undertaken to translate in my declining years; struggling with wants, oppressed with sickness, curbed in my genius, liable to be misconstrued in all I write; and my judges, if they are not very equitable, already prejudiced against me, by the lying character which has been given them of my morals.'

He would have been less open to attack, had he been less servile to the false taste and corrupt morals of his age. As a writer for the stage, he deliberately adopted the mercantile maxim that

'He who lives to please, must please to live.'

His dedications are nauseous panegyrics. In one, he says to the Duchess of Monmouth:

To receive the blessings and prayers of mankind, you need only be seen together. We are ready to conclude, that you are a pair of angels, sent below to make virtue amiable in your persons, or to sit to poets, when they would pleasantly instruct the age by drawing goodness in the most perfect and alluring shape of nature. . . . No part of Europe can afford a parallel to your noble Lord in masculine beauty, and in goodliness of shape.'

The rest was good, and the land was pleasant. Elsewhere to her 'noble lord,' he says, doubtless with the vision of a purse of gold before him:

'You have all the advantages of mind and body, and an illustrious birth, conspiring to render you an extraordinary person. The Achilles and the Rinaldo are present in you, even above their originals; you only want a Homer or a Tasso to make you equal to them. Youth, beauty, and courage (all which you possess in the height of their perfection) are the most desirable gifts of Heaven.'

His works afford too many examples not only of abject adulation but of dissolute licentiousness. He studied filth as he studied everything, not as a pleasure but as a trade. He committed his offences with his eyes wide open. He sinned against his better knowledge. For the depravity that deliberately makes merchandise of corruption, there is no excuse. The single consolation is, that the offender shall nobly confess his error, and testify his repentance. Of one who had coarsely reproved him, in the preface to the Fables he says:

'I shall say the less of Mr. Collier, because in many things he has taxed me justly; and I have pleaded guilty to all thoughts and expressions of mine which can be truly argued of obscenity, profaneness, or immorality, and retract them. If he be my enemy, let him triumph; if he be my friend, as I have given him no personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance.'

Elsewhere:

'My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires,

My manhood, long misled by wandering 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!'

Conscious that he had been untrue to his finer possibilities, in the end he says:

'I have been myself too much of a libertine in most of my poems, which I should be well contented, if I had time, either to purge or to see them fairly burned.'

He was sceptical, yet superstitious. Like many others, he was a believer in astrology. In a letter to his sons he says: