THE POETRY OF 
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 BY 
 
 MARK VAN DOREN 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE 
 1920
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1920, BT 
 HABCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC.
 
 Stack 
 
 Annex 
 
 TO 
 
 CARL VAN DOREN 
 IRITA VAN DOREN
 
 PREFACE 
 
 This is an effort to brighten the most neglected 
 side of the greatest neglected English poet. There 
 is some novelty, I hope, in a treatment on an ex- 
 tended and more or less enthusiastic scale of Dry- 
 den's non-dramatic verse as a body, with attention 
 to the celebrator, the satirist, the journalist, the 
 singer, and the story-teller all together. No justifi- 
 cation will be required, probably, for my interest in a 
 poetic personality always important and never more 
 freshly so than now. 
 
 The essay owes much to my brother, Carl Van 
 Doren, whose idea it largely was and whose immense 
 resources of encouragement were always at my com- 
 mand. My sister, Irita Van Doren, assisted cheer- 
 fully with certain details. Professor W. P. Trent 
 brought his scholarship to bear upon the book, 
 along with an old and well-considered fondness for 
 the poetry under discussion. Professor A. H. Thorn- 
 dike and Professor J. B. Fletcher made valuable 
 suggestions for improving the manuscript. It is an 
 especial pleasure to acknowledge favors received in 
 England, where I spent some months as a fellow 
 from Columbia University. The officials of the 
 British Museum were courteous in all respects. Sir 
 Arthur Dryden of Canons Ashby was hospitable and 
 variously helpful. Mr. Percy L. Babington of 
 Cambridge University was most liberal with his
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 information concerning John Oldham. I have been 
 pleasantly in debt from the first to Professor Saints- 
 bury, who has lost no opportunity in forty years for 
 speaking well of Dryden, and whose spirited mono- 
 graph in the English Men of Letters I could only 
 expect to supplement. For talks on Dryden and 
 other subjects I am happy to remember my travel- 
 ling companion, Joseph Wood Krutch. 
 
 MARK VAN DOREN.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 
 I. THE MAKING OF THE POET I 
 
 II. FALSE LIGHTS 39 
 
 III. THE TRUE FIRE 86 
 
 IV. THE OCCASIONAL POET 137 
 
 V. THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 178 
 
 VI. THE LYRIC POET 219 
 
 VII. THE NARRATIVE POET 260 
 
 VIII. REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 292 
 
 APPENDIX: The Authorship of Mac Flecknoe, . . . 339 
 INDEX 351
 
 THE 
 POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 THE MAKING OF THE POET 
 
 The world has not been inclined to make way for 
 John Dry den the poet. When he died in 1700, the 
 generalissimo of English verse, it seemed certain to 
 the survivors that the momentum of his name 
 would keep his works forever rolling abreast of 
 the generations. But before a single century had 
 passed, he had begun to live rather in the stiffness 
 than in the strength of his eminence; and another 
 century saw him laid carefully away among the 
 heroes. 
 
 Since Dryden was laid away, the world has not 
 been exactly incurious about his tarnished remains. 
 It was the fashion a hundred years ago to classify 
 the poets, and level them into orders; at such times 
 Dryden was likely to be sent with Pope to seek the 
 second level. The nineteenth century, anxious to 
 know what past poets had been great and why, 
 sounded Dryden to the depths for notes which it 
 could recognize; Lowell went eagerly through him, 
 thinking to decide once for all how much of a poet 
 he was, and revising his judgment at every tenth
 
 2 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 page. Latterly the critics with historical bent and 
 eclectic taste have been busy either at placing Dry- 
 den in time or at explaining his imperfections by an 
 appeal to the shortcomings of the audience for which 
 he wrote. This tasting and this research have 
 done much to lay bare huge flaws and inequalities 
 hi the surface which Dryden presented to posterity. 
 Little has been done in the way of exploring the 
 large spirit which worked beneath that surface, or 
 in surveying other surfaces less conspicuous. The 
 embattled seventeenth century left a number of 
 bruised and defective monuments, none of which 
 is more engaging than the poetry of John Dryden. 
 
 The story of Dry den's poetry is the story of a sin- 
 ewy mind attacking bulky materials. Since we 
 know next to nothing about Dryden's mind before 
 it ripened, the story naturally begins for us with the 
 materials which are known to have lain at hand dur- 
 ing the years of his growth. 
 
 The thirty years, from 1631 to 1660, during 
 which Dryden came slowly to his maturity, saw 
 many slender volumes of fine verse published in 
 England, the work of Milton, Herbert, Randolph, 
 Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, Crashaw, Vaughan, and 
 Herrick. Yet after Ben Jonson no one poetic per- 
 sonality was dominant in these years, and there 
 flowed no current powerful enough to draw young 
 writers in. Of the nine poets who have just been 
 named, six had done their work in comparative iso- 
 lation, and the other three had been content to 
 toss off courtly trifles. Dryden is temperamentally 
 akin to none of them, and it is unlikely that they
 
 THE MAKING OF THE POET 3 
 
 impressed him in his youth; although it must be 
 remembered that his first considerable poem, the 
 Heroic Stanzas of 1659, contains in the thirty-fifth 
 stanza a faint echo of Milton's Ode on the Morning 
 of Christ's Nativity: 
 
 But first, the Ocean, as a tribute, sent 
 
 That Giant-Prince of all her watery herd; 
 
 And th' isle, when her protecting Genius went, 
 Upon his obsequies loud sighs conferred. 
 
 Other poets, past and present, he gradually became 
 acquainted with before 1660. Jonson must always 
 have been to an extent congenial. Chaucer, Spenser, 
 and Shakespeare he was not prepared so early to 
 admire. But by Sylvester he was "rapt into ec- 
 stasy"; and Quarles and Wither furnished him 
 thin nourishment. There were hundreds of plays to 
 be read. He was not ignorant of Fairfax's transla- 
 tion of Tasso. Soon or late he came to know Michael 
 Drayton, whose label for Samuel Daniel, "too much 
 historian in verse," Dryden adopted for Lucan in the 
 preface to Annus Mirabilis; and whose apostrophe 
 to Daniel, 
 
 And thou, the sweet Musseus of these times, 
 Pardon my rugged and unfiled rhymes, 
 
 curiously anticipates Dryden's own verses in honor 
 of John Oldham. We may be certain that he 
 read an abundance of very bad poetry in his 
 green, unknowing youth. Professor Saintsbury 
 has shown that he was acquainted with Edward 
 Benlowes, almost the worst poet England has pro-
 
 4 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 duced. The poems of William Cartwright which 
 were collected in 1651 include, among some respec- 
 table complimentary pieces, two on smallpox which 
 if seen by Dryden before 1649 could have inspired 
 his unhappy effusion on Lord Hastings. The " Cleve- 
 landisms " which Lisideius damns in the Essay of 
 Dramatic Poesy in 1668 probably were not anathema 
 to Dryden a dozen years before. 
 
 Had Dryden never indulged in more than random 
 reading among the poets, it is safe to say that he 
 would never himself have become a poet of dimen- 
 sions. No one was better aware of what he needed 
 to read than he. ''Mere poets," he wrote in the 
 postcript to the Notes and Observations on the 
 Empress of Morocco (1674), "are as sottish as mere 
 drunkards are, who live in a continual mist, without 
 seeing or judging anything clearly. A man should 
 be learned in several sciences, and should have a 
 reasonable, philosophical, and in some measure a 
 mathematical head, to be a complete and excellent 
 poet; and besides this, should have experience in 
 all sorts of humours and manners of men. . . . Mr. 
 Settle having never studied any sort of learning but 
 poetry, ... as you may find by his writings, . . . 
 ; must make very lame work on 't." Although Dry- 
 den was speaking here of dramatic poets, it is fair 
 to accept these sentences as trustworthy guides 
 through the twists and turns of his culture. 
 
 "For my own part, who must confess it to my 
 shame, ... I never read anything but for pleasure," 
 he declared in the Life of Plutarch (1683). But 
 pleasure for him meant the satisfying of intellec-
 
 THE MAKING OF THE POET 5 
 
 tual curiosity as well as it meant diversion; from 
 the beginning, there can be no doubt, he was 
 pleased to read widely and was avid of informa- 
 tion. "He's a man of general learning," sneered 
 Settle. Dryden was not an exact or patient scholar, 
 nor was he obsessed with the pedantry that had 
 produced works like Burton's Anatomy of Melan- 
 choly earlier in the century. Although he loved 
 learning and argument and could not refrain from 
 literary history and criticism, although he loaded 
 his poems with science and mythology and theol- 
 ogy, he was never weighed down with learned 
 lumber. In the Rehearsal he is represented with a 
 common-place book in his hand from which he is 
 ever drawing the happiest images and sentences of 
 Persius, Seneca, Horace, Juvenal, Claudian, Pliny, 
 Plutarch, and Montaigne. Though this may not 
 be a true likeness, it brings into relief a bent of 
 Dryden's which must have been apparent early in 
 his career. Congreve records that he had an un- 
 failing memory, and Dr. Johnson was inclined to 
 attribute his large stock of information rather to 
 "accidental intelligence and various conversa- 
 tion" than to diligent and solitary reading. How- 
 ever he may have come by his lore, he came by it 
 eagerly, at a time when the old was mingling with 
 the new, and all the surfaces of knowledge were 
 being broken rapidly into fresh forms. 
 
 It is not known exactly when Dryden entered 
 Westminster School, or in detail what he did there. 
 But a good deal is known, both generally about the 
 character of English schools in those days and
 
 6 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 particularly about the character of Dryden's mas- 
 ter, Busby. The English grammar schools before 
 the Restoration clung to the old omnibus ideals of 
 education which stressed the encyclopedic and the 
 sententious. For a century Latin had led in the 
 school curriculums, supplanting logic. Wolsey had 
 advised that Virgil be "pronounced with due intona- 
 tion of voice," out of regard for "the majesty of 
 his verse," and during the first half of the seven- 
 teenth century the discipline in Latin was espe- 
 cially complete. Exercises in Greek received for 
 the most part only secondary emphasis, although 
 Westminster School was famous for its Greek stud- 
 ies, three different head-masters, Grant, Camden, 
 and Busby, having produced Greek grammars. 
 Charles Hoole, in his New Discoverie of the Old Art 
 of Keeping Schools, 1660, furnishes the best testi- 
 mony we have upon mid-century curriculums. Ac- 
 cording to him, boys began very early to trans- 
 late English verse into Latin, keeping notebooks 
 by them wherein they entered choice classical 
 phrases to assist them in avoiding Anglicisms. The 
 "figura" and "prosodia" of rhetoric were by no 
 means neglected, and for a show of wisdom the 
 pupils were taught to embellish their themes with 
 apologues, fables, adages, "witty sentences" an- 
 cient or modern, hieroglyphics, emblems, sym- 
 bols, ancient laws and customs, and biographical 
 illustrations out of Plutarch. Dr. Richard Busby 
 of Westminster was the most famous schoolmaster 
 of the century; during his fifty-seven years of in- 
 cumbency Westminster produced more notable
 
 THE MAKING OF THE POET 7 
 
 men than any other school has produced in a hun- 
 dred. When Dryden published his translation 
 of Persius in 1693, he dedicated the fifth Satire 
 to Dr. Busby, "to whom I am not only obliged 
 myself for the best part of my own education, and 
 that of my two sons, but have also received from 
 him the first and truest taste of Persius"; and be- 
 fore the third Satire he remarked, "I remember I 
 translated this Satire, when I was a King's scholar 
 at Westminster School, for a Thursday night's 
 exercise." Some notion of the school discipline in 
 Dryden's day may be gained from the account 
 left by another of Dr. Busby's boys. "Betwixt 
 one to three, that lesson which, out of some author 
 appointed for that day, had been by the Master 
 expounded into them (out of Cicero, Virgil, Homer, 
 Euripides; Isocrates; Livie, Sallust, etc.) was to be 
 exactlie gone through by construing and other 
 grammatical waies, examining all the rhetorical 
 figures and translating it out of verse into prose, 
 or out of prose into verse; out of Greek into Latin; 
 or out of Latin into Greek. Then they were en- 
 joined to commit that to memorie against the next 
 morning." 1 
 
 It was Coleridge's belief that the whole tone of 
 Augustan poetry in England was derived from 
 such academic practices as these, which freighted 
 the styles of many generations of schoolboys with 
 conventional imagery and stereotyped epithets. 
 Certainly it was under Busby that Dryden con- 
 
 1 Barker, G. F. R., Memoir of Richard Busby, D. D. London, 1895, 
 p. 80.
 
 8 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 tracted the Latinism of thought and speech which 
 proved later both a blessing and a curse. His Lat- 
 inism helped him to be clear and strong, as he in- 
 dicated in his dedication of Troilus and Cressida: 
 "I am often put to a stand in considering whether 
 what I write be the idiom of the tongue, or false 
 grammar, and nonsense couched beneath that 
 specious name of Anglicism; and have no other 
 way to clear my doubts, but by translating my 
 English into Latin, and thereby trying what sense 
 the words will bear in a more stable language." 
 But his Latinism also encouraged him to write too 
 much in that diffuse manner which so ludicrously 
 vitiated the verse of the next century. When he 
 was not at his raciest, for instance, he could write 
 lines like these from Britannia Rediviva: 
 
 As when a sudden storm of hail and rain 
 Beats to the ground the yet unbearded grain, 
 Think not the hopes of harvest are destroyed 
 On the flat field, and on the naked void; 
 The light unloaded stem, from tempest freed, 
 Will raise the youthful honours of his head; 
 And, soon restored by native vigour, bear 
 The timely product of the bounteous year. 
 
 If Westminster offered a style, Cambridge be- 
 stowed the broader gifts of taste and thought. 
 Dryden entered Trinity College in 1650 and stayed 
 at least four years. It is at this point that Au- 
 brey's note in his Minutes of Lives, "John Drey- 
 den, esq., Poet Laureate. He will write it for me 
 himselfe," most tantalizes. From 1654 to the
 
 THE MAKING OF THE POET 9 
 
 death of Cromwell we know nothing about Dry- 
 den; but we may suppose that somewhere he pri- 
 vately read and wrote to advantage during those 
 years, since the Heroic Stanzas reveal a mind al- 
 ready careful and full. From nineteen to twenty- 
 eight Dryden was a student; and it is important 
 to know what he learned. 
 
 "I am, ridiculously enough, accused to be a con- 
 temner of universities;" he told Sir Charles Sedley 
 in the dedication of The Assignation in 1673, "that 
 is, ... an enemy of learning; without the founda- 
 tion of which, I am sure, no man can pretend to be a 
 poet." Shadwell swore in his Medal of John Bayes 
 (1682) that Dryden "came first to Town" when 
 "a raw young fellow of seven and twenty"; which 
 seems to indicate that the poet remained in resi- 
 dence either at the university or with his Round- 
 head relatives at Tichmarsh for four years after 
 1654. The Reverend Dr. Crichton, however, a 
 contemporary at Cambridge, was warrant for 
 another story: "he stayed to take his Bachelor's 
 degree, but his head was too roving and active, or 
 what else you'll call it, to confine himself to a col- 
 lege life, and so he left it and went to London into 
 gayer company, and set up for a poet." 1 What- 
 ever the impatience with which he went to Lon- 
 don, he took many an occasion in later years to 
 pay beautiful compliments to the universities. In 
 the Life of Plutarch he duly acknowledged his debt 
 to Trinity College. And his prologues and epi- 
 logues at Oxford are luxuriant with praise of the 
 
 1 W. D. Christie. Selections from Dryden. zd ed. Oxford, 1873, p. xvi.
 
 io THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 place. Mrs. Marshall addressed an audience there 
 in 1674 as follows: 
 
 Oft has the poet wished this happy seat 
 Might prove his fading Muse's last retreat: 
 I wondered at his wish, but now I find 
 He sought for quiet, and content of mind; 
 Which noiseful towns and courts can never know, 
 And only in the shades, like laurels, grow. 
 Youth, ere it sees the world, here studies rest, 
 And age, returning thence, concludes it best. 
 
 Another university prologue ended with the famous 
 lines: 
 
 Oxford to him a dearer name shall be, 
 Than his own mother university. 
 Thebes did his green unknowing youth engage; 
 He chooses Athens in his riper age. 
 
 During Dryden's residence at Cambridge the 
 university was under the thumb of the Puritans, 
 who in 1644 had evicted all Royalist tutors. The 
 old academic peace suffered less disturbance than 
 might have been expected. The discipline even 
 improved, and solid progress continued to be 
 made in philosophy and science. It was here at 
 least that Dryden proceeded to widen his acquaint- 
 ance with the Latin poets, to store his mind with 
 the old scholastic forms of speculation and dis- 
 course, to become aware of the new trend and the 
 new processes, to dabble in natural science, to read 
 Descartes and Hobbes. 
 
 The same observer who saw Dryden dash off to 
 London to set up for a poet declares that while
 
 THE MAKING OF THE POET n 
 
 still at Cambridge "he had to his knowledge read 
 over and very well understood all the Greek and 
 Latin poets." A faith then reigned that the clas- 
 sics were a sufficient and final compendium of wis- 
 dom, eloquence, and beauty. Addison was not 
 for fifty years yet, writing home from Virgil's 
 Italy, to found a more or less flushed worship of 
 Greece and Rome. The homage of the mid-seven- 
 teenth century was somewhat dry, and paid from 
 a distance. Dryden accepted his Greeks and- 
 Romans without question, but also without hot sen- 
 timent. 
 
 William Gifford, springing once to the defense 
 of Ben Jonson, asserted that "Dryden had merely 
 the Greek and Latin of a clever schoolboy." Dry- 
 den had more than that. He not only knew his 
 poets; he enormously respected them, and used 
 them. His opinions of them were likely to be 
 the traditional opinions that Scaliger's brilliant 
 criticism had made standard. But he employed 
 them for purposes quite his own. His Greek was 
 not half so good as his Latin. His examples from 
 Greek life are very few; he fell back upon Latin 
 texts of Homer and Theocritus, and he knew Long- 
 inus only through the French of Boileau, or per- 
 haps the English of John Hall. He preferred the 
 severer muses of the Romans, he said, to "the 
 looseness of the Grecians." He shared here the 
 bias of his age; the Augustans were Augustans, not 
 Hellenes. His "old master Virgil" was never al- 
 lowed to go so long as a year without the tribute of 
 praise or imitation. Any one who reads the pref-
 
 12 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 aces to Annus Mirabilis and the folio of 1697 can- 
 not remain in doubt what Latin poet was Dry den's 
 lifelong dictator. From another master, Lucre- 
 tius, Dryden learned the secret architecture of 
 reasoned verse; learned to run swiftly yet carry 
 heavy weights; learned his favorite images of dark- 
 ness and light, eclipse and chaos, ordered atoms 
 and whirling worlds. In a third master, Ovid, 
 whom he says he read in Sandys' translation when 
 a boy, he found a sparkling mind inferior to the 
 other two, but one that fascinated him. Ovid, the 
 favorite of Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare 
 and Milton, the purveyor of mythological lore to 
 every English poet, the "sweet witty soul" who 
 was at once tender and mocking, at once flexible 
 and hard, at once allusive and brisk, taught Dry- 
 den his gait, and showed him how to turn all the 
 sides of his mind to the light. For the first twenty 
 years after the Restoration Dryden's London was 
 to reproduce with a certain amount of accuracy 
 the Rome of Ovid. With civil war just past and 
 a commonwealth overthrown, with court and city 
 beginning to realize their power, with peace pre- 
 vailing and cynicism in fashionable morals ram- 
 pant, with a foreign culture seeking the favor of 
 patrons and wits, the new city did for a while 
 bear a strange resemblance to the old Empire; so 
 that the vogue of Ovid in those years is not difficult 
 to understand. Juvenal and Persius lent their 
 larger, angrier tones to Dryden at Cambridge. 
 Nor was Dryden indifferent to the curiosa felic- 
 itas of Horace; but he was not equipped, as Ben
 
 THE MAKING OF THE POET 13 
 
 Jonson and Herrick were, to achieve anything like 
 it in practice. He knew Lucan's busy epic and 
 Seneca's bloody plays, and he was fond in later 
 life of paraphrasing Statius on sleep. The follow- 
 ing soliloquy on night, from the Indian Emperor, 
 which Wordsworth correctly called "vague, bom- 
 bastic and senseless," has often been quoted by 
 incautious admirers of Dryden in a misdirected 
 effort to prove that he could do justice to Nature: 
 
 All things are hushed, as Nature's self lay dead; 
 The mountains seem to nod their drowsy head; 
 The little birds in dreams their songs repeat, 
 And sleeping flowers beneath the night-dew sweat. 
 Even lust and envy sleep; yet love denies 
 Rest to my soul, and slumber to my eyes. 
 
 The lines come straight from Statius' Sylvce. 
 
 Dryden was rarely successful in his descriptions 
 of Nature and his accounts of the human passions, 
 as we shall see in another place. What data he did 
 possess upon these subjects he had borrowed, not 
 very happily, from the classical poets. He had 
 learned from Sappho, according to Addison, that 
 persons in love alternately burn and freeze. He 
 had learned from Virgil that in sudden fright the 
 knees tremble and the breath deserts the frame. 
 He had learned from Lucretius the terminology 
 of physical love. He contracted from them all his 
 taste for dealing in blood and hardness and cruelty. 
 But what more deeply affected him than this was 
 the tradition of Roman virtue, male virtue, which 
 he found recited so admirably in the ancient his-
 
 14 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 tories. "When we hear this author speaking," he 
 says of Polybius, "we are ready to think ourselves 
 engaged in a conversation with Cato the Censor, 
 with Lelius, with Massinissa, and with the two 
 Scipios; that is, with the greatest heroes and most 
 prudent men of the greatest age in the Roman 
 commonwealth. This sets me ... on fire." His 
 dedications are replete with Roman examples, 
 and tempered with a rare Augustan awe, as here 
 in the dedication of An Evening's Love to the Duke 
 of Newcastle: 
 
 Thus, my Lord, the morning of your life was clear 
 and calm; and though it was afterwards overcast, yet, 
 in that general storm, you were never without a shelter. 
 And now you are happily arrived to the evening of a day 
 as serene as the dawn of it was glorious; but such an even- 
 ing as, I hope, and almost prophesy, is far from night. 
 'Tis the evening of a summer's sun, which keeps the day- 
 light long within the skies. The health of your body is 
 maintained by the vigour of your mind: neither does the 
 one shrink from the fatigue of exercise, nor the other bend 
 under the pains of study. Methinks I behold in you 
 another Caius Marius, who, in the extremity of his age, ex- 
 ercised himself almost every morning in the Campius Mar- 
 tius, amongst the youthful nobility of Rome. And after- 
 wards in your retirements, when you do honour to poetry 
 by employing part of your leisure in it, I regard you as 
 another Silius Italicus, who, having passed over his con- 
 sulship with applause, dismissed himself from business, 
 and from the gown, and employed his age amongst the 
 shades, in the reading and imitation of Virgil. 
 
 It was in these spacious precincts that Dryden's 
 imagination was most at home; in this distant and
 
 THE MAKING OF THE POET 15 
 
 mellow morality Declarations of Indulgence and 
 Test Acts were intrusive trifles, and the neces- 
 sity of choosing between a James and a William 
 but a dwarfish dilemma. 
 
 "The old and the new philosophy" was a phrase 
 often on the lips of Dryden and his contempora- 
 ries. The seventeenth century, from Bacon to 
 Locke, saw many inroads made by the new phys-\ 
 ics and the new psychology upon established 
 modes of faith and behavior. At no period dur- *>h. t 
 ing the century was the shift being made more 
 rapidly than it was in the sixth decade, when Dry- 
 den lived at Cambridge. Dryden, witnessing the 
 unequal conflict between scholasticism and ex- 
 perimental science, between formal logic and com- 
 mon sense, may not have comprehended all that 
 was being done. There is no sign that he had un- 
 usual gifts for recognizing or criticising ideas; he was 
 not a metaphysician; yet he must have been aware 
 of being present at a death. It was the scholas- 
 tic habit of thinking and discoursing that was dy- 
 ing; it was the disputation that was going out. As 
 far back as the days when James I delighted to 
 attend the disputations at Cambridge, disputa- 
 tions had been archaic. And Thomas Randolph, 
 who studied at Trinity College thirty years before 
 Dryden, could only praise the Aristotelianism of 
 his instruction as something quaint. The medie- 
 val tradition lingered on, however, and Dryden 
 was still able to look upon the ruins of those "Vast 
 Bodies of Philosophic" irreverently invoked by 
 Cowley in his poem To Mr. Hobbes. To Dryden the
 
 16 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 hoary structures were not without their charm, 
 and he did not pass them by without making them 
 yield the secrets of their form, however little he 
 cared for the dubious treasures of their content. 
 He retained to the last a touch of the scholas- 
 tic in his method of framing thoughts and arriving 
 at distinctions. Upon more than one occasion he 
 showed himself familiar with the language of the 
 schools, even the jargon. "He delighted to talk 
 of liberty and necessity, destiny and contingence," 
 said Dr. Johnson. He had only the medieval idiom 
 for soul and body at his commandj The famous 
 lines on Shaftesbury's 
 
 . . . fiery soul, which, working out its way, 
 
 Fretted the pigmy body to decay, 
 
 And o'er-informed the tenement of clay, 
 
 are tinctured with scholasticism; and Dryden's 
 inveterate attachment to the image of circles, 
 whether in the poem on Lord Hastings (11. 27- 
 28), in the Heroic Stanzas (11. 17-20), in Astraa 
 Redux (1. 299), in The Hind and the Panther (III, 
 1. 19), or in Eleanor a (1. 273), betrays the fas- 
 cination which the ancient forms exercised over 
 his imagination. Finally, it was from the schools, 
 from the disputation, that Dryden learned to love 
 argument and ratiocination. Swift called The 
 Hind and the Panther "a complete abstract of six- 
 teen thousand schoolmen, from Scotus to Bellar- 
 mine." Here again it was form, not content, that 
 Dryden enriched himself with. His arguments 
 often are not without serious flaw; but his manner
 
 THE MAKING OF THE POET 17 
 
 is impeccable. He discovered which gestures con- 
 vince; he acquired "the air of proving something." 
 Like Ovid in the rhetorical schools of Rome, learn- 
 ing to ring infinite changes on a theme in suasoria 
 and controversies^ Dryden by study and by in- 
 stinct developed an unexampled power, so far as 
 English poetry goes, of handling and turning over 
 ideas and beating them into shape with the scant- 
 lings of logic. 
 
 "The new philosophy," meanwhile, with its new 
 outlook brought a new language; and always it was 
 language that interested Dryden. Since Milton's 
 days at Cambridge there had come definite inno- 
 vations. Theology was being rationalized, Ramus 
 and Bacon and Descartes were replacing Aristotle,* 
 mathematics and natural science were in the as- 
 cendant. The unwieldly amalgam of sixteenth cen- 
 tury natural history was yielding to the attacks 
 of specialists in physics, chemistry, and anatomy. 
 Harvey, Ent, and Ward were publishing the re- 
 sults of their researches. Definite curiosity about 
 sensible problems seemed in the way of being satis- 
 fied. 
 
 Lowell thought science "the most obstinately 
 prosy material." Yet the new science was far from 
 dull to Dryden and his kind. No laborious termin- 
 ology chilled their ardor and blunted their curios- 
 ity, or forbade them to incorporate the new world 
 in their conversation and their writing. Not that 
 they were the first to make use of the material. 
 Donne had found science a brighter ornament for 
 verse than hackneyed mythology. Milton was al-
 
 1 8 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 ready ruminating upon the cosmic bearings of as- 
 tronomy, geography, and chemistry. But they 
 were the first to play exultantly with both the new 
 spirit and the new language. They were frankly 
 dilettanti. The game was expression, and the 
 chase was for metaphors. When Dryden in the 
 State of InnQ&nce has Adam awake from his bed 
 oT moss and cry, 
 
 What am I? or from whence? For that I am 
 I know, because I think, 
 
 he does not convince us that he knows more than 
 three words of Descartes. His astronomy is con- 
 fused; he mixes the Roman poets with the Cam- 
 bridge cosmologists ; he has no system. There can 
 be no honest doubt that he took a good deal of 
 stock in astrology; among the papers at Oxford of 
 Elias Ashmole, the great virtuoso and curioso, are 
 to be found nativities of Dryden and his eldest son, 
 carefully cast. At the close of his life he wrote to 
 his sons at Rome, ''Towards the latter end of this 
 month, September, Charles will begin to recover 
 his perfect health, according to his nativity, which, 
 casting it myself, I am sure is true; and all things 
 hitherto have happened accordingly to the very 
 time that I predicted them." He was not a scien- 
 tist. Yet he picked up the new language, and 
 adopted the new airs; he established what Ma- 
 caulay named "the scientific vocabulary" in verse. 
 Not long after he went to London, and before he 
 had won any notice by his writing at all, in 1662^
 
 19 
 
 lie was made a member of the newly chartered 
 Royal Society. The next year he was laying hon- 
 est Aristotle by with some verses addressed to Dr. 
 Charleton, who had written a book on Stonehenge; 
 
 The longest tyranny that ever swayed 
 Was that wherein our ancestors betrayed 
 Their free-born reason to the Stagirite, 
 And made his torch their universal light. 
 
 In the same poem he celebrated the innovations of 
 Bacon, Gilbert, Boyle, Harvey, and Ent. Three 
 years later he inserted an apostrophe to the Royal 
 Society in his Annus Mirabilis, and put into the 
 mouth of Crites in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy 
 this query: "Is it not evident, in these last hun- 
 dred years, . . . that almost a new Nature has been 
 revealed to us? that more errors of the School 
 have been detected, more useful experiments in 
 philosphy have been made, more noble secrets in 
 optics, medicine, anatomy, astronomy, discovered, 
 than in all those credulous and doting ages from 
 Aristotle to us?" 
 
 The new mechanical conception of nature bore 
 bitter fruit in the domain of psychology and polit- 
 ical science, where the astounding Hobbes held 
 sway. It seemed to Samuel Butler and others 
 with less humor that the Sage of Malmesbury, 
 though he might conquer the Kingdom of Dark- 
 ness in a way to satisfy himself, would end by ex- 
 tinguishing all the light which the remainder of 
 mankind enjoyed. As Donne had exclaimed in the 
 Anatomy of the World,
 
 20 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 [The] new philosophy calls all in doubt; 
 
 The element of fire is quite put out; 
 
 The sun is lost, and th' earth, and no man's wit 
 
 Can well direct him where to look for it. 
 
 The deplorable paradoxes about the selfishness of 
 human nature which the tutor of the future 
 Charles II was propounding in the Treatise on Hu- 
 man Nature and the Leviathan during the first two 
 years of Dryden's residence at Cambridge were 
 destined to fascinate many a gilded youth after 
 the Restoration, and even to incline old Bishop 
 Burnet "to be apt to think generally the worst of 
 men and of parties." 
 
 In the wake of Hobbes came Lucretius, the fa- 
 vorite of Gassendi and Moliere, 
 
 ... to proclaim in English verse 
 No monarch rules the universe, 
 
 as Waller politely wrote upon the occasion of 
 Evelyn's translation in 1656. The atoms of Lu- 
 cretius and Ovid became almost the favorite image 
 of poets throughout the century. "Blind chance," 
 "the confused heap of things," "atoms casually 
 together hurled," were phrases that always passed 
 current. The idea of a world left running by it- 
 self was poison to the divines but food for the ver- 
 sifiers. 
 
 Dry den announced in the preface to Religio 
 Laid that he was "naturally inclined to scepticism 
 in philosophy." Emphasis needs to be placed on 
 the first word in his phrase; he was by disposition 
 rather than by doctrine a sceptic. He thought
 
 THE MAKING OF THE POET 21 
 
 Hobbes and Lucretius very much alike in a cer- 
 tain "magisterial authority" of utterance. If he 
 bowed to this authority in his earlier years, when 
 he was at college, he was disposed later on to 
 give it no more than casual, good natured recogni- 
 tion. He never altogether capitulated to any sys- 
 tem of politics or morals or aesthetics. He was 
 born and he died with an Olympian indifference 
 to principles. Yet Hobbes and Lucretius both 
 made powerful, permanent impressions upon his 
 imagination. It was Hobbes who inspired his 
 deep distrust of human beings in the mass and his 
 lifelong intolerance of movements that threat- 
 ened to disturb the peace. Hobbes gave him "the 
 reason and political ornaments," according to the 
 authors of The Censure of the Rota, for the Con- 
 quest of Granada, as well as language with which 
 to defend the Stuart kings in satire. The Levi- 
 athan had blazed a sinister trail into the thicket 
 of human nature and had revealed dismaying 
 perspectives in what was taken for human his- 
 tory. Dryden has much to say about the State of 
 Nature. On a few occasions he reverts with a 
 kind of pleasure to a golden age among 
 
 those happy isles 
 Where in perpetual spring young Nature smiles; l 
 
 Or among 
 
 guiltless men, who danced away their time, 
 Fresh as their groves, and happy as their clime. z 
 
 1 To My Lord Chancellor, 11. 135-6. 
 1 To Dr. Charleton, 11. 13-4.
 
 22 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 And he has Almanzor say in the Conquest of Gran- 
 ada: 
 
 But know that I alone am king of me. 
 I am as free as Nature first made man, 
 Ere the base laws of servitude began, 
 When wild in woods the noble savage ran. 
 
 But most often the prehistoric rabble which he in- 
 vokes is 
 
 . <r 
 
 Blind as the Cyclops, and as wild as he; 
 They owned a lawless savage liberty, 
 Like that our painted ancestors so prized 
 Ere empire's arts their breasts had civilized. 1 
 
 And the State of Innocence ends upon a note that 
 is cold and ruthless, almost ominous, compared 
 with the undaunted serenity that closes Paradise 
 Lost. Says Raphael, ushering Adam and Eve out 
 into the world, 
 
 The rising winds urge the tempestuous air; 
 And on their wings deformed winter bear: 
 The beasts already feel the change; and hence 
 They fly to deeper coverts, for defense: 
 The feebler herd before the stronger run; 
 For now the war of nature is begun. 
 
 There was also something sinister about the world 
 of Lucretius as Dryden adopted it; for in his imag- 
 ination he did adopt it. Times without number, 
 in both his prose and his verse, the atoms came 
 crowding upon the page; they were his unfailing 
 
 1 Astrcea Redux, 11. 45-8.
 
 THE MAKING OF THE POET 23 
 
 conceit. They flung themselves together into a 
 "universal frame," a frame held together not so 
 much by spirit or will (as to be sure Dryden felt 
 bound each time to maintain) as by some godless, 
 grinding power like music. In his fancy the ma- 
 chine was not to run forever. The pageant was to 
 crumble. Chaos would some day reign again. 
 But eternity promised him few of the comforts 
 that it promised men like Milton. If Dryden 
 ever thought of eternity at all, he thought of it as 
 very great and empty. 
 
 When Descartes for his purposes sharpened Aris- 
 totle's distinction between mind and matter he per- 
 formed a doubtful service to philosophy, since more 
 than a hundred years were required to make it plain 
 that his distinction had been academic, and that 
 mind and matter might not after all be mutually 
 exclusive. In his own system the exclusions were 
 absolute. An analogous distinction was being re- 
 vived and emphasized in aesthetics during the seven- 
 teenth century. In poetry, fancy was being set 
 against judgment, and although the two were sup- 
 posed to be mutually enriching, they were more 
 often taken to destroy each other. This distinction 
 was of doubtful service to literature. As in philoso- 
 phy the arid dualism of Descartes obscured the 
 true function of the human spirit, so in literature 
 the war between fancy and judgment hindered the 
 true work of the imagination. Not that poetry in 
 England suffered a total eclipse, as is often believed. 
 A very great deal of brains and imagination went into 
 the poetry of the latter seventeenth and early eight-
 
 24 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 eenth centuries. But certain definite exclusions were 
 made by all who touched the subject either as poets 
 or as critics, and certain limitations were more 
 or less freely acknowledged. Dryden grew up at a 
 time when the air was filled with many diverse strains 
 of verse, and no note was predominant. Yet as 
 he reached maturity he became aware of some- 
 thing that might have been called "the new po- 
 etry." He came to distinguish four forward-look- 
 ing poets among the throng: Cowley, Waller, Den- 
 ham, and Davenant. And behind those Sons of 
 Ben he was able to discern the forward-peering 
 countenance of Hobbes. 
 
 The new poetry was to be the work of sober 
 wit, the issue of the conscious faculties. Wit had 
 danced in with the conceit early in the century, 
 but it had been tortured then as it was not to be 
 tortured now. "Doctor Donne," a more fascinat- 
 ing man than the Augustans ever supposed, had 
 been "the greatest wit," said Dryden at a later 
 date, but "not the best poet of our nation." The 
 current of conceits which had swept even Milton 
 in had not much further to flow. "Ingenious 
 Cowley! " cries Cowper in the Task, 
 
 I cannot but lament thy splendid wit 
 Entangled in the cobwebs of the schools. 
 
 Yet even Cowley had his clear, free vein; and the 
 cobwebs that he spun did not last long past the 
 Restoration. Dryden, who indeed was never 
 exempt from conceits as long as he lived, declared
 
 THE MAKING OF THE POET 25 
 
 against them from the first. If the conceit sur- 
 vived in Augustan poetry, it survived in the cir- 
 cumlocution, which at least was civilized. The 
 new poets were to have large audiences, and they 
 needed to be understood when they spoke. As in 
 comedy wit was to take the place of "humour," 
 and pungent criticism of society was to supplant 
 an endless elaboration of fantastic characters, so 
 in all verse there was to be an effort to speak a 
 language 
 
 Consisting less in words and more in things: 
 
 A language not affecting ancient times, 
 
 Nor Latin shreds by which the pedant climbs, 
 
 to use some lines written to James I by an excel- 
 lent poet who early anticipated Dryden's style, 
 Sir John Beaumont. If the word "wisdom" be 
 taken not too seriously, the following passage 
 from Dryden's prologue to (Edipus may serve in- 
 directly to express the new ideal. Says Dryden, 
 speaking of ancient Greece, 
 
 Then Sophocles with Socrates did sit, 
 Supreme in wisdom one, and one in wit; 
 And wit from wisdom differed not in those, 
 But as 't was sung in verse or said in prose. 
 
 Eugenius, in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 
 makes a triumphant canvass of Dryden's first 
 teachers in verse. The Greeks and Romans, he 
 says, "can produce nothing ... so even, sweet, and 
 flowing, as Mr. Waller; nothing so majestic, so 
 correct, as Sir John Denham; nothing so elevated, 
 so copious, and full of spirit, as Mr. Cowley."
 
 26 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 "TThe darling of my youth, the famous Cowley," 
 wrote Dryden in 1693, long after he had outgrown 
 his young enthusiasms. There had been a time, 
 shortly after he left Cambridge, when he had 
 known Cowley's work minutely, and had made 
 good use of it. Cowley was a zealous scientist. 
 He studied medicine, wrote a botanical treatise, 
 proposed a College for the Advancement of Ex- 
 perimental Philosophy, was admitted to the Royal 
 Society, and practiced odes on Dr. Scarborough 
 and Dr. Harvey. He was interested in every- 
 thing. He took a naive delight in explication, and 
 loved to give accounts of things in verse. His 
 mind was agile and airy, and worked with a cer- 
 tain dry animation that captivated the attention. 
 At times he was a facile metrist, and always his 
 spirit was sweet. It is often said that Dryden's 
 early poems are bad because they are like Cowley. 
 It is fair to Cowley to say that if they had been 
 exactly like him they would not have been so bad. 
 Dryden approximated the plenty but not the 
 sprightliness of his elder. Even in that plenty 
 there were signs of strength. Dryden's poem to 
 Dr. Charleton follows closely after Cowley's to 
 Mr. Hobbes in its treatment of Aristotle and the 
 schoolmen. The Heroic Stanzas and the verses to 
 Sir Robert Howard contain a generous propor- 
 tion of scientific figures inserted in the Cowley 
 manner. For years Dryden spoke always in the 
 warmest accents of his "master," and it was not 
 until his last piece of criticism altogether, the pref- 
 ace to the Fables, that he took pains to expose
 
 THE MAKING OF THE POET 27 
 
 Cowley's faults. He seems always to have been 
 thoroughly familiar with his poems. It has long 
 been known that four lines in Mac Flecknoe, 
 
 Where their vast courts the mother-strumpets keep, 
 And undisturbed by watch in silence sleep. . . . 
 Where unfledged actors learn to laugh and cry, 
 And infant punks their tender voices try, 
 
 are a close parody of four in the Davideis: 
 
 Where their vast courts the mother-waters keep, 
 And undisturbed by moons in silence sleep. . . . 
 Beneath the dens where unfledged tempests lie, 
 And infant winds their tender voices try; 
 
 it has not been observed that the famous portrait 
 of Sha dwell near the beginning of Mac Flecknoe, 
 
 Some beams of wit on other souls may fall, 
 Strike through and make a lucid interval; 
 But ShadwelPs genuine night admits no ray; 
 His rising fogs prevail upon the day, 
 
 is replete with echoes from an adjoining passage in 
 Cowley's epic: 
 
 There is a place deep, wondrous deep below, 
 Where genuine night and horror does o'erflow; . . . 
 Here no dear glimpse of the sun's lovely face, 
 Strikes through the solid darkness of the place; 
 No dawning morn does her kind reds display; 
 One slight weak beam would here be thought the day. 
 
 Cowley was dry, and wrote without passion. 
 Dryden's tutors were all mild and self-contained. 
 Mildest among them came Waller and Denham,
 
 28 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 the pair whom Dryden began as early as the ded- 
 ication of the Rival Ladies in 1664 to name to- 
 gether, and whose twin fames for a century were 
 the outcome of his persistent praise. The impor- 
 tance of neither can be over-emphasized. Dryden 
 said of Waller, "Unless he had written, none of us 
 could write," and of Denham that his Cooper's 
 Hill, "for the majesty of the style, is, and ever 
 will be, the exact standard of good writing." 
 
 To begin with Waller. The novelty of his num- 
 bers will be considered in another place. It was the 
 novelty of his expression and his processes that 
 charmed the wits who read his first volume in 1645, 
 and who continued for forty-two years to hear oc- 
 casions graced by his easy voice. He had learned 
 the secret which Augustan poets were to need to 
 know, the secret of writing with ease. His ease 
 was ease of mind as well as of meter. He was cool 
 and gracious at the same time. He was not per- 
 turbed by his subjects, which indeed were never 
 really great St. James's Park, the repairing of 
 St. Paul's Cathedral, or Her Majesty's taste for tea; 
 even the wars he sung were petty affairs. He was 
 obvious and pleasant, and could in perfect self- 
 possession build up an idea or a conceit in verse 
 that would charm by its symmetry. Thought in 
 him was often fatuous, but it was never absent; 
 Goldsmith was struck by his "strength of think- 
 ing." When Dryden in 1680-1 revised Sir William 
 Soame's translation of Boileau's Art of Poetry and 
 substituted English names for the French, he wrote 
 "Waller" for "Malherbe," saying,
 
 THE MAKING OF THE POET 29 
 
 His happy genius did our tongue refine, 
 And easy words with pleasing numbers join. 
 
 "Easy" and "pleasing" were important terms in 
 Restoration criticism of verse. Waller was not 
 without his conceits; his complimentary effusions 
 are full of absurdities. But he is not shocking; he 
 bathes his bizarrerie in a geniality to which no ex- 
 ception can be taken. His good will is irresistible. 
 Dryden has not exaggerated his own debt to Waller. 
 He borrowed many things, both good and bad, 
 from the suave old Parliamentarian. By consti- 
 tution he was scarcely so agreeable as Waller, but 
 he learned from him the accent and the diction of 
 affability. Waller's favorite and most frequent 
 images, those of the eagle and the halcyon, Dryden 
 calmly appropriated. Whenever Dryden's early 
 panegyrical tone is soft and insinuating, as it is in 
 the poems to Charles II, the Lord Chancellor, 
 Lady Castlemaine, and the Duchess of York, he is 
 speaking with Waller's voice. And anyone who 
 will take the trouble to read three poems by Waller 
 on public occasions, the Panegyric to my Lord Pro- 
 tector (1655), Of a War with Spain, and Fight at Sea 
 (1656-61), and Instructions to a Painter, for the 
 Drawing of the Posture and Progress of His Majes- 
 ty's Forces at Sea (1666), will no longer be in doubt 
 as to whence Dryden derived certain features of 
 his Heroic Stanzas and his Annus Mirabilis. The 
 dignity and the beauty of those two poems are his 
 own; the occasional notes of sober fatuity are Wal- 
 ler's.
 
 30 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Denham's Cooper's Hill owed its vogue largely 
 to Dryden, who neglected no opportunity to praise 
 it. Two lines in that poem, 
 
 Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull; 
 Strong without rage; without o'erflowing, full, 
 
 modelled by Denham on three lines in Cartwright's 
 verses in memory of Ben Jonson, 
 
 Low without creeping, high without loss of wings; 
 Smooth, yet not weak, and by a thorough-care, 
 Big without swelling, without painting fair, 
 
 became classic through Dryden's analysis of them 
 in his dedication of the jEneis. From Denham 
 Dryden acquired the ratiocinative dignity which is 
 secured by quiet rhetorical questions, restful aph- 
 orisms, and meditative enjambement. 
 
 The volume which contained Sir William Dav- 
 enant's Gondibert (1651) is now interesting chiefly 
 for its introductory matter. The epic which fol- 
 lowed is important only because it called out poems 
 by Waller and Cowley, and because it needed the 
 elaborate introduction of essays written in Paris the 
 previous year by Davenarrt and Hobbes. These 
 four prefixtures are interesting despite their failure 
 to convince the world that Gondibert was either new 
 or significant. In themselves they reflected or ex- 
 pressed new doctrines in poetry which were not 
 sterile. They prescribed the materials for the new 
 poetry, and they analyzed the psychological proc- 
 esses by which it would be produced. This volume 
 of 1651 was almost a text-book of the new aesthetics.
 
 THE MAKING OF THE POET 31 
 
 Waller and Cowley commended Davenant's pre- 
 occupation with the manners of men. Said Waller: 
 
 Now to thy matchless book, 
 Wherein those few that can with judgment look, 
 May find old love in pure fresh language told, 
 Like new-stamped coin made out of angel-gold. 
 Such truth in love as th' antique world did know, 
 In such a style as courts may boast of now; 
 Which no bold tales of gods or monsters swell, 
 But human passions such as with us dwell. 
 Man is thy theme; his virtue or his rage 
 Drawn to the life in each elaborate page. 
 
 Cowley proceeded in the same tenor: 
 
 Methinks heroic poesie till now 
 Like some fantastic fairy-land did show; 
 Gods, devils, nymphs, witches, and giants' race, 
 And all but man, in man's best work had place. 
 Thou like some worthy knight, with sacred arms, 
 Instead of those, dost man and manners plant, 
 The things which that rich soil did chiefly want. 
 
 All this is simply in recognition of Davenant's own 
 pronouncement that a heroic poem gives us "a 
 familiar and easy view of ourselves," and of Hobbes's 
 stouter declaration that "the subject of a poem is 
 the manners of men." "Of all which," says Dry- 
 den in his preface to Troilus and Cressida, "who- 
 soever is ignorant does not deserve the name of 
 poet." 
 
 The manners of men, then, are the business of a 
 rjoej. How are his expression and his imagination 
 to compass the manners of men? First for the ex-
 
 32 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 pression, which must be adequate and no more; 
 whose prime qualities must be "perspicuity, pro- 
 priety, and decency." Davenant and Hobbes were 
 far from eschewing novelties and rarities, as will be 
 seen in another chapter; but they insisted upon 
 adequacy and propriety. "There be so many words 
 in use at this day in the English tongue," writes 
 Hobbes, "that though of magninque sound, yet 
 (like the windy blisters of a troubled water) have 
 no sense at all; and so many others that lose their 
 meaning by being ill coupled, so that it is a hard 
 matter to avoid them; for having been obtruded 
 upon youth in the schools by such as make it, I 
 think, their business there (as 't is exprest by the 
 best poet [Davenant] ) 
 
 With terms to charm the weak and pose the wise, 
 
 they grow up with them, and gaining reputation 
 with the ignorant, are not easily shaken off. To 
 this palpable darkness I may also add the ambi- 
 tious obscurity of expressing more than is perfectly 
 conceived, or perfect conception in fewer words 
 than it requires, which expressions, though they 
 have had the honor to be called strong lines, are in- 
 deed no better than riddles, and, not only to the 
 reader but also after a little time to the writer him- 
 self, dark and troublesome." That is, the poet 
 should avoid congested and crabbed utterance, 
 should choose his epithets sanely, and should al- 
 ways be sure that he knows himself what he is say- 
 ing. Dryden draws the same inferences, in the 
 State of Innocence,
 
 THE MAKING OF THE POET 33 
 
 From words and things, ill sorted and misjoined; 
 The anarchy of thought, and chaos of the mind. 
 
 Hobbes went about in an orderly way to dis- 
 sect the imagination and ascertain its workings. 
 "Time and Education begets Experience; Experience 
 begets Memory; Memory begets Judgement and 
 Fancy. . . . The Ancients therefore fabled not 
 absurdly, in making Memory the Mother of the 
 Muses." There was no mystery here at all. Imagi- 
 nation is a makeshift. If we could keep the whole 
 world fresh and vivid about us all our days there 
 would be no call for Fancy in the metaphysics of 
 true enjoyment. The life of the imagination is a 
 life of sheer pretense. "Imagination," runs a sen- 
 tence in Hobbes's Physics, "is nothing else but 
 sense decaying, or weakened, by the absence of the 
 object." This refusal to credit the imagination 
 with creative power, this insistence upon reducing 
 it to its lowest terms and making of it a mechanical 
 device for reproducing experience as such, is cru- 
 cial in the history of English poetry. When Bacon 
 had examined the mental processes of the poet in 
 the Advancement of Learning he had not, to be sure, 
 come to the conclusion that poets are divine, or 
 mad; but he had assigned to them a function more 
 or less creative, which was "to give some shadow of 
 satisfaction to the mind of man in those points 
 wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world 
 being in proportion inferior to the soul." Now 
 Hobbes ignored the transforming power in favor of 
 the recording power. "For Memory is the World 
 (though not really, yet so as in a looking glass) in
 
 34 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 which the Judgment, the severer Sister, busieth 
 herself in a grave and rigid examination of all the 
 parts of Nature, and in registering by letters their 
 order, causes, uses, differences, and resemblances; 
 whereby the Fancy, when any work of Art is to be 
 performed, finding her materials at hand and pre- 
 pared for use, needs no more than a swift motion 
 over them, that what she wants, and is there to be 
 had, may not lie too long unespied." Which is to 
 say, what is true yet is not the whole truth, that 
 the best poet is he who has the best memory. Ten 
 years before, Milton, in his Reason of Church Gov- 
 ernment, had confided to "any knowing reader" 
 that the great work which he was setting out to do 
 would be a work not "to be obtained by the invoca- 
 tion of Dame Memory and her Siren daughters, 
 but by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit who can 
 enrich with all utterance and knowledge." And 
 twenty-four years after Gondibert, Milton's nephew, 
 Edward Phillips, in the preface to his Theatrum 
 Poetarum, was to hold a brief for "true native Po- 
 etry" as against mere "wit, ingenuity, and learning 
 in verse." But Hobbist psychology was as potent as 
 Hobbist politics, and it was not until a century or 
 more had passed that any really philosophical 
 attack was made upon Dame Memory's position. 
 It was in the wake of such an attack that Blake, in 
 the world of painting, explained all of what he con- 
 sidered had been Sir Joshua Reynolds' critical errors 
 by adducing the one mistaken conception that 
 "originates in the Greeks calling the Muses daugh- 
 ters of Memory." It was in rebuttal of theories like
 
 THE MAKING OF THE POET 35 
 
 those of Hobbes that Wordsworth wrote: "Imag- 
 ination has no reference to images that are merely 
 a faithful copy, existing in the mind, of absent ex- 
 ternal objects; but is a word of higher import, de- 
 noting operations of the mind upon those objects, 
 and processes of creation and composition." 
 
 All this does not mean that Dryden and others 
 who went to school to Hobbes did not write great, 
 amazing poetry. It only explains why they failed 
 to write poetry of a certain kind. Wonder and 
 brooding reverie were simply not of their world. 
 They transformed nothing; the divine illusion was 
 not for them. They created and composed endur- 
 ing monuments of art, but not in Wordsworth's 
 way. They were not at all times aware of their 
 limitations. Dryden, as we shall see, struggled a 
 long while to trample them down. He spoke often, 
 in common with his contemporaries, of the furor 
 poeticus; he championed poetic license; and he 
 tried to write like Shakespeare. But like his con- 
 temporaries he was bound by triple steel. He had 
 to learn to be great in his own way. 
 
 Taine, having no reason to doubt the notion 
 current in his time that Dryden had stayed on three 
 years at Cambridge after taking his Bachelor's de- 
 gree, proceeds: "Here you see the regular habits of 
 an honorable and well-to-do family, the discipline of 
 a connected and solid education, the taste for clas- 
 sical and exact studies. Such circumstances an- 
 nounce and prepare, not an artist, but a man of 
 letters." If to be an artist is to be devoted to an 
 art, and if to be a true artist is to have that devo-
 
 36 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 tion not only continue but increase through each 
 year of a long life, then Dryden was truly an artist, 
 and Taine is unjust. Dryden's devotion cannot be 
 called into question. Whether or not the legend be 
 accurate that he was "too roving and active to con- 
 fine himself to college life" and that he hastened to 
 set himself up in London, it is plain that he, like 
 Ovid, would sooner or later have found it impos- 
 sible to keep out of poetry. Whenever his career 
 began, it engrossed him solely and entirely. In 
 later years he liked to review this career; his con- 
 ception of it was dramatic, if not theatrical. He 
 saw himself on a great stage, prominent, almost 
 alone. He carried with him to London, and always 
 kept by him there, an "adamantine confidence," as 
 Dr. Johnson put it, not simply in himself, for he 
 knew what modesty was, but in the powers which 
 study and practice had convinced him were his. 
 Pride of profession, scorn of competitors, devotion 
 to his trade sustained him. Goldsmith made his 
 way into the mid-eighteenth century literary world 
 by a good-humored unconventionality that brought 
 relief to sufferers from the prevailing gentilities and 
 rotundities. Dryden, also without violence of blus- 
 ter, forced himself upon his world through sheer 
 display of confidence and a large, steady assump- 
 tion of authority. There was a growing demand 
 for poetry which could be read and generally dis- 
 cussed. Dryden believed that he could supply the 
 smoothest and most powerful variety. He was not 
 long in convincing London that he was right. 
 
 It was brought against Dryden by Shadwell, in
 
 THE MAKING OF THE POET 37 
 
 The Medal of John Bayes, that he had served as a 
 hack to Herringman the bookseller during his first 
 few years in London, writing "prefaces to books for 
 meat and drink." It is probable that Shadwell ex- 
 aggerated the meanness of the relation, if it existed 
 at all. Dryden's private income was not large, and 
 he must have turned at an early stage to writing for 
 money, without, indeed, the spiritual support of 
 Dr. Johnson's avowal that no man except a block- 
 head ever wrote for anything else. Any connec- 
 tion with Herringman in these years of his appren- 
 ticeship would have been valuable in that it would 
 have placed him in one of the main currents of po- 
 etic production, Herringman being almost the chief 
 publisher of poems and plays at the Restoration. 
 Somewhere, at least, Dryden was learning what was 
 being written, and coming to feel at home in society; 
 without which knowledge and feeling he could not 
 have gone very far. 
 
 Personally, Dryden seems never to have prepos- 
 sessed anyone. His youth had not been precocious, 
 and his maturity found him more mellow than 
 splendid. He was genial in his old age, without any 
 great allowance of spontaneous humor. His mind 
 always remained warm and strong. Pope told 
 Spence that he "was not a very genteel man; he was 
 intimate with none but poetical men." He pretended 
 to be nothing other than what above all things he 
 was, a writer. He did not profess to be a hero; he 
 disliked holding himself rigid. "Stiffness of opin- 
 ion," he wrote in the dedication of Don Sebastian, "is 
 the effect of pride, and not of philosophy. . . . The
 
 38 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 ruggedness of a stoic is only a silly affectation of be- 
 ing a god. . . . True philosophy is certainly of a more 
 pliant nature, and more accommodated to human 
 use. ... A wise man will never attempt an impossi- 
 bility." Dryden's inconsistencies have generally been 
 deplored. But it is precisely to his unending powers 
 of renewal that we owe that serenity and that fresh- 
 ness in which he never fails us. "As I am a man," 
 he told the Earl of Mulgrave in 1676, in the dedica- 
 tion of Aureng-Zebe, "I must be changeable; and 
 sometimes the gravest of us all are so, even upon 
 ridiculous accidents. Our minds are perpetually 
 wrought on by the temperament of our bodies; 
 which makes me suspect they are nearer allied, than 
 either our philosophers or school-divines will allow 
 them to be. . . . An ill dream, or a cloudy day, has 
 power to change this wretched creature, who is so 
 proud of a reasonable soul, and make him think 
 what he thought not yesterday/'
 
 II 
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 
 
 Dr. Johnson's brilliant example seems nearly to 
 have established for all time the procedure of per- 
 sons who would criticise the poetry of Dryden. The 
 procedure consists in moving swiftly through his 
 works, line by line and page by page, noting down 
 what passages are in shocking taste and what pas- 
 sages are unexceptionable, and at the end qualify- 
 ing on the basis of the first the praise which ought 
 naturally to fall to the second. There has been 
 good reason for this. No critic has felt that he 
 could afford to commend Dryden in general with- 
 out proving that he had taken into account the 
 worst of him in particular. No critic has been wil- 
 ling to go on record as in any way approving the 
 more flagant stanzas of the Annus Mirabilis^ the 
 more impossible speeches of the heroic plays, or the 
 more meretricious portions of the Virgil and other 
 journey-work. Such caution has been warranted 
 by the fact that Dryden is more unequal than al- 
 most any English poet who has written volumin- 
 ously. But now it seems worth while to proceed 
 a little further and ask whether Dryden held any 
 theories which might have been responsible for the 
 obvious defects in his product. For it is evident 
 that the unhappy passages to which exception has
 
 40 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 invariably been taken are not passages wherein the 
 poet's attention seems to have lagged, or his spirits 
 drooped. They are rather, in fact, his most careful 
 and ambitious performances; Dryden never dozed. 
 Nor can they be explained as indiscretions of youth. 
 They are found everywhere throughout his works, 
 from first to last. It is plain that Dryden was fol- 
 lowing false lights when he committed his offenses 
 against taste. Either he was pursuing ends which 
 by nature he was unqualified to reach, he was at- 
 tempting the impossible, he was speaking a lan- 
 guage which was not instinctive; or he was reach- 
 ing ends which were hardly worth reaching, he was 
 sedulously perfecting a language which though 
 native was not gauged for sterling utterance. Good 
 literature is the effect of adequate form applied to 
 genuine material. The poetry in Dryden which is 
 not good can be explained by errors which he made 
 first in choosing his material and second in culti- 
 vating his form. On the one hand, false lights led 
 him to employ two kinds of materials which in his 
 case were spurious : first, the materials of the fancy, 
 in works like Annus Mirabilis; second, the mate- 
 rials of the human passions, in works like the heroic 
 plays and the tragedies. The results were absur- 
 dity and bathos. On the other hand, false lights 
 led him to give excessive attention to the form of 
 his verse at times when the matter was of little im- 
 port, as in the Virgil. The results were artificiality 
 and monotony. The purpose of the present chapter 
 is to follow Dryden as he pursues his wandering 
 fires, and to sweep away the rubbish which he leaves
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 41 
 
 behind him. Only after that is done can we take 
 up in good conscience his genuine performances be- 
 fore the true flame. 
 
 When Hobbes and Davenant separated Fancy 
 from Judgment and sent it off to play alone, they 
 condemned it to dull company. Their aesthetics, 
 in setting reason over against imagination, did rea- 
 son no great service and did imagination real harm. 
 Dryden belonged on the side of the so-called reason. 
 He was not a child of fancy; he never lived what is 
 often too glibly termed the life of the imagination. 
 His true home was the house of Judgment, and his 
 true game was the adult game of common sense. 
 But he was given to experimenting. He was cu- 
 rious, to begin with, to know all that could be known 
 about Fancy, whom Hobbes and Davenant had de- 
 scribed as sprightly and fair. "When she seemeth 
 to fly from one Indies to the other," said Hobbes, 
 "and from Heaven to Earth, and to penetrate into 
 the hardest matter and obscurest places, into the 
 future and into herself, and all this in a point of 
 time, the voyage is not very great, herself being all 
 she seeks, and her wonderful celerity consisteth not 
 so much in motion as in copious Imagery discreetly 
 ordered and perfectly registered in the memory." 
 "Wit," said Davenant, meaning Fancy, "is the labo- 
 rious and the lucky resultances of thought. ... It is 
 a web consisting of the subtlest threads; and like 
 that of the spider is considerately woven out of our 
 selves. ... Wit is not only the luck and labour, but 
 also the dexterity of thought, rounding the world, 
 like the Sun, with unimaginable motion, and bringing
 
 42 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 swiftly home to the memory universal surveys." 
 No description could have been more alluring; it is 
 no wonder that Dryden yielded and followed Fancy 
 for a time. The two preceptors also conveyed hints 
 as to the kind of language which the creature spoke. 
 To write with fancy, said Hobbes, one must "know 
 much." A sign of knowing much "is novelty of ex- 
 pression, and pleaseth by excitation of the mind; for 
 novelty causeth admiration, and admiration curios- 
 ity, which is a delightful appetite of knowledge." To 
 write with wit, said Davenant, is to bring truth home 
 "through unfrequented and new ways, and from the 
 most remote shades, by representing Nature, though 
 not in an affected, yet in an unusual dress." That is, 
 conceits were to be abjured, but dulness was to be 
 avoided at all costs. 
 
 It seems certain that Dryden was thinking of 
 Davenant's happy phrases when in the preface to 
 Annus Mirabilis he wrote: "The composition of all 
 poems is, or ought to be, of wit; and wit in the poet, 
 or wit writing, (if you will give me leave to use a 
 School distinction), is no other than the faculty of 
 imagination in the writer, which, like a nimble span- 
 iel, beats over and ranges through the field of mem- 
 ory, till it springs the quarry it hunted after; or, 
 without metaphor, which searches over all the mem- 
 ory for the species or ideas of those things which it 
 designs to represent." Then, as now, it seems to 
 have been difficult to speak of the faculties in other 
 than figurative terms. Dryden here compares wit 
 to a spaniel; elsewhere he declares that the lan- 
 guage of the French "is not strung with sinews like
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 43 
 
 our English; it has the nimbleness of a greyhound, 
 but not the bulk and body of a mastiff." The dog 
 was not a pretty image, perhaps, but it served Dry- 
 den's purpose. Dryden confessed himself capti- 
 vated by Davenant's own wit. "He was a man of 
 quick and piercing imagination," he said in the pref- 
 ace to the Tempest, in the writing of which he had 
 been assisted by Davenant the next year after 
 Annus Mirabilis. "In the time I writ with him, 
 I had the opportunity to observe somewhat more 
 nearly of him, than I had formerly done. ... I 
 found him then of so quick a fancy, that nothing was 
 proposed to him, on which he could not suddenly 
 produce a thought extremely pleasant and surpris- 
 ing. . . . And as his fancy was quick, so likewise 
 were the products of it remote and new ... his im- 
 aginations were such as could not easily enter into 
 any other man." The words "quick," "piercing," 
 and "surprising" should be noted, because they were 
 much in the mode whenever the poetic faculties were 
 being analyzed. Shadwell, when he was still friendly, 
 even used them to describe Dryden. 
 
 "Quick" was not the word for Dryden's fancy. 
 Davenant's own adjective, "laborious," fits better. 
 In the early occasional poems there is no surpris- 
 ing facility of phrase or illustration. In no piece 
 did Dryden ever display a happy gift for turning up 
 images. He speaks from time to time of difficul- 
 ties encountered in curbing a luxuriant fancy. But 
 it is plain that the difficulties were never really 
 great. There are times when, as Dr. Johnson has 
 it, "he seems to look round him for images which
 
 44 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 he cannot find." His imagination is not bounding, 
 or fertile; he proceeds painfully to scour the surface 
 of life for allusions. His spaniel does not frisk; it 
 must be beaten and driven. To use his own words 
 in another connection, "The fancy, memory, and 
 judgment are . . . extended (like so many limbs) 
 upon the rack; all of them reaching with their utmost 
 stress at nature." The net result is not a pretty or a 
 pleasantly variegated pattern; "'tis like an orange 
 stuck with cloves," to fall back again upon Buck- 
 ingham in the Rehearsal. 
 
 Annus MirabiliSj the locus classicus of Dryden's 
 "wit-writing," "seems to be the work of a man," 
 says Macaulay, "who could never, by any possi- 
 bility, write poetry." It is better to call it the work 
 of a man who could never, by any possibility, write 
 a certain kind of poetry the luxuriant, splendid 
 kind that is studded with significant allusions. No 
 swarm of ideas has beset the imagination of Dry- 
 den here. He has had to make an effort for every 
 image, proceeding with an almost childlike serious- 
 ness that is oddly accentuated by the halting ca- 
 dence of his heroic stanza. For most of his happier 
 strokes he has gone to the classics. He is proud to 
 admit in his preface that many of his images are 
 from Virgil, and his notes acknowledge debts not 
 only to Virgil but to Petronius, Tacitus, Pliny, Sta- 
 tius, Horace, and Ovid as well. His notes also fur- 
 nish scientific explanations for the more obscure 
 allusions in the poem. Wishing in the third stanza 
 to say that the Dutch have had the good fortune to 
 discover jewels in the East Indies, he has written,
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 45 
 
 For them alone the heavens had kindly heat; 
 In eastern quarries ripening precious dew. 
 
 To this he appends a note: "Precious stones at 
 first are dew, condensed and hardened by the warmth 
 of the sun or subterranean fires." His images from 
 the classics are generally happy. It is when he 
 draws upon his own resources, or, which is little 
 better, draws upon Waller, that he proves once and 
 for all that his career must lie another way. Cer- 
 tain stanzas have been quoted ad nauseam. Many 
 remain. 
 
 On high-raised decks the haughty Belgians ride, 
 Beneath whose shade our humble frigates go: 
 
 Such port the elephant bears, and so defied 
 By the rhinoceros her unequal foe. 
 
 By viewing Nature, Nature's handmaid Art 
 
 Makes mighty things from small beginnings grow; 
 
 Thus fishes first to shipping did impart 
 
 Their tale the rudder, and their head the prow. 
 
 The gravity with which in these and similar cases 
 the last two lines of a stanza are made to serve up 
 an absurd simile for garnishing the first two is the 
 most lamentable feature of Annus Mirabilis. The 
 attention is drawn down full upon the unfortunate 
 comparison, and Dryden has no way to conceal his 
 fundamental weakness. A few figures are excellent; 
 as when Prince Rupert comes upon the scene, 
 
 And his loud guns speak thick like angry men. 
 The Dutch ships retire, awed by the British cannon:
 
 46 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 So reverently men quit the open air 
 
 When thunder speaks the angry gods abroad. 
 
 But Dryden's strenuous efforts have thrown the 
 balance the other way, and have made it plain, not 
 that he was incapable of a single happy image, but 
 that he was incapable of measuring his own success. 
 Pepys took Annus Mirabilis home with him from a 
 book stall, and found it "a very good poem." It is 
 a spirited poem, and it is an admirable poem when- 
 ever Dryden forgets his spaniel long enough to 
 speak with the purely metrical rush and emphasis 
 which were eventually to win him his position in 
 English verse: 
 
 There was the Plymouth squadron new come in, 
 Which in the Straits last winter was abroad; 
 
 Which twice on Biscay's working bay had been, 
 And on the midland sea the French had awed. 
 
 Old expert Allen, loyal all along, 
 
 Famed for his action on the Smyrna fleet; 
 
 And Holmes,whose name shall live in epic song 
 While music numbers, or while verse has feet; 
 
 Now, anchors weighed, the seamen shout so shrill, 
 That heaven, and earth, and the wide ocean rings; 
 
 A breeze from westward waits their sails to fill, 
 And rests in those high beds his downy wings. 
 
 Annus Mirabilis is by no means the first or last 
 poem in which Dryden reveals a fatal want of tact 
 and subtlety in the use of figures. From his earliest 
 piece, that on Lord Hastings, through the pane- 
 gyrics written at the Restoration, through the 
 Threnodia Augustalis, through the Britannia Redi-
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 47 
 
 viva, through the Eleonora, to his last translation 
 from Ovid, he pursues with heavy steps the flashing 
 heels of fancy. In Ovid, it may be remarked, he 
 found a genius who invariably inspired him to ex- 
 cesses. Ovid's inexhaustible fund of grotesque and 
 tasteless yet clear-cut scenes furnished Dryden 
 with dubious riches which he never failed to make 
 the most of, and which he could not have embel- 
 lished had he tried. 
 
 If Dryden should not be expected to compete 
 with other poets on the score of delicacy in simile 
 and metaphor, much less should he be required to 
 display his powers of passionate utterance in drama 
 and narrative. Here he is in competition with 
 Shakespeare and the tragic poets of Greece, and 
 here he fails once again to prove that he possesses 
 discrimination. Not that he lacks assurance. No 
 poet has talked at greater length about the pas- 
 sions, or about "sublimity." Yet no great poet has 
 managed to acquire a firmer reputation as a bungler 
 in these departments. It is another case of a man 
 working with materials which are not gauged for 
 him, and which to a certain extent are irreconcilable 
 wkh the whole temper of his time. 
 
 Dryden lacks that organic conception of man and 
 nature which gives what is called insight. He can- 
 not compress a large amount of emotional expe- 
 rience into a single phrase. He is virtually barren of 
 illuminating comments on human life which move 
 a reader to take new account of himself. His passages 
 on the soul are foolish, treating importantly as they 
 do of something which is not important to him. And
 
 48 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 the pessimistic soliloquies which the characters in 
 his plays deliver on the subjects of fate and decep- 
 tion are for the most part trash, though not a few of 
 them have been quoted to prove that Dryden was a 
 critic of life. The following lines from Aureng-Zebe 
 are compact and bright: 
 
 When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat; 
 
 Yet, fooled with hope, men favor the deceit; 
 
 Trust on, and think tomorrow will repay; 
 
 Tomorrow's falser than the former day; 
 
 Lies worse; and while it says we shall be blest 
 
 With some new joys, cuts off what we possesst. 
 
 Strange cozenage! None would live past years again, 
 
 Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain; 
 
 Arid from the dregs of life think to receive 
 
 What the first sprightly running could not give. 
 
 I'm tired with waiting for this chemic gold, 
 
 Which fools us young, and beggars us when old. 
 
 Yet there is nothing appalling in their revelation; 
 and their felicity need disturb no one. They have 
 done Dry den's reputation in the main more harm 
 than good by being so often brought forward in a 
 hopeless cause. 
 
 "It requires Philosophy," said Dryden, "as well 
 as Poetry, to sound the depths of all the passions; 
 what they are in themselves, and how they are to be 
 provoked." Dryden did a great deal of experi- 
 menting in the depths he speaks of. Having little 
 or no intuition, and being without discrimination, 
 he was almost never successful. He had a lasting 
 curiosity concerning what he called "those enthusi- 
 astic parts of poetry" which deal with love and hate,
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 49 
 
 disaster and death. In the heroic plays, in the trag- 
 edies, and in the translations of classical narratives 
 he labored to render desperate actions in fitting 
 speech, remembering that the "sublimest subjects 
 ought to be adorned with the sublimest . . . expres- 
 sions." The results can rarely be placed to his 
 credit. In the first part of the Conquest of Granada, 
 the haughty Almanzor, after looking fixedly for a 
 moment at Almahide's face, which she has just un- 
 veiled, turns aside and utters this humiliated con- 
 fession : 
 
 I'm pleased and pained, since first her eyes I saw, 
 
 As I were stung with some tarantula. 
 
 Arms, and the dusty field, I less admire, 
 
 And soften strangely in some new desire; 
 
 Honour burns in me not so fiercely bright, 
 
 But pale as fires when mastered by the light; 
 
 Even while I speak and look, I change yet more, 
 
 And now am nothing that I was before. 
 
 I'm numbed, and fixed, and scarce my eye-balls move; 
 
 I fear it is the lethargy of love! 
 
 'Tis he; I feel him now in every part; 
 
 Like a new lord he vaunts about my heart; 
 
 Surveys, in state, each corner of my breast, 
 
 While poor fierce I, that was, am dispossessed. 
 
 At the end of Aureng-Zebe, Nourmahal, distracted 
 with poison she has swallowed, cries out in the face 
 of death: 
 
 I burn, I more than burn; I am all fire. 
 
 See how my mouth and nostrils flame expire! 
 
 I'll not come near myself
 
 So THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Now I'm a burning lake, it rolls and flows; 
 I'll rush, and pour it all upon my foes. 
 Pull, pull that reverend piece of timber near; 
 Throw 't on 'tis dry 'twill burn 
 Ha, ha! how my old husband crackles there! 
 Keep him down, keep him down: turn him about; 
 I know him; he'll but whizz, and straight go out. 
 Fan me, you winds; What, not one breath of air? 
 I burn them all, and yet have flames to spare. 
 Quench me: Pour on whole rivers. 'Tis in vain; 
 Morat stands there to drive them back again; 
 With those huge bellows in his hands he blows 
 New fire into my head; my brain-pan glows. 
 
 These speeches are from the heroic plays, which in 
 some measure were licensed to rave. Yet) with the 
 one exception of All for Lovf, the maturest of the 
 tragedies, those which are supposed to have been 
 conceived in better taste under Greek, French, and 
 Shakespearian influences are everywhere marred 
 by mortal extravagances. Dorax, in Don Sebastian, 
 believes he is poisoned: 
 
 I'm strangely discomposed; 
 
 Quick shootings through my limbs, and pricking pains, 
 Qualms at my heart, convulsions in my nerves, 
 Shiverings of cold, and burnings of my entrails, 
 Within my little world make medley-war, 
 Lose and regain, beat, and are beaten back, 
 As momentary victors quit their ground. 
 Can it be poison! 
 
 Cleonidas, in Cleomenes, doubts the immortality of 
 the soul
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 51 
 
 Because I find, that, now my body starves, 
 
 My soul decays. I think not as I did; 
 
 My head goes round; and now you swim before me; 
 
 Methinks my soul is like a flame unfed 
 
 With oil, that dances up and down the lamp, 
 
 But must expire ere long. 
 
 And Cleomenes himself, dying, announces: 
 A rising vapor rumbles in my brains. 
 
 Dryden's excuse for every such passage was that 
 "a man in such an occasion is not cool enough, 
 either to reason lightly, or to talk calmly." Yet in 
 his own cooler days, when he had Virgil and Boccac- 
 cio for guides, and less fortunately Ovid, he still 
 guided his pen through love and death and regret 
 with clumsy fingers. "With the simple and elem- 
 ental passions, as they spring separate in the mind," 
 said Dr. Johnson once and for all, "he seems not 
 much acquainted." 
 
 Dryden's theory was that if one only entered in 
 with enthusiasm and industrious abandon one 
 could succeed as well as any in striking off brave, 
 fine talk in verse. While occupied with writing 
 heroic plays he was supported by the creed that a 
 heroic poet "is not tied to a bare representation of 
 what is true." Rather he is expected to be reckless. 
 
 Poets, like lovers, should be bold, and dare, 
 
 runs the piologue to Tyrannic Love; and in the 
 preface to the same play scorn is expressed for him 
 who "creeps after plain, dull, common sense." "A 
 solid man is, in plain English, a solid, solemn fool,"
 
 52 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 he was to observe to the Earl of Mulgrave six 
 years later. This rough-and-ready ardor soon 
 found rare support in Longinus, whose treatise 
 On the Sublime was translated by Boileau in France 
 in 1674 and almost immediately taken up by Dry- 
 den. Horace had insisted that the poet should be 
 more than correct, and the French critics generally 
 had allowed for elevation in style. Thomas Rymer, 
 in his translation of Rapin's Reflections on Aris- 
 totle's Treatise of Poesie, was writing this sentence in 
 the same year that Boileau's Longinus appeared: 
 "Of late some have fallen into another extremity, 
 by a too scrupulous care of purity of language: 
 they have begun to take from Poesie all its nerves, 
 and all its majesty, by a too timorous reservedness, 
 and false modesty." The true poet, says Rymer, 
 will|have "flame" as well as "phlegm." It was 
 chiefly from Longinus himself, however, "who was 
 undoubtedly, after Aristotle, the greatest critic 
 among the Greeks," said Dryden, that Dryden de- 
 rived the substance of his Apology for Heroic Poetry 
 and Poetic License in 1677. He quoted Longinus on 
 the meanness of a poet who will shun profuseness 
 and write parsimoniously in order to secure safety 
 from ridicule. And in the light of the famous 
 Greek treatise he formulated a definition of poetic 
 license. But it cannot be granted that he caught all 
 or any of the subtlety of his master in sublimity. 
 Certainly he received no inspiration that served 
 later on to chasten or ripen his manner of dealing 
 with the passions. He was attracted by his teach- 
 er's theory of images. "Imaging is, in itself," he
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 53 
 
 wrote, "the very height and life of Poetry. It is, as 
 Longinus describes it, a discourse, which, by a kind 
 of enthusiasm, or extraordinary emotion of the 
 soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things 
 which the poet paints, so as to be pleased with them, 
 and to admire them." He was referring here to the 
 distinction made by Longinus between poetical and 
 oratorical images. The first, says Longinus, is 
 achieved "when he who is speaking . . . imagines 
 himself to see what he is talking about, and produces 
 a similar illusion in his hearers." The second is 
 merely "designed to give perspicuity, and its chief 
 beauties are its energy and reality." The metaphor 
 which Dryden brings forward from his own works 
 to prove that he has approximated the poetical 
 image of Longinus in unfortunately a typically bad 
 one: 
 
 Seraph and cherub, careless of their charge, 
 And wanton, in full ease now live at large; 
 Unguarded leave the passes of the sky, 
 And all dissolved in hallelujahs lie. 
 
 Here if anywhere is final proof that Dryden lacked 
 discrimination in executing and judging figures of 
 speech. He feigns well enough the "enthusiasm, or 
 extraordinary emotion of the soul," but he does not 
 achieve the reality which is after all the end of any 
 writing. He misses the chief point in Longinus, 
 which is that sublimity is not a trick but is a state 
 of mind, is not mere fine writing but is the expres- 
 sion of an important personality. The distinction 
 made by Longinus between true sublimity and
 
 54 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 "amplification" reflects directly upon Dryden, and 
 scarcely to his credit: "The sublime is often con- 
 veyed in a single thought, but amplification can 
 only subsist with a certain prolixity and diffusive- 
 ness." Dryden spent energy on both his figures 
 and his heroic declarations; but the effect is one of 
 words rather than things. The words seem stark 
 naked on the page; they throw off no enlarging 
 rings of suggestion or illusion; there is no light be- 
 hind. 
 
 Let Dryden pronounce the final verdict. "To 
 speak justly of this whole matter," he wrote in 
 the preface to Troilus and Cressida, " 'tis neither 
 height of thought that is discommended, nor pa- 
 thetic vehemence, nor any nobleness of expression 
 in its proper place; but 'tis a false measure of all 
 these, something which is like them, and is not 
 them; 'tis the Bristol stone, which appears like a 
 diamond; 'tis an extravagant thought, instead of a 
 sublime one; 'tis roaring madness, instead of vehe- 
 mence; and a sound of words, instead of sense. If 
 Shakespeare were stripped of all the bombasts in his 
 passions, and dressed in the most vulgar words, we 
 should find the beauties of his thoughts remaining; 
 if his embroideries were burnt down, there would 
 still be silver at the bottom of the melting pot: but 
 I fear (at least let me fear it for myself) that we, 
 who ape his sounding words, have nothing of his 
 thought, but are all outside; there is not so much as 
 a dwarf within our giant's clothes." This hand- 
 some recantation was carried still further in the pref- 
 ace to the Spanish Friar. But no one should be
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 55 
 
 deceived. Dryden was an imcomparably better 
 critic than he was a writer of tragedies. He never 
 can be said to have "settled his system of propriety," 
 as Dr. Johnson would say. 
 
 Dryden drew an interesting distinction between 
 Shakespeare and Fletcher in the preface to Troilus 
 and Cressida. "The excellency of that poet was, as 
 I have said, in the more manly passions; Fletcher's 
 in the softer: Shakespeare writ better betwixt man 
 and man; Fletcher, betwixt man and woman; con- 
 sequently, one described friendship better; the other 
 love; . . . the scholar had the softer soul; but the 
 master had the kinder." Here is offered an approach 
 to Dryden's own peculiar triumph in the drama. 
 Failing to distinguish himself in his accounts of love, 
 he yet succeeded famously in showing friendships 
 broken and mended. Taking for his model the 
 quarrel between Brutus and Cassius in Shake- 
 speare's Julius Ccesar, he executed four admirable 
 scenes in as many tragedies. One who would see 
 him at his best in dialogue should go to the scenes 
 between Antony and Ventidius in AH for Love, 
 Hector and Troilus in Troilus and Cressida, Sebas- 
 tian and Dorax in Don Sebastian, and Cleomenes 
 and Cleanthes in Cleomenes. Here he is straight- 
 forward, and he writes with his mind on the object. 
 Here, in the most limited sense of the phrase, he 
 shows the "manners of men." Almanzor's blunt 
 direction to Almahide, given before she removes her 
 veil, is worth all the pages of rant which follow upon 
 her committing that indiscretion:
 
 56 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Speak quickly, woman: I have much to do. 
 
 Dryden was at his best when describing a contest 
 between two competent minds playing free of sen- 
 timent. It was in his true role of sensible observer 
 that he wrote his quarrel scenes; as it was with his 
 plainest vision that he watched those two astonish- 
 ing beasts, the hind and the panther, in their end- 
 less game of crafty give and take: 
 
 To this the Panther sharply had replied; 
 But, having gained a verdict on her side, 
 She wisely gave the loser leave to chide. . . . 
 Yet thought it decent something should be said; 
 For secret guilt by silence is betrayed. 
 So neither granted all, nor much denied, 
 But answered with a yawning kind of pride. 
 
 It is a commonplace of literary history that the 
 seventeenth century in Europe saw an almost comi- 
 cal divergence between poetic theory and poetic 
 practice, the heroic poem in France being the in- 
 stance usually given of a type that failed to fulfil its 
 promise. In England, as has been seen, the diver- 
 gence was very wide between Dryden's theory and 
 Dryden's achievements in so far as they implicated 
 fancy operating over the face of nature and imagin- 
 ation operating among the human passions under 
 dramatic strain; one reason beyond all doubt being 
 that the separation in current doctrine of wit from 
 judgment, imagination from reason, rendered it 
 difficult or impossible to discriminate between true 
 and false expression and sanctioned a certain reck- 
 lessness which was mistaken for poetic rage. There
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 57 
 
 is another group of major defects in the poetry of 
 Dryden and the Augustans generally wherein form 
 rather than substance is involved, and wherefrom 
 has resulted that artificiality of tone which is the 
 proverbial objection urged by modern critics. Here 
 again it is possible to find the poets controlled by 
 theories, and here again promise is hopelessly in 
 advance of fulfilment owing to the superficial char- 
 acter of the theories and the inadequacy with which 
 they are applied. The theories are that poetry is 
 like oratory, that poetry is like painting, and that 
 poetry is like music. 1 The aim is to achieve the 
 ends of those three parallel arts as well as the 
 ends of poetry, and thus enrich poetic expression. 
 The problem is purely one of expression, or as 
 was said in the seventeenth century, of elocution. 
 Art is for the imitation of life. Each separate art 
 has ' means whereby it can accomplish direct imi- 
 tation. If poetry, in addition to its own direct 
 means, can appropriate the means of other arts and 
 apply them obliquely to its material, why should not 
 the eventual product be so much the fuller of beauty 
 and meaning? Actually the product as we now 
 regard it is less beautiful rather than more beauti- 
 ful in consequence of this confusion among the arts. 
 Instead of deepening its own medium by contact 
 with oratory, painting, and music, poetry became 
 shallow; instead of growing more eloquent, more 
 picturesque, and more harmonious, it only grew 
 more rhetorical, more vague, and more monoto- 
 
 1 "In it are assembled all the Powers of Eloquence, of Musick, and 
 of Picture." Sir William Temple. Of Poetry. 1690.
 
 58 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 nous. That is to say, Augustan poetry at its worst 
 grew rhetorical, vague, and monotonous; at its best 
 it was something far different. As its worst has of- 
 ten been seized and unduly enlarged upon by con- 
 trary critics, and as only the worst of Dryden is 
 being considered in the present chapter, it seems 
 necessary to bestow considerable attention at this 
 point upon these weaknesses which Dryden shared 
 with all his contemporaries and with most of his 
 immediate followers. 
 
 Tacitus complained in his Dialogus that Roman 
 oratory was being invaded by the dance; orations 
 were being composed and delivered in dance meas- 
 ures; "orators speak voluptuously," he wrote with 
 indignation, "and actors dance eloquently." Taci- 
 tus was not the first or the last to make objection 
 to the mingling in spirit and technique of two dis- 
 tinct arts. Laokoons were thought, even if they 
 were not written, long before Lessing. But the 
 confusion of poetry with eloquence that began to be 
 current in the Italian Renaissance and persisted 
 throughout the criticism of all Europe for at least 
 two centuries aroused no Tacitus and was suffered 
 to run its own long course unchallenged. The 
 original invasion of poetry by oratory was no less 
 gradual and peaceable than the final withdrawal, 
 if indeed the withdrawal can be said as yet to have 
 reached a final stage, or can be expected or desired 
 ever to be complete. The early Renaissance crit- 
 ics in Italy studied poetry and rhetoric together at 
 a time when neither was flourishing in anything like 
 perfect health. Both were being made to serve the
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 59 
 
 purposes of flattery in small despotic courts where a 
 premium was placed on fulness and roundness and 
 ordered pomp of elocution. The Italian critics 
 originated parallels and confusions which were per- 
 petuated by the French Pleiade and the English 
 theorists of Elizabeth's time. These had mainly to 
 do with rules for ornamentation and devices for 
 securing striking effects. The classical critics had 
 confined the application of their rules and devices 
 to prose oratory, all of them agreeing that poetry 
 had a style of its own which could not be taught. 
 Plato had insisted that poets were inexplicably in- 
 spired, but he had encouraged men who would be 
 orators to go and study the rules. Aristotle had 
 written separate treatises on rhetoric and poetry, 
 and had treated of artifices in connection with the 
 first which he would have denied could be applied 
 to the second. Cicero, Quintilian, and Tacitus had 
 discussed oratory, not poetry, although Cicero had 
 raised his art both in theory and in practice to an 
 exalted position. In all this body of doctrine there 
 had been gradually developed and clearly explained 
 numerous elaborate methods, not excluding asso- 
 nance and rhyme, by which prose could be height- 
 ened in effect, made more symmetrical, and given 
 a greater appearance of finality. Now when the 
 Italians established their identification between the 
 poet and the orator they were able to offer to 
 the poet handsome if questionable assistance. Po- 
 etry in Europe did not become rhetorical over 
 night. In England, for example, the sixteenth cen- 
 tury saw eloquence occupying the second place;
 
 60 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Sidney, Webb, and Daniel denied it access to the 
 highest levels. Yet all Elizabethan criticism is 
 curiously concerned with the whole matter of classi- 
 cal figures and decorations so far as they are appli- 
 cable to the style of poetry; and George Puttenham 
 finds one great difference between prose and poetry 
 to be that poetry is the more "eloquent and rhetor- 
 ical." "The poets," says Puttenham, "were . . . 
 from the beginning the best persuaders, and their 
 eloquence the first rhetoric of the world." Ben 
 Jonson was thoroughly familiar with the works of 
 the classical and post-classical rhetoricians, and 
 helped to establish a tradition of their sacred effi- 
 cacy which outlived him a hundred years. It was 
 not until Dryden's time, when the inspiration of the 
 Elizabethans had in a way given out, and the full 
 body of modern classical doctrine was being re- 
 ceived in its most systematic form from France, 
 that eloquence came to feel completely at home in 
 poetry. Then it was that sophistication, easy ex- 
 pertness, and obvious perfection of finish became of 
 paramount importance in the manner of verse. A 
 consciously "poetic" style was created. Poets 
 called themselves "virtuosos." The secrets of in- 
 dividuality became obscure, while the conventions 
 became easier each year to follow. It became less 
 and less desirable to state things naively; the cir- 
 cumlocution was cherished for its elegance and the 
 antithesis for its effect of completeness and finality 
 even when nothing final was being said. It came to 
 be expected that everything, whether important or 
 not, should be said importantly. There was some-
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 61 
 
 thing not quite genuine about the poetry which was 
 the ultimate product of these tendencies. Poetry 
 at its best leaves the impression that there was 
 something in the poet's head which must have been 
 said, whatever the words at hand. The poetry 
 which first of all was eloquence gave no such im- 
 pression. "Modern poetry," complained Coleridge 
 in 1805, "is characterized by the poets' anxiety 
 to be always striking. . . . Every line, nay, every 
 word, stops, looks full in your face, and asks and 
 begs for praise! . . . There are no distances, no per- 
 spectives, but all is in the foreground; and this is 
 nothing but vanity. . . . The desire of carrying 
 things to a greater height of pleasure and admiration 
 than . . . they are susceptible of, is one great cause 
 of the corruption of poetry." 
 
 Dryden was peculiarly fitted to lead the rhetori- 
 cal grand march in English poetry. Possessing all 
 of Ovid's fondness for exhortation and pleading, he 
 possessed in addition unexampled powers of classi- 
 fying and dividing his thoughts, hitting upon happy 
 generalities, thumping out bold, new epithets, and 
 accumulating great stores of rhetorical energy as he 
 proceeded to build his resounding rhyme. He car- 
 ried eloquence as high as it can go in poetry, which 
 is not the highest, since eloquence is committed to 
 dealing with effects rather than forces, with novel- 
 ties and ardors rather than with convictions. Not 
 always sympathetic in theory with what he once 
 condemned as "Ciceronian, copious, florid, and 
 figurative," he yet was inclined by nature and by 
 precept towards those very qualities. He was in-
 
 62 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 clined to favor a diction that was even and digni- 
 fied at the expense perhaps of piquancy. "Our 
 language is noble, full, and significant;" says Nean- 
 der towards the end of the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 
 "and I know not why he who is master of it may 
 not clothe ordinary things in it as decently as the 
 Latin, if he use the same diligence in his choice of 
 words. Delectus verborum origo est eloquently. . . . 
 One would think, unlock the door, was a thing as 
 vulgar as could be spoken; and yet Seneca could make 
 it sound high and lofty in his Latin: 
 
 Reserate clusos regii pastes laris. 
 Set wide the palace gates." 
 
 Dryden was also inclined to fall into an exalted anti- 
 thetical tone of formal address which frequently 
 suited his needs admirably but which in many cases 
 has rendered him unattractive in the eyes of later 
 generations. That tone was indispensable in the 
 heroic plays, which were supposed by no one to be 
 real. It was of enormous advantage in Absalom and 
 Achitophel, where it erected great public personages 
 to their proper height and gave to satire a strange 
 epic importance; as may best be seen in Achitophel's 
 address to Absalom beginning: 
 
 Auspicious prince! at whose nativity 
 Some royal planet ruled the southern sky, 
 Thy longing country's darling and desire, 
 Their cloudy pillar, and their guardian fire, 
 Their second Moses, whose extended wand 
 Divides the seas and shows the promised land, 
 Whose dawning day in every distant age 
 Has exefcised the sacred prophet's rage,
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 63 
 
 The people's prayer, the glad diviner's theme, 
 The young men's vision, and the old men's dream, 
 Thee, Saviour, thee the nation's vows confess, 
 And, never satisfied with seeing, bless. 
 
 It is not in the heroic plays or in the poems on pub- 
 lic affairs that Dryden's rhetorical vein has failed to 
 meet with approval; it is rather in those narrative 
 poems where nothing short of exquisite variety and 
 delicacy are demanded by the theme. Here Dryden, 
 instead of proving himself sensitive to the demands 
 made by the successive turns of his story and the 
 altered dispositions of his characters, continues to 
 speak in the cadence of the pulpit or the bar. It is 
 this rigidity of manner which has estranged fastid- 
 ious readers from the Virgil and the Fables. The 
 plasticity of Virgil and Chaucer is not Dryden's. 
 Arcite's dying speech to Emily is one of Chaucer's 
 directest and most intimate passages: 
 
 Naught may the woful spirit in myn herte 
 
 Declare o point of alle my sorwes smerte 
 
 To yow, my lady, that I love most; 
 
 But I bequethe the service of my gost 
 
 To yow aboven every creature, 
 
 Sin that my lyf may no lenger dure. 
 
 Alias, the wo! alias, the peynes stronge, 
 
 That I for yow have suffred, and so longe! 
 
 Alias, the deeth! Alias, myn Emelye! 
 
 Alias, departing of our companye! 
 
 Alias, myn hertes quene! alias, my wyf! 
 
 Myn hertes lady, endere of my lyf! 
 
 What is this world? What asketh men to have? 
 
 Now with his love, now in his colde grave
 
 64 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Allone, withouten any companye. 
 Far-wel, my swete fo! myn Emelye! 
 And softe tak me in your armes tweye, 
 For love of God, and herkneth what I seye. 
 
 Dryden's Arcite speaks as follows: 
 
 No language can express the smallest part 
 Of what I feel, and suffer in my heart, 
 For you, whom best I love and value most; 
 But to your service I bequeath my ghost; 
 Which from this mortal body when untied, 
 Unseen, unheard, shall hover at your side; 
 Nor fright you waking, nor your sleep offend, 
 But wait officious, and your steps attend. 
 How I have loved, excuse my faltering tongue, 
 My spirit's feeble, and my pains are strong: 
 This I may say, I only grieve to die, 
 Because I lose my charming Emily: 
 To die, when Heaven had put you in my power, 
 Fate could not choose a more malicious hour! 
 What greater curse could envious Fortune give, 
 Than just to die, when I began to live! 
 Vain men, how vanishing a bliss we crave, 
 Now warm in love, now withering in the grave! 
 Never, O never more to see the sun! 
 Still dark, in a damp vault, and still alone! 
 This fate is common; but I lose my breath 
 Near bliss, and yet not blest before my death. 
 Farewell; but take me dying in your arms, 
 'Tis all I can enjoy of all your charms; 
 This hand I cannot but in death resign; 
 Ah, could I live! but while I live 'tis mine. 
 I feel my end approach, and thus embraced, 
 Am pleased to die; but hear me speak my last.
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 65 
 
 Dryden has no equal in prayers, objurgations, po- 
 litic addresses, and speeches of defiance; he wears 
 the robes that he has borrowed from the orator with 
 a splended assurance; his accents, although they too 
 are borrowed, ring true. But in poetic narrative 
 his limits are firmly fixed. When the shades of the 
 Forum cannot be beckoned to help him rise, he 
 does not rise. He has always the appearance of 
 being strong, but as Lowell has pointed out, there is 
 stiffness, and there is coldness, in his strength. 
 Taking him altogether, stiffness must be accounted 
 one of his shortcomings. 
 
 Under Charles I, secular painting and music had 
 come to England to stay. Van Dyck and Henry 
 Lawes, to name no others, had won the enduring 
 favor of courtiers and poets; and the technique of 
 each of their arts had rapidly become familiar to 
 persons of culture or acquaintance. Interest in 
 those arts from the technical side continued to in- 
 crease after the Restoration and through the age of 
 Dryden. It became a commonplace of aesthetics 
 that poetry, painting, and music are allied. Con- 
 greve said "Poetry includes Painting and Music." 
 English and French writers throughout the eight- 
 eenth century carried forward the double parallel, 
 so that when Friedrich Schlegel wrote in 1798 "Die 
 Poesie ist Musik fur das innere Ohr, und Malerei fiir 
 das innere Auge," although he implied something 
 that had not been implied a hundred years before, 
 he yet was dealing with what might have been called 
 an axiom. This axiom was to bear new and strange 
 fruit in nineteenth-century literature. Upon Au-
 
 66 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 gustan verse its influence had been purely formal; it 
 had established a diction and a scheme of numbers. 
 The single parallel between poetry and painting 
 was already venerable in Dryden's day. It had 
 first been drawn in Aristotle's Poetics; Horace and 
 Plutarch had given it momentum; and it had been 
 sanctioned by virtually every European critic dur- 
 ing the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 
 England the Elizabethan theorists had touched upon 
 it, and it had been ratified in turn by Ben Jonson, 
 Cowley, Davenant, and Hobbes. It was cherished 
 during the Restoration and the early eighteenth 
 century, but it eventually lost its meaning, so that 
 when Lessing attacked it in 1766, employing some 
 of the weapons which Du Bos had used half a cen- 
 tury earlier, he was attacking something which 
 could offer only partial resistance. The parallel had 
 not borne along any constant body of dogma. Aris- 
 totle had merely remarked that the poet, being an 
 imitator, is therefore like a painter or any artist; 
 and it had occurred to him to compare the charac- 
 ters and plot of a tragedy to the colors and outline 
 of a painting. Horace had suggested that poems 
 and pictures are alike with respect to the circum- 
 stances under which spectators should judge them; 
 some appear better at a distance than when closely 
 observed, some require more lighting than others, 
 some should be seen many times to be appreciated 
 at their full value. Plutarch had called painting 
 dumb poetry, and poetry a speaking picture. 
 Lessing objected to the whole theory on the ground 
 that it had led to a freezing of the drama; in striv-
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 67 
 
 ing to remove ugliness and suffering from the sur- 
 face of their art so as to render it capable of compari- 
 son with the still surfaces of other arts, dramatists 
 had thrown away their pity and their terror, and 
 nothing was left. A stoic hero is not interesting 
 since he cannot suffer. The bearings of the theory 
 on dramatic construction are of no concern in the 
 present connection. The parallel is important here 
 for its bearing on the question of Dryden's diction. 
 
 Dryden was thoroughly familiar with the doc- 
 trine of the parallel and with its history. He first 
 quoted the Ut pictura poesis of Horace in his De- 
 fence of an Essay oj Dramatic Poesy in 1668. His 
 works are loaded with references to technical points 
 in painting, showing that he considered himself ac- 
 quainted with the practical problems of the art. He 
 draws the parallel, with applications of his own, no 
 less than twenty times; and often he extends it. In 
 the Life of Plutarch history is compared with paint- 
 ing. In the preface to Sylvce the shading of caden- 
 ces in a Pindaric ode is found to be like the shading 
 of colors in a picture. In the Discourse Concerning 
 Satire a satirical "character" is compared to a por- 
 trait on canvas. It is in the Parallel of Poetry and 
 Painting, however, which Dryden prefixed to his 
 translation of Du Fresnoy's De Arte Graphica in 
 1695, tnat ne elaborates the parallel to its fullest 
 extent and explains its bearings on poetic diction. 
 "Expression," he writes, "and all that belongs to 
 words, is that in a poem which colouring is in a pic- 
 ture. The colours well chosen in their proper places, 
 together with the lights and shadows which belong
 
 68 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 to them, lighten the design, and make it pleasing to 
 the eye. The words, the expressions, the tropes and 
 figures, the versification, and all the other elegan- 
 cies of sound, as cadences, turns of words upon the 
 thought, and many other things, which are all parts 
 of expression, perform exactly the same office both 
 in dramatic and epic poetry. ... In poetry, the ex- 
 pression is that which charms the reader, and beau- 
 tifies the design, which is only the outlines of the 
 fable. . . . Amongst the ancients, Zeuxis was most 
 famous for his colouring; amongst the moderns, Ti- 
 tian and Correggio. Of the two ancient epic poets, 
 who have so far excelled all the moderns, the inven- 
 tion and design were the particular talents of Homer 
 . . . but the dictio Virgiliana, the expression of 
 Virgil, his colouring, was incomparably the better; 
 and in that I have always endeavoured to copy 
 him." Expression, elocution, diction, were cardinal 
 points with Dryden; they absorbed the greater 
 part of his effort in virtuoso-works like the Virgil 
 and the Fables. To be going hand in hand with 
 Virgil and Titian, the supreme colorists, was a su- 
 preme privilege in his eyes. Yet he labored with a 
 complacency that one does not expect in a conscien- 
 tious painter. And his results are what one does not 
 find in a conscientious poet. For the parallel he 
 drew between diction in poetry and color in paint- 
 ing was superficial. He conceived color in paint- 
 ing as a kind of splendid wash applied after the 
 drawing is done. It has no more organic function 
 than that of decoration. It adds to the glamor rather 
 than to the meaning of a picture. So elocution in
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 69 
 
 poetry; it is, "in plain English," says Dryden, "the 
 bawd of her sister, the design . . . ; she clothes, 
 she dresses her up, she paints her, she makes her 
 appear more lovely than naturally she is; she pro- 
 cures the design, and makes lovers for her." That 
 is, diction in poetry is a splendid wash that is spread 
 over the framework of the plot. Words have no 
 more organic function than the painter's pigments; 
 the imagination is nothing but camel's hair. 
 
 The diction of the firgil and the Fables is always 
 vigorous and smooth, and at its best it is nothing 
 short of magnificent. But it is always evident that 
 the poet has laid it on from without. At its best it 
 is gilt rather than gold, and at its worst it is tinsel. 
 The tinsel is what modern readers have found diffi- 
 cult to accept in Dryden. Dryden applied his elo- 
 cution with a hasty hand, and one that rarely 
 showed discrimination. He has been called the 
 Rubens among English poets because of his lavish- 
 ness and gusto; surely he can deserve the title for no 
 other reason. He has boundless gusto; but he is al- 
 most incorrigibly vague. His vagueness is partly 
 the result of a theory, partly the result of defec- 
 tive vision. The theory is the theory of idealized 
 or generalized Nature. He makes much of it in the 
 Parallel, where he shows that the poet and the 
 painter alike should form ideas of a perfect nature 
 in which all eccentricities are corrected and all 
 vulgarities pared away. The surface of a poem or a 
 painting should be smooth and beautiful and de- 
 corous; no word or phrase should be inserted which 
 it might strain the intelligence of elegant readers or
 
 70 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 spectators to understand. Technical diction is 
 barred for the benefit of "those men and ladies of 
 the first quality, who have been better bred than to 
 be too nicely knowing in the terms." Here is the 
 source of that generalizing frame of mind which 
 created the poetry and the painting of the next cen- 
 tury; that frame of mind which made Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds most of what he was as artist or as critic, 
 and which eventually moved Ruskin and Blake 
 to awful wrath. "To generalize," said Blake, "is 
 to be an idiot." Dryden generalized. His feeling 
 for details was not keen, and his interest in them 
 was nil. He used a broad brush, and painted 
 swiftly. He did not mind repeating himself. He 
 would have been pleased had he been called conven- 
 tional. Virgil had conventionalized Homer. Dry- 
 den conventionalized Virgil. In the thirteenth book 
 of the Odyssey Homer describes the harbor in Ithaca 
 where Odysseus landed: 
 
 There is in the land of Ithaca a certain haven of Phorcys, 
 the ancient one of the sea, and thereby are two headlands 
 of sheer cliff, which slope to the sea on the haven's side 
 and break the mighty wave that ill winds roll about, but 
 within, the decked ships ride unmoored when once they 
 have reached the place of anchorage. Now at the harbor's 
 head is a long-leaved olive tree, and hard by is a pleasant 
 cave and shadowy, sacred to the nymphs, that are called 
 the Naiads. And therein are mixing bowls and jars of 
 stone, and there moreover bees do hive. And there are 
 great looms of stone, wherein the nymphs weave raiment 
 of purple stain, a marvel to behold, and therein are waters 
 welling evermore. 1 
 
 1 Translation of Butcher and Lang. Oxford, 1879.
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 71 
 
 This is the work of a poet who would always rather 
 insert a detail than leave it out. Virgil's descrip- 
 tion of the Libyan harbor where ^Eneas landed (I, 
 I59ff.) is the work of a poet who cares somewhat 
 less for the concrete than he does for the beautiful: 
 
 There, in a deep bay, is a roadstead, which an island 
 forms by its jutting sides. On those sides every wave 
 from the deep breaks, then parts into the winding hollows: 
 on this hand and that are vast rocks, and twin cliffs frown- 
 ing to heaven; and beneath their peaks, far and wide, the 
 peaceful seas are silent. From the height hangs a back- 
 ground of waving forests, and a grove of dim and tangled 
 shadows. Under the fronting crags is a rock-hung cave 
 haunted by nymphs and, within it, sweet water and seats 
 from the living rock. l 
 
 Dryden's account is the work of a man who alto- 
 gether lacks fondness for particulars: 
 
 Within a long recess there lies a bay; 
 An island shades it from the rolling sea, 
 And forms a port secure for ships to ride; 
 Broke by the jutting land, on either side, 
 In double streams the briny waters glide; 
 Betwixt two rows of rocks a sylvan scene 
 Appears above, and groves forever green: 
 A grot is formed beneath, with mossy seats, 
 To rest the Nereids, and exclude the heats. 
 Down through the crannies of the living walls 
 The crystal streams descend in murmuring falls. 
 
 In these "briny waters," "sylvan scenes," and 
 
 1 Translation of John Jackson. Oxford. 1908.
 
 72 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 "crystal streams" are the beginnings of the stereo- 
 typed Nature which graced the verse of England 
 for at least two generations. No one can be held 
 more strictly accountable for its vogue than Dry- 
 den, whose Virgil was read by every poet and 
 served as a storehouse, like Pope's Homer, of culti- 
 vated phrases. Dryden supplied himself with a 
 kind of natural furniture with which he could stock 
 any house of verse that seemed to him bare. He 
 laid in a fund of phrases with which he could expand 
 any passage that seemed to him curt. Thus in the 
 fifth jEneid, when Virgil writes 
 
 ferit aethera clamor 
 Nauticus, adductis spumant freta versa lacertis, 
 
 Dryden goes beyond him and whips the sea into a 
 more suitable froth: 
 
 With shouts the sailors rend the starry skies; 
 Lashed with their oars, the smoky billows rise; 
 Sparkles the briny main, and the vexed ocean fries. 
 
 One word in Chaucer's Knight's Tale, "huntyng," 
 becomes four lines in Dryden's Palamon and Ar- 
 cite: 
 
 A sylvan scene with various greens was drawn, 
 Shades on the sides, and in the midst a lawn; 
 The silver Cynthia, with her nymphs around, 
 Pursued the flying deer, the woods with horns resound. 
 
 Three words in The Flower and the Leaf, "the briddes 
 songe," become sixteen in Dryden: 
 
 The painted birds, companions of the Spring, 
 Hopping from spray to spray, were heard to sing.
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 73 
 
 Nor did young poets in the time of Queen Anne 
 need to go further than Diyden for models of pe- 
 riphrasis. The circumlocution, that pale ghost of 
 the Roman epithet, that false pigment bound to 
 fade even before its poet-painter could apply it, 
 was everywhere in the later Dryden. In the JEneis, 
 an arrow is a feathered death; in the Georgics, 
 honey is liquid gold, tenacious wax, ambrosial dew, 
 gathered glue; and always the fish are finny. 
 
 "Music and Poetry have ever been acknowl- 
 edged Sisters," said Henry Purcell, the greatest 
 English musician of Dryden's or any other time. 
 He had the Greeks for his authority, as well as every 
 Englishman who had ever written either about 
 music or about poetry. The analogy of the two arts 
 may be said to have seemed self-evident to the 
 Elizabethans, Gascoigne, Sidney, Puttenham, Dan- 
 iel, Campion, and to writers of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury. Davenant confessed that he had composed 
 the cantos of his Gondibert with "so much heat . . . 
 as to presume they might (like the works of Homer 
 ere they were joined together and made a volume by 
 the Athenian king) be sung at village feasts, though 
 not to monarchs after victory, nor to armies before 
 battle. For so (as an inspiration of glory into the 
 one, and of valour into the other) did Homer's 
 spirit, long after his body's rest, wander in musick 
 about Greece." Sir William Temple derived music 
 and poetry from a single source, a certain heat and 
 agitation of the brain. The parallel had and al- 
 ways will have multitudinous phases, of which the 
 opera and the song and the ballad suggest the most
 
 74 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 obvious. The connection which Dryden and others 
 made between the two arts purported to be a more 
 subtle one than that which is involved in the ac- 
 companiment of words by music. It involved the 
 arrangement of words in such a succession that they 
 themselves should produce the effects of music. 
 This is an important theory, which in different 
 guises and in the hands of different men has been 
 productive of genuine poetry; for no one will deny 
 that the most moving poetry has been in some way 
 musical. But it is not a simple theory, and it can- 
 not be applied complacently or mechanically. In 
 so far as Dryden and his followers applied it com- 
 placently and mechanically they failed to produce 
 poetry that moves. As in the case of the analogy 
 from painting they failed to perceive that it is only 
 the color of a distinguished mind that can lend dis- 
 tinctive shades of beauty to a poem, so in the case 
 of the analogy from music they were not always 
 aware that it is only the tone of a genuinely com- 
 posed and vibrant imagination which can give impor- 
 tant harmonies to verse. They relied upon a kind 
 of musical attachment, both to furnish them with 
 a constant pitch and to ring occasional changes 
 suited to the sense. 
 
 "I do not hesitate to say," wrote Leigh Hunt in 
 the preface to his Story of Rimini in 1816, "that 
 Pope and the French school of versification have 
 known the least on the subject of any poets perhaps 
 that ever wrote. They have mistaken mere smooth- 
 ness for harmony." This is perhaps the most ab- 
 solute condemnation which the music of Augustan
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 75 
 
 verse has received. But it is by no means the ear- 
 liest. Hunt was capping a commonplace of criticism 
 with his climax. Milton, in his preface to Para- 
 dise Lost, had categorically denied the possibility 
 of true music to heroic verse, with its "jingling 
 sound of like endings." Augustan poets and crit- 
 ics themselves had inveighed against "mere har- 
 mony." The Earl of Mulgrave, in his Essay Upon 
 Poetry of 1682, had observed that 
 
 Number, and Rime, and that harmonious sound 
 Which never does the Ear with harshness wound, 
 Are necessary, yet but vulgar Arts. 
 
 The preface to that remarkable anthology, the 
 Poems on Affairs of State (1697), had contained a 
 robust protest against mere regularity: "There are 
 a sort of men, who having little other merit than a 
 happy chime, would fain fix the Excellence of Po- 
 etry in the smoothness of the Versification, allow- 
 ing but little to the more Essential Qualities of a 
 Poet, great Images, good sense, etc. Nay they 
 have so blind a passion for what they excel in, 
 that they will exclude all variety of numbers from 
 English Poetry, when they allow none but Iambics, 
 which must by an identity of Sound bring a very 
 unpleasant satiety upon the Reader." Pope, in 
 his Essay on Criticism, had disposed very neatly of 
 
 these tuneful fools. . . . 
 Who haunt Parnassus but to please their ear. 
 
 And finally, Cowper in Table Talk had found Pope 
 wanting because he
 
 76 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Made poetry a mere mechanic art, 
 
 And every warbler has his tune by heart. 
 
 So that from the beginning there had been no lack 
 of consciousness that heroic verse tended towards 
 monotony. Yet in general the claim of the couplet 
 writers that their essential contribution to English 
 poetry was in the way of harmony went without 
 serious challenge for a good hundred years after 
 Waller and Denham first "came out into the world," 
 as the saying was, "forty thousand strong." It was 
 precisely the music of the couplet, easy and contin- 
 uous rather than intricate and intermittent, that 
 won the couplet its prestige at the start. 
 
 The relish of the Muse consists in rhyme; 
 One verse must meet another like a chime. 
 Our Saxon shortness hath peculiar grace 
 In choice of words fit for the ending place: 
 Which leave impression in the mind as well 
 As closing sounds of some delightful bell. 
 
 So wrote Sir John Beaumont early in Dryden's cen- 
 tury, in his Concerning the True Form of English 
 Poetry. Not only delightful rhymes but flawless 
 "numbers" as well became the aim of successive 
 generations of versifiers. At the close of the six- 
 teenth century in France, Malherbe, in his commen- 
 tary on Desportes, had laid down rules for a kind of 
 negative harmony, a mere smoothness, in French 
 verse. The only distinction between prose and 
 verse, said Malherbe, was to be nombre. "Num- 
 bers" became paramount both in England and in 
 France. "The music of numbers . . .," wrote Cow-
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 77 
 
 ley, "almost without anything else, makes an excel- 
 lent poet." The preface l to Joshua Poole's English 
 Parnassus (1657), an enterprising forerunner of the 
 handbooks on poetry which Bysshe, Gildon, and 
 others were to issue in the eighteenth century, 
 placed particular emphasis upon the "Symphony 
 and Cadence" of poesy; right accent, "like right 
 time in Music, produces harmony"; rhyme is the 
 "symphony and music of a verse." It became easy, 
 by Pope's time, to write in flawless cadence. Pope 
 himself, despising as he did the tuneful poetasters, 
 tuned his own instrument with great pains. "The 
 great rule of verse," he told Spence, "is to be musi- 
 cal." Within their narrow range, it must be granted, 
 the Augustan poets were able to achieve a much 
 greater variety of tone than it now is the custom to 
 recognize, and it never is necessary to remind a 
 knowing reader that the best of these poets were 
 anything but slaves to numbers. But no one will 
 deny that their range was too narrow, and that 
 their eneigies were directed too much into the 
 mechanics of their art. 
 
 Dryden, who was considered in his own day to be 
 unrivalled anywhere for diversity, and who must 
 always be prized for his really genuine melody, 
 lived also under the spell of numbers, believing in 
 them with his whole mind and communicating his 
 faith with a proselyting zeal. Such monotony and 
 such glibness as he has result from the conviction 
 which he never abandoned that a poet's best pow- 
 ers should go into the perfecting of his verse in- 
 
 1 Signed " J. D."
 
 78 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 strument. Aristotle had not denied to the music of 
 the flute and the lyre the capacity for imitating 
 life, but he had observed that the medium through 
 which musical instruments may function in their 
 imitation of life is restricted to "harmony and 
 rhythm alone." Dryden, believing always that 
 "versification and numbers are the greatest pleas- 
 ures of poetry," tended to cherish heroic verse as a 
 musical instrument, and to work for "harmony and 
 rhythm alone." He thought that "well-placing of 
 words, for the sweetness of pronunciation, was not 
 known till Mr. Waller introduced it." He never 
 doubted that English could be rendered more liquid 
 than it was, so that in time it might even com- 
 pete with Virgil's Latin and with Tasso's Italian, 
 "the softest, the sweetest, the most harmonious" 
 of all tongues, a tongue which seemed to him "to 
 have been invented for the sake of Poetry and 
 Music." His desire was always for more "even, 
 sweet, and flowing " lines. His objection to English 
 consonants and monosyllables was that they ob- 
 structed the flow of verse. His fondness for Latin- 
 istic polysyllables arose from the capacity which 
 they seemed to have for "softening our uncouth 
 numbers," for suppling the heroic line, and impart- 
 ing to it an undulating grace. Circumlocutions rec- 
 ommended themselves to him and to all Augustans 
 as much for their sound as for their ingenuity. 
 "Periphrasis," Longinus told them, "tends much to 
 sublimity. For, as in music the simple air is ren- 
 dered more pleasing by the addition of harmony, so 
 in language periphrasis often sounds in concord
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 79 
 
 with a literal expression, adding much to the beauty 
 of its tone provided always that it is not inflated 
 and harsh, but agreeably blended. Plato . . . takes 
 . . . words in their naked simplicity and handles 
 them as a musician, investing them with melody, 
 harmonizing them, as it were, by the use of periph- 
 rasis." Dryden was well aware at all times that 
 it is possible to become smooth at the expense 
 of more important qualities. "I pretend to no dic- 
 tatorship," he confessed in his dedication of the 
 jEneis, "among my fellow poets, since, if I should 
 instruct some of them to make well-running verses, 
 they want genius to give them strength as well as 
 sweetness." Dryden can rarely be said to have had 
 the appearance of weakness, either in his Virgil or 
 elsewhere. Yet it was just in his JEneis that he 
 surrendered most completely to the tyranny of 
 numbers. His boundless admiration for Virgil's 
 metrical and verbal genius led him to toy with 
 strange devices. Recognizing clearly enough that 
 Virgil's haunting melody was well beyond his reach, 
 he endeavored to compensate the readers of his 
 translation with obvious and rather sensational 
 substitutes. For the effect of fluency and for "soft- 
 ening " his numbers he depended upon polysylla- 
 bles; not finding a sufficient stock of dissyllabic ad- 
 jectives in the language, he devised some of his own, 
 as heapy, spiry, sluicy, sweepy, forky, fainty, 
 spumy, barmy, beamy, roofy, flaggy, ropy, dauby, 
 piny, moony, chinky, pory, and hugy. Not find- 
 ing, either, a sufficient stock of long Latin words 
 in English, he brought many of Virgil's abundant
 
 80 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 phrases straight over, rendering them for what 
 they appeared rather than for what they meant. 
 It is impossible to quote any one passage from the 
 jEneis which will adequately reveal the virtuoso 
 temper in which Dryden composed it. But it is no 
 exaggeration to say that it shows better than any 
 other Augustan poem the effects of musical princi- 
 ples applied mechanically to verse. 
 
 Pope, as is well known, had in mind two kinds of 
 tuneful fools when he was writing his Essay on Crit- 
 icism. 
 
 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense, 
 The sound must seem an echo to the sense. 
 
 The second line of his couplet referred to the Dick 
 Minims who insisted that "imitative harmony," 
 or "representative harmony," or "representative 
 versification," as it was variously called, was an in- 
 dispensable ingredient in poetry. Dionysius of 
 Halicarnassus was perhaps the parent of the creed. 
 Vida had echoed him in his De Arte Poetica, and the 
 dogma had settled gradually down through various 
 Italian and Spanish rhetoricians to Cowley, who in 
 a note to his Davideis declared that "the disposi- 
 tion of words and numbers should be such, as that 
 out of the order and sound of them, the things 
 themselves may be represented." The Earl of 
 Roscommon, in his Essay on Translated Verse 
 (1684), wrote: 
 
 The Delicacy of the nicest Ear 
 
 Finds nothing harsh or out of Order there.
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 81 
 
 Sublime or low, unbended or Intense, 
 The sound is still an echo to the Sense. 
 
 Pope's lines, which derived no doubt from Ros- 
 common's, gave the doctrine especial currency, and 
 to echo sense with sound became a pleasant duty of 
 versifiers. Pope himself told Spence that he "fol- 
 lowed the significance of the numbers, and the 
 adapting them to the sense, much more even than 
 Dryden." Later in the eighteenth century there 
 grew up a rather fine distinction between what Dr. 
 Johnson called the imitation of sound and the imi- 
 tation of motion in verse. Daniel Webb, in his 
 Observations on the Correspondence between Poetry 
 and Music (1769), claimed that the use of words 
 to represent sounds was an inferior artifice, not com- 
 parable to the important art of communicating emo- 
 tion through cadences. James Beattie, in his Es- 
 say on Poetry and Music as they Affect the Mind 
 (1776), followed Webb; and Dr. Johnson, in his 
 lives of Cowley and Pope, enunciated the distinc- 
 tion most forcibly of all. At its highest, imitative 
 harmony cannot be said to have attained the dig- 
 nity of an art. It was always a cheap and easy ar- 
 tifice not to be associated with that mysterious power, 
 possessed in the greatest abundance by Virgil, 
 Milton, and Wordsworth, which works its mighty 
 will among the emotions purely through combina- 
 tions of sounds. 
 
 "The chief secret," confided Dryden in the pref- 
 ace to Albion and Albanius, "is the choice of words; 
 and, by this choice, I do not here mean elegancy of 
 expression, but propriety of sound, to be varied ac-
 
 82 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 cording to the nature of the subject. Perhaps a 
 time may come when I may treat of this more largely 
 out of some observations which I have made from 
 Homer and Virgil, who, amongst all the poets, 
 only understood the art of numbers." Dryden 
 never treated of the matter on the scale he prom- 
 ised here, nor had he done so is it likely that his 
 treatise would have been profound. He was not 
 only intrigued, he was baffled by the solemn har- 
 monies of Virgil, whose verse, he observed in the 
 preface to Syha, "is everywhere sounding the 
 very thing in your ears, whose sense it bears." His 
 own Firgil is nothing more or less than an exten- 
 sive p roving-ground for imitative harmony. It is a 
 huge temple of sound, not beautiful on the whole, 
 but sturdy and imposing. Dryden attempts in it 
 to represent both noises and movements, if Dr. 
 Johnson's distinction may be employed once more. 
 The first he accomplished without any subtlety at 
 all. He is particularly fond of storms that churn the 
 seas and shake the shores. Our ears grow accus- 
 tomed to windy caverns echoing thunder. Time 
 and time again 
 
 The impetuous ocean roars, 
 And rocks rebellow from the sounding shores. 
 
 There are no gradations of violence in Dryden's 
 weather, and there is rarely any more than an ob- 
 vious and general fitness in Dryden's language. He 
 is much more cunning when he is representing move- 
 ments of animals or persons. The fifth book of his 
 JEneis is particularly noteworthy in this connec-
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 83 
 
 tion. The serpent which issues from Anchises' 
 tomb while ^Eneas is praying before it moves with 
 a writhing splendor: 
 
 Scarce had he finished, when with speckled pride 
 A serpent from the tomb began to glide; 
 His hugy bulk on seven high volumes rolled; 
 Blue was his breadth of back, but streaked with 
 
 scaly gold; 
 
 Thus riding on his curls, he seemed to pass 
 A rolling fire along, and singe the grass. 
 More various colours through his body run 
 Than Iris when her bow imbibes the sun. 
 Betwixt the rising altars, and around, 
 The sacred monster shot along the ground; 
 With harmless play amidst the bowls he passed, 
 And with his lolling tongue essayed the taste. 
 Thus fed with holy food, the wondrous guest 
 Within the hollow tomb retired to rest. 
 
 The funeral games are presented in plunging, 
 roughly felicitous cadences. The boxers Dares and 
 Entellus seem to strike real blows and fall their ac- 
 tual heavy lengths in Dryden's verse; and the 
 young horsemen perform their evolutions without 
 a metrical flaw: 
 
 The second signal sounds, the troop divides 
 In three distinguished parts, with three distin- 
 guished guides. 
 
 Again they close, and once again disjoin; 
 In troop to troop opposed, and line to line. 
 They meet; they wheel; they throw their darts afar 
 With harmless rage, and well-dissembled war: 
 Then in a round the mingled bodies run; 
 Flying they follow, and pursuing shun;
 
 84 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Broken, they break; and, rallying, they renew 
 
 In other forms the military shew. 
 
 At last, in order, undiscerned they join 
 
 And march together in a friendly line. 
 
 And, as the Cretan labyrinth of old, 
 
 With wandering ways and many a winding fold, 
 
 Involved the weary feet, without redress, 
 
 In a round error, which denied recess; 
 
 So fought the Trojan boys in warlike play, 
 
 Turned and returned, and still a different way. 
 
 Dryden's Pirgil served Pope and many other suc- 
 cessors as a sample-book wherein both representa- 
 tive cadences and representative words could be 
 found. Pope's famous lines on Camilla in the Essay 
 on Criticism come from Dryden's portrait of Camilla 
 at the end of the seventh JEneid more directly 
 than from Virgil himself. Dryden's virago 
 
 Outstripped the winds in speed upon the plain, 
 Flew o'er the fields, nor hurt the bearded grain; 
 She swept the seas, and as she skimmed along, 
 Her flying feet unbathed on billows hung. 
 
 Pope's Homer owes much to the Virgil in this as 
 well as in other departments. Gray's Progress oj 
 Poesy borrows Dryden's most sounding diction, as 
 in the lines 
 
 Now rolling down the steep amain, 
 
 Headlong, impetuous, see it pour; 
 
 The rocks and nodding groves rebellow to the roar. 
 
 From Cowley to Dick Minim Dryden was the 
 great example of the imitative versifier, as he was 
 also the great example of most of what the Augus-
 
 FALSE LIGHTS 85 
 
 tans believed to comprise a poet. It seems never to 
 have been suspected that Dry den was speaking 
 with his most communicative cadences in the sat- 
 ires and the epistles. But nothing is more natural 
 than that his best music should be heard in the 
 poems which he most meant. It was when he was 
 most oblivious of the problem of adapting sound to 
 sense, when he was fullest of the scorn or the admi- 
 ration which he knew better than any other poet to 
 express, that he fell into his properest rhythms. 
 These two utterly contemptuous lines from Absalom 
 and Achitophel, 
 
 A numerous host of dreaming saints succeed, 
 Of the true old enthusiastic breed, 
 
 are perfectly tuned; the vowels and the consonants, 
 whether or not they were thoughtfully chosen, are 
 steeped in disdain. This gracious triplet from the 
 poem To the Memory of Mr. Oldham, 
 
 Thy generous fruits, though gathered ere their prime, 
 
 Still shewed a quickness; and maturing time 
 
 But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme, 
 
 is otherwise attuned, but its attunement too is per- 
 fect. The acceleration in the second line speaks 
 eagerness to praise whatever can be praised; the 
 long, ripe cadence of the close breathes consola- 
 tion. Such passages are worth, as poetry, a thou- 
 sand Camillas and all the rocks that ever were 
 heard rebellowing to the roar. It is in them that the 
 true fire of Dryden's genius will be found to burn.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 
 
 The only qualities which Wordsworth could find 
 in Dryden deserving to be called poetical were "a 
 certain ardour and impetuosity of mind" and "an 
 excellent ear." Whether or not Wordsworth stopped 
 short of justice in his enumeration, he hit upon two 
 virtues which are cardinal in Dryden, and confined 
 himself with proper prudence to what in Dryden is 
 more important than any other thing, his manner. 
 His manner, embracing both an enthusiastic ap- 
 proach to any work and a technical dexterity in the 
 performance of it, was constant. The channels 
 through which his enthusiasm drove him were not 
 always fitted for his passage, as we have been see- 
 ing; nor was his ease of motion always an advan- 
 tage, inasmuch as his metrical felicity served at 
 times only to accentuate his original error in choice 
 of province. But when his material was congenial, 
 and when he himself was thoroughly at home in his 
 style, he was unexceptionable. 
 
 Dryden was most at home when he was making 
 statements. His poetry was the poetry of declara- 
 tion. At his best he wrote without figures, with- 
 out transforming passion. When Shakespeare's 
 imagination was kindled his page thronged with 
 images. When Donne was most genuinely pos-
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 87 
 
 sessed by his theme he departed in a passionate 
 search for conceits. When Dryden jjecame firedjie 
 only wrote more plainly. The metal of his genius 
 was silver, and the longer it was heated the more 
 silver it grew. Nausicaa fell in love with Odysseus 
 because the goddess Athene had shed a strange 
 grace about his head and shoulders and made him 
 seem more presentable than he was. No one can be 
 impressed by Dryden who sees him in disguise. One 
 must see him as he is: a poet of opinion, a poet of 
 company, a poet of civilization. It is not to be in- 
 ferred that he was without passion; no man ever had 
 more. But his was not the passion that behaves 
 like ecstasy; he never got outside himself. His pas- 
 sion was the passion of assurance. His great love 
 was the love of speaking fully and with finality; his 
 favorite subjects being personages and books. 
 
 Personages he treated from a variety of motives, 
 but always with honest delight. He celebrated pub- 
 lic heroes real or supposed, sketched the characters 
 of men in high places and in low, addressed elabo- 
 rate compliments to benefactors or friends, de- 
 scribed minds and actions both in fact and in fable 
 with an endless relish. Books he treated from a 
 single motive, admiration for them and their mak- 
 ers. Dryden was above all things a literary man. 
 His mind could best be energized by contact with 
 other minds; he himself could become preoccupied 
 most easily with other poets. He sat down with 
 indubitable pleasure to write his addresses to How- 
 ard, to Roscommon, to Lee, to Motteux, his la- 
 ments for Oldham and Anne Killigrew, his pro-
 
 88 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 logues and epilogues on Shakespeare, Jonson, and 
 the present state of poetry. He was partial to lit- 
 erary history and literary parallels as subjects for 
 poems, and no one in English has done better crit- 
 icism in meter. In verse as in prose he earned Dr. 
 Johnson's judgment that "the criticism of Dry- 
 den is the criticism of a poet." Personalities, ac- 
 tions, ideas, and art were Dryden's best material. 
 But let it be said again, the story of Dryden's 
 conquest of English poetry for the most part is the 
 story not of his material but of his manner. It is the 
 story of a poet who inherited a medium, perfected 
 it by long manipulation, stamped it with his genius, 
 and handed it on. That medium was heroic couplet 
 verse. The utility of the heroic couplet had been 
 established for all time in England by Chaucer. 
 Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare had made 
 various uses of it at the end of the sixteenth century, 
 as had also the group of satirists which included 
 Hall, Lodge, Marston, and Donne. It had grown 
 more and more in favor during the early years of 
 Dryden's century and had begun to adapt itself 
 to the type of mind which Dryden represents long 
 before he became of age poetically. This adaptation 
 
 /involved a number of characteristics, of which the 
 end-stop, the best known, was only one; the others 
 were a conformation of the sentence-structure to 
 the metrical pattern, a tendency towards poly- 
 syllables within the line, a tendency towards em- 
 phatic words at the ends of lines, and a frequent 
 use of balance with pronounced caesura. The end- 
 stop, and the modification of sentence-structure to
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 89 
 
 suit the length of measure, made for pointedness if 
 not for brevity, and provided in the couplet a ratio- 
 cinative unit which served admirably as the basis 
 for declarative or argumentative poems. The polysyl- 
 lables made for speed and flexibility, and encouraged 
 a Latinized, abstract vocabulary. The insistence 
 upon important words for the closing of lines meant 
 that the sense was not likely to trail off or be left 
 hanging; and the use of balance promoted that air 
 of spruce finality with which every reader of Augustan 
 verse has long been familiar. 
 
 Just when and in whom the couplet first reached 
 a stage something like this is a matter that has not 
 been settled. In France a similar development can 
 be traced back pretty clearly to Malherbe, whose 
 formula for perfect rhetorical poetry called, among 
 other things, for a caesura which should cut every 
 verse into two equal parts. "As for the pauses," 
 said Dryden in the dedication of the jEneis, "Mal- 
 herbe first brought them into French within this 
 last century; and we see how they adorn their Al- 
 exandrines." No formula like Malherbe's was con- 
 trived in England, but the first half of the seven- 
 teenth century there saw couplet verse invaded and 
 conquered by the principles just specified. Credit 
 for the innovation has been given to a number of 
 different poets, none of whom can be said to de- 
 serve it wholly. Edward Fairfax, the translator of 
 Tasso's Godfrey of Bulloigne (1600), is the earliest 
 whom Dryden himself named among the reformers 
 of English versification; in the preface to the Fables 
 Waller is declared the "poetical son" of Fairfax.
 
 90 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 The stanzas of the Tasso end in couplets which of- 
 ten have the accent of the Augustans, but which 
 more often have it not, tending less towards a mo- 
 notony of balance than towards a monotony of se- 
 ries or "triplets" of adjectives and nouns. Michael 
 Drayton at various times during his long career 
 wrote couplets which come very near to having Dry- 
 den's ring; his England's Heroical Epistles (1597) 
 afford the best examples. Drayton was a good 
 Elizabethan, which suggests that there were many 
 Elizabethans who could write Augustan couplets. 
 Spenser did so in his Mother Rubber d^s Tale; the 
 closing couplets of Shakespeare's sonnets are cu- 
 riously like Dryden and Pope, as here: 
 
 For we, which now behold these present days, 
 Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise. 
 
 The Elizabethan satirists, particularly Joseph Hall, 
 whose Firgidemiarum appeared in 1597-8, spoke 
 occasionally in clear tones, though in general their 
 expression was uneven, and such felicity as they 
 permitted themselves to achieve was not conta- 
 gious. Ben Jonson's influence on seventeenth cen- 
 tury poetry was immense, and he was in large part 
 responsible for the new form of heroic verse; but 
 his chief influence was rather upon diction than upon 
 meter. Sir John Beaumont, who died in 1627, 
 wrote his Bosworth Field and other poems in coup- 
 lets which not only for their own time but for any 
 time are models of sweetness and clarity. The 
 Metamorphoses of George Sandys (1621-6) was for a 
 hundred years after its publication a landmark to
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 91 
 
 all who would trace poetical genealogies. Dryden 
 called Sandys "the best versifier of the former age" 
 in the preface to the Fables, and Pope paired him 
 with Dryden's Fairfax as a "model to Waller" in 
 versification. The couplets of his Ovid were what 
 Drayton called them, "smooth-sliding," but they 
 were neither as uniform nor as brisk as the new 
 poetry was to require. Milton wrote four of his 
 Cambridge poems in couplets which are not sig- 
 nificant here. The speech of the Genius in Arcades 
 begins like one of Dryden's prologues: 
 
 Stay, gentle swains, for though in this disguise, 
 I see bright honour sparkle through your eyes; 
 
 but it does not continue in that vein. 
 
 It was Waller who the Augustans themselves, 
 from Dryden on, declared had been the parent of 
 their line. Francis Atterbury, in his preface to the 
 1690 edition of Waller's poems, gave a detailed 
 
 account of what he believed Waller's innovations ^ 
 
 to have been. "Before his time," said Atterbury, 
 "men rhymed indeed, and that was all; as for the 
 harmony of measure, and that dance of words which \ 
 good ears are so much pleased with, they knew noth- \ 
 ing of it. Their poetry then was made up almost en- \ 
 tirely of monosyllables; which, when they come to- j 
 gether in any cluster, are certainly the most harsh, 
 untuneable things in the world. . . . Besides, their 
 verses ran all into one another, and hung together, 
 throughout a whole copy, like the hooked atoms 
 that compose a body in Descartes. There was no 
 distinction of parts, no regular stops, nothing for the
 
 92 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 ear to rest upon. . . . Mr. Waller removed all these 
 faults, brought in more polysyllables, and smoother 
 measures, bound up his thoughts better, and in a 
 cadence more agreeable to the nature of the verse 
 he wrote in-; so that wherever the natural stops of 
 that were, he contrived the little breakings of his 
 sense so as to fall in with them; and, for that reason, 
 since the stress of our verse lies commonly upon the 
 last syllable, you will hardly ever find him using 
 a word of no force there." Atterbury was very 
 greatly exaggerating the chaotic state of English verse 
 before Waller, and he attributed innovations to 
 Waller that really should be credited to Marlowe, 
 Sandys, and others; yet he analyzed with particular 
 delicacy the salient points in which Dryden's ver- 
 sification differs, for instance, from Donne's. 
 
 Cowley's Davideis was composed in heroic coup- 
 lets which could teach Dryden nothing after Waller 
 and Denham. Cowley handled this measure less 
 felicitously than he handled any other; the Davideis 
 does not chime. Cleveland's political poems, which 
 Dryden must have read before the Restoration, 
 were not smooth or sweet, but they had another 
 quality which was important for Dryden, the qual- 
 ity of momentous directness. Such pauseless lines 
 as these, 
 
 Encountering with a brother of the cloth, 
 Who used to string their teeth upon their belt, 
 Religion for their seamstress or their cook, 
 
 gave Dryden his metrical cue on more than one oc- 
 casion.
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 93 
 
 Dryden wrote altogether, over a period of exactly 
 fifty years, some thirty thousand heroic couplets. 
 The stream of English verse, flowing through him 
 thus for half a century, both sustained him and 
 was sustained by him. His achievement was to 
 make of it a strong yet light vehicle for miscellaneous 
 loads, a medium for the poetry of statement. He 
 learned to say anything in it that he liked, high or 
 low, narrow or broad. Earlier in the century John 
 Selden had written in his Table Talk: "Tis ridicu- 
 lous to speak, or write, or preach in verse. As 'tis 
 good to learn to dance, a man may learn to leg, 
 learn to go handsomely; but 'tis ridiculous for him 
 to dance when he should go." Dryden showed how 
 one might speak, and write, and preach, and how 
 one might "go" in verse. Verse became for him a 
 natural form of utterance. "Thoughts, such as 
 they are, come crowding in so fast upon me," he 
 wrote in the preface to the Fables, "that my only 
 difficulty is to choose or to reject, to run them into 
 verse, 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." 
 
 Dryden's style was a constant delight to his con- 
 temporaries because it was unfailingly fresh; new 
 poems by Mr. Dryden meant in all likelihood new 
 cadences, new airs. He was perpetually fresh be- 
 cause he perpetually studied his versification. He 
 perhaps was not a laborious student of metrics; the 
 Prosodia for which he said in the dedication of the 
 JEneis that he had long ago collected the materials, 
 but which he never published, might have been any-
 
 94 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 thing other than exhaustive. Yet there can be no 
 question that he experimented freely and was al- 
 ways sensitive to novel demands that novel sub- 
 jects might make upon his medium. He generally 
 knew beforehand what effects he should gain; and 
 he had a happy faculty for hitting at once upon 
 rhythms which would secure those effects. His was 
 not, like Doeg's, "a blundering kind of melody." 
 "There is nobody but knows," declared John Old- 
 mixon in 1728, "that it was impossible for Dryden 
 to make an ill verse, or to want an apt and musical 
 word, if he took the least care about it." He was 
 always conscious that rhyme was a handicap, but 
 he accepted it without any prolonged protest; and 
 within the bounds imposed by it he obtained a sur- 
 prising diversity of accent. He defended rhyming 
 plays against Sir Robert Howard in the dedication 
 of the Rival Ladies, in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 
 and in the Defence of the Essay, taking occasion by 
 the way to declare against the inversions and the 
 strained diction into which the exigencies of rhyme 
 tend to force even good poets. But in the prologue 
 to Aureng-Zebe he repudiated his "long-loved Mis- 
 tress"; in both the epistle to Roscommon and the 
 epistle to Sir Godfrey Kneller he damned her as a 
 barbaric fraud foisted upon Europe by the Goths 
 and Vandals; and in the dedication of the JEneis he 
 admitted that "Rhyme is certainly a constraint even 
 to the best poets." 
 
 Dryden did not always make his principles of 
 versification clear, nor did he ever follow any of 
 them scrupulously. A good case is that of the mon-
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 95 
 
 osyllables. The Elizabethans had not been moved 
 to inveigh against monosyllables. "The more . . . 
 that you use," said Gascoigne, "the truer English- 
 man you shall seem." But the new versifiers found 
 them clogging, and spoke against them with great fre- 
 quency. Dryden was especially resentful of "our 
 old Teuton monosyllables." Yet he employed the 
 "low words," as Pope called them, time and again 
 with excellent effect. He began his JEneis with ten 
 of them: 
 
 Arms and the man I sing, who, forced by fate; 
 
 and some of his most telling passages have twenty 
 in succession. He told the young poet Walsh that 
 he was often guilty of them "through haste." It 
 should be understood that his quarrel was only with 
 monosyllablic lines that are heavy with consonants, 
 like this from Creech's Lucretius: 
 
 Thee, who hast light from midst thick darkness 
 brought, 
 
 or this from Ben Jonson's poem to Camden, 
 
 Men scarce can make that doubt, but thou canst 
 teach. 
 
 He gladly allowed such open, liquid lines as this 
 from the same poem of Jonson's : 
 
 All that I am in arts, all that I know. 
 
 Of course, both easy polysyllabic and difficult mono- 
 syllabic lines can be effective in ways of their own; 
 no more compendious example of which could be 
 cited than these two from Hamlet's last speech,
 
 96 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Absent thee from felicity awhile, 
 
 And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, 
 
 where both serve by means exactly opposite to ex- 
 press the pain of dying. Dryden was probably not 
 always aware of the extent to which he relied upon 
 mechanical devices. Alliteration seems to have 
 been instinctive with him, as indeed it is with most 
 rapid and powerful English writers. It played an 
 integral part in his versification, assisting both sense 
 and sound. Scarcely ten consecutive lines can be 
 found in him wherein alliteration is not conspicuous. 
 It serves a variety of purposes. In satire it is either 
 corrosive in its contemptuousness : 
 
 In friendship false, implacable in hate, 
 Resolved to ruin or to rule the state; 
 
 or simply derisive and pelting: 
 
 And pricks up his predestinating ears, 
 And popularly prosecutes the plot. 
 
 In ratiocination it quietly weaves phrases into a 
 firm texture of thought: 
 
 This general worship is to praise and pray, 
 One part to borrow blessings, one to pay; 
 And when /rail nature slides into of/ense, 
 The sacrifice for crimes is penitence. 
 Yet, since the effects of providence, we/ind, 
 Are variously dispensed to humankind; 
 That ice triumphs, and wrtue suffers here, 
 (A brand that sovereign justice cannot &ear;) 
 Our reason prompts us to a future state, 
 The last appeal from fortune and from fate.
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 97 
 
 In narrative it lends luxuriance and momentum 
 where it does not lend speed: 
 
 Down fell the beauteous youth; the gaping wound 
 Gushed out a crimson stream, and stained the ground. 
 His nodding neck reclines on his white breast, 
 Like a /air /lower, in/urrowed/ields oppressed 
 By the keen share; or poppy on the plain, 
 Whose heavy head is overcharged with rain. 
 Disdain, despair, and deadly vengeance powed, 
 Drove Nisus headlong on the Aostile crowd. 
 
 Dryden's gift for adapting his rhythmical em- 
 phasis to his meaning amounted to genius. Allit- 
 eration, effective rhyme, antithesis, and the use of 
 polysyllables were only auxiliaries to that. It was 
 that which gave him rapidity without the appear- 
 ance of haste and flexibility without the loss of 
 strength. Bound by the laws of a syllabic system of 
 versification and condemned to a narrow metrical 
 range, he succeeded in manipulating his measures 
 so that he could speak directly and easily yet with 
 dignity. He was more than a believer in mere va- 
 riety of accent, though he stressed that too as early 
 as the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, where Neander ob- 
 served, "Nothing that does Perpetuo tenor e fluere, 
 run in the same channel, can please always. 'Tis 
 like the murmuring of a stream, which not varying 
 in the fall, causes at first attention, at last drowsi- 
 ness. Variety of cadences is the best rule." Dry- 
 den was a believer in significant variety of accent. 
 Pope, in a letter to his friend Henry Cromwell, 
 recognized three places within the heroic line where
 
 98 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 pauses might come: after the fourth, after the fifth, 
 and after the sixth syllables. Dryden knew no lim- 
 its of the kind. The freedom of blank verse seems to 
 have been in his thoughts. His pauses come any- 
 where; and often they do not come at all, as in these 
 lines : 
 
 Drawn to the dregs of a democracy, 
 Of the true old enthusiastic breed, 
 To the next headlong steep of anarchy, 
 But baffled by an arbitrary crowd. 
 
 He kept himself free to distribute his emphasis 
 where the sense demanded it. The result was what 
 might be called a speaking voice in poetry. Some 
 one seems actually to be reciting Absalom and Achi- 
 tophel: 
 
 Others thought kings an useless heavy load, 
 Who cost too much, and did too little good; 
 They were for laying honest David by, 
 On principles of pure good husbandry. 
 
 And the voice of a physical Prologue is plainly 
 heard here: 
 
 Lord, how reformed and quiet are we grown, 
 Since all our braves and all our wits are gone! . . . 
 France, and the fleet, have swept the town so clear 
 That we can act in peace, and you can hear. . . . 
 'Twas a sad sight, before they marched from home, 
 To see our warriors in red waistcoats come, 
 With hair tucked up, into our tiring-room. 
 But 'twas more sad to hear their last adieu:
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 99 
 
 The women sobbed, and swore they would be true; 
 And so they were, as long as e'er they could, 
 But powerful guinea cannot be withstood, 
 And they were made of playhouse flesh and blood. 
 
 Everywhere Dryden's personal presence can be 
 felt. Pope lurks behind his poetry; Dryden stands 
 well forward, flush with his page and speaking with 
 an honest voice if not an honest heart. 
 
 The most speaking lines in the last passage quoted 
 are the two which close their respective triplets. 
 Dryden's triplets and Alexandrines have been 
 sources of worry to critics and sources of satisfac- 
 tion to enemies. Inheriting the triplet from Chap- 
 man and Waller, the Alexandrine from Spenser 
 and Hall, and the two in combination from Cowley, 
 he took these devices to himself and made them 
 into important metrical instruments. He did not 
 always succeed in working them into his medium, in 
 rendering them organic within his verse structure; 
 often they were excrescences. The Earl of Roches- 
 ter was thinking of this when he spoke of Dryden's 
 "loose slattern muse," and Tom Brown, that ex- 
 cellent fooler, made fine fun of the laureate's long 
 lines. Swift was angered at the currency which 
 Dryden had given to triplets and Alexandrines, and 
 Dr. Johnson condemned such of them as were not 
 justified by the general tenor of the passages in 
 which they occurred. Macaulay disposed of them 
 as "sluttish." Dryden put them to various uses. 
 Sometimes his Alexandrines and fourteeners served 
 little or no purpose, being most likely unconscious 
 echoes of the French heroic line. At other times
 
 ioo THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 they contributed a sweep of burlesque grandeur, as in 
 the epistle to John Driden of Chesterton: 
 
 But Maurus sweeps whole parishes, and peoples 
 every grave. 
 
 Elsewhere, and particularly in the translations, 
 they were calculated to yield an effect of splendor. 
 Dryden counted on them, when he was putting 
 Lucretius into English, to represent what he called 
 "the perpetual torrent of his verse." A passage in 
 the dedication of the JEneis described how they 
 were used in that work: "Spenser has . . . given me 
 the boldness to make use sometimes of his Alexan- 
 drine line. . . . It adds a certain majesty to the verse, 
 when it is used with judgment, and stops the sense 
 from overflowing into another line. ... I take an- 
 other license in my verses: for I frequently make use 
 of triplet rhymes, and for the same reason, because 
 they bound the sense. And therefore I generally 
 join the two licenses together, and make the last 
 verse of the triplet a Pindaric; for, besides the maj- 
 esty which it gives, it confines the sense within the 
 barriers of three lines, which would languish if it 
 were lengthened into four. Spenser is my example 
 for both these privileges of English verses; and 
 Chapman has followed him in his translation of 
 Homer. Mr. Cowley has given into them after both; 
 and all succeeding writers after him. I regard them 
 now as the Magna Charta of heroic poetry, and am 
 too much an Englishman to lose what my ancestors 
 have gained for me. Let the French and Italians 
 value themselves on their regularity; strength and
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 101 
 
 elevation are our standard." They were not al- 
 ways used with judgment in the Virgil, their fre- 
 quency being a root of weakness rather than of 
 strength. At certain junctures, in the Pirgil and 
 elsewhere, they discharged Dryden's accumulated 
 poetic energy in passages that partook of the nature 
 of the ode. 1 In the present connection there remains 
 to be pointed out a function of theirs which is differ- 
 ent from the rest and which has not been empha- 
 sized before. It is a function that may have been 
 discerned in the prologue from which the last quo- 
 tation was made; it operates everywhere in the oc- 
 casional poems; it consists in the supplying of a 
 colloquial, first-hand note. The third line of a trip- 
 let in Dryden frequently represents a lowering of 
 the voice to the level of parenthesis or innuendo, as 
 in the Epilogue Spoken at the Opening of the New 
 House, March 26, 1674: 
 
 A country lip may have the velvet touch; 
 Tho' she's no lady, you may think her such; 
 A strong imagination may do much; 
 
 or in the prologue to Troilus and Cressida: 
 
 And that insipid stuff which here you hate, 
 Might somewhere else be called a grave debate; 
 Dulness is decent in the Church and State; 
 
 or in the prologue to Love Triumphant: 
 
 The fable has a moral, too, if sought; 
 But let that go; for, upon second thought, 
 He fears but few come hither to be taught. 
 
 1 See Chapter VI.
 
 102 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Triplets closing with Alexandrines frequently suc- 
 ceed in imparting a compendiousness to compli- 
 ment, as in the epistle to Congreve: 
 
 Firm Doric pillars found your solid base; 
 The fair Corinthian crowns the higher space; 
 Thus all below is strength, and all above is grace. 
 
 In him all beauties of this age we see, 
 
 Etherege his courtship, Southerne's purity, 
 
 The satire, wit, and strength of Manly Wycherley. 
 
 This is your portion; this your native store; 
 Heaven, that but once was prodigal before, 
 To Shakespeare gave as much; she could not give him 
 more. 
 
 Lines like these represent Dryden's metrical license 
 at its safest and best; he could not always be trusted 
 to employ it sanely when describing storms of Na- 
 ture or of passion in Virgil and Lucretius; when he 
 used it to stamp a statement of his own, as here, he 
 was well within his province and could not go wrong. 
 A trip let-and-f our teener which appears in the 
 Cymon and Iphigenia leads the way to another met- 
 rical device of which Dryden pretended to be fond. 
 The triplet runs: 
 
 The fanning wind upon her bosom blows, 
 To meet the fanning wind the bosom rose; 
 The fanning wind and purling streams continue her 
 repose. 
 
 This is one of those "turns" which Dryden in the 
 Discourse Concerning Satire said that he had been
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 103 
 
 led by Sir George Mackenzie twenty years before to 
 study in Waller, Denham, Spenser, Tasso, Virgil, 
 and Ovid. A "turn" involved the musical repeti- 
 tion of a phrase with variations of meaning. Dry- 
 den had a good deal to say about "turns" from time 
 to time, but in general he thought them below his 
 dignity, and worthy of no greater geniuses than 
 those of Ovid and the French, or of such minor 
 versifiers of the day as pleased themselves with trans- 
 lating Virgil's fourth Georgic and wringing all the 
 possible echoes out of the name Eurydice. The 
 sleeping Iphigenia occurred to him as a pretty 
 enough subject upon which to try one of the met- 
 rical toys. He tried few others, though in general 
 he was perhaps too fond of playing with words for 
 their own sake, so that he exposed himself to the 
 censure of Luke Milbourne, to name an enemy, and 
 John Oldmixon, to name an admirer, for "turning 
 the Epick style into Elegiack." Virgil's turn in the 
 seventh Eclogue, 
 
 Fraxinus in silvis pulcherrima, pinus in hortis, 
 Populus in fluviis, abies in montibus altis; 
 Saepius at si me, Lycida formose, revisas, 
 Fraxinus in silvis cedat tibi, pinus in hortis, 
 
 he rendered thus: 
 
 The towering ash is fairest in the woods; 
 In gardens pines, and poplars by the floods; 
 But, if my Lycidas will ease my pains, 
 And after visit our forsaken plains, 
 To him the towering ash shall yield in woods, 
 In gardens pines, and poplars by the floods.
 
 104 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 "He was an improving writer to the last," said 
 Congreve. What Dryden improved in most stead- 
 ily was the texture of his verse. The difference in 
 respect of texture between the poem on the death 
 of Hastings and The Hind and the Panther, to go no 
 further, is enormous; that the author of one should 
 have grown out of the author of the other seems 
 now a kind of miracle. The transformation, which 
 was gradual, involved the discovery and the ex- 
 ploitation of a fundamental rhythm, and it pro- 
 gressed with the adaptation of that rhythm, through 
 modification or enrichment, to widely varying 
 themes. Dryden's metrical evolution began with 
 his earliest verses and proceeded through the plays, 
 through the poems on public affairs, and through the 
 translations. 
 
 He scored no decisive technical triumph before 
 the period of the heroic plays. The early poems, 
 distinguished as they are in spots, and approaching 
 Dryden's best manner as they do at times, cannot 
 be supposed to have encouraged the poet to believe 
 that he had caught his stride. The first one, the 
 elegy on Hastings (1649), was done, it must be re- 
 membered, before he was eighteen. Metrically it 
 was chaos. Gray remarked to Mason that it seemed 
 the work of a man who had no ear and might never 
 have any. Gray probably had in mind such lines as 
 those addressed to Hastings' "virgin-widow": 
 
 Transcribe the original in new copies; give 
 Hastings o' th' better part; so shall he live 
 In's nobler half; and the great grandsire be 
 Of an heroic divine progeny.
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 105 
 
 There is nothing of the future Dryden there. But 
 in the outburst against old age that precedes there is 
 a Juvenalian enthusiasm which warms the verse to a 
 species of transparency; and certain other lines have 
 a readiness and a bound: 
 
 But hasty winter, with one blast, hath brought 
 The hopes of autumn, summer, spring, to naught. 
 Thus fades the oak i' th* sprig, i' th' blade the corn; 
 Thus without young, this Phoenix dies, new-born. 
 
 The Heroic Stanzas appeared ten years later, after 
 what must have been a period of frequent experi- 
 ments in more than one kind of meter. The poems 
 to John Hoddesdon (1650) and to Honor Dryden 
 (1655) had not told of any advance. But in this 
 poem, as in the Annus Mirabilis eight years later 
 still, Dryden wielded with positive assurance a 
 mighty line which was very much his own. Spen- 
 ser in Colin Clout, Sir John Davies, Donne, and Ben 
 Jonson had written heroic stanzas before Davenant; 
 and Davenant, wishing to adapt his utterance "to a 
 plain and stately composing of music," had inter- 
 woven his long-falling, leaden-stepping lines to 
 form what Dryden and Soame called "the stiff 
 formal style of Gondibert" But no elegaic quat- 
 rains before 1659 had contained verses more eman- 
 cipated or more confident than these on Cromwell: 
 
 His grandeur he derived from Heaven alone; 
 
 For he was great ere fortune made him so: 
 And wars, like mists that rise against the sun, 
 
 Made him but greater seem, not greater grow.
 
 io6 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 By his command we boldly crossed the line, 
 And bravely fought where southern stars arise; 
 
 We traced the far-fetched gold into the mine, 
 
 And that which bribed our fathers made our prize. 
 
 His ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest; 
 
 His name a great example stands to show, 
 How strangely high endeavors may be blessed, 
 
 Where piety and valour jointly go. 
 
 Each quatrain developed a proposition of its own, 
 and generally, as in the first two which have been 
 quoted, a distinction was stated. It is interesting to 
 see Dryden's earliest fluency coming to him in the 
 exercise of ratiocination. The heroic stanza with 
 its leisurely authority continued to fascinate him 
 even when he resorted to other forms. His next 
 poem, Astraa Redux (1660), started off with twenty- 
 eight lines sharply divided into groups of four and 
 developing seven distinct propositions. The brief 
 series of complimentary poems which began with 
 the Astraa were quickened and sweetened by the 
 influence of Waller, although Dryden in them did 
 not attain to his eventual flow. The heroic stanza 
 motif was quickly silenced, but no other motif was as 
 yet distinguishable. The close of the Astraa had 
 what must have seemed a new sort of drive; and 
 passages like the following from the poem To His 
 Sacred Majesty, a Panegyric on His Coronation 
 (1661), must have struck the ears even of Waller's 
 readers as novel because of their swift, smooth rap- 
 ture:
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 107 
 
 The grateful choir their harmony employ, 
 Not to make greater, but more solemn joy; 
 Wrapped soft and warm your name is sent on high, 
 As flames do on the wings of incense fly; 
 Music herself is lost, in vain she brings 
 Her choicest notes to praise the best of kings; 
 Her melting strains in you a tomb have found, 
 And lie like bees in their own sweetness drowned. 
 He that brought peace, and discord could atone, 
 His name is music of itself alone. 
 
 In the poem To My Lord Chancellor (1662) there 
 were lines somewhat similar on the subject of 
 Charles I, "our setting sun." Dryden in them is 
 seen to be at least partially a master of his medium; 
 his voice is becoming a more important instrument 
 than his pen. The poem To The Lady Castlemaine, 
 Upon Her Incour 'aging His First Play (c. 1663) both 
 began and ended with skilfully modulated tones 
 and happily emphatic stresses; the Verses to Her 
 Highness the Duchess (1665), prefixed to the first 
 edition of Annus Mirabilis, rode pleasantly on the 
 wings of Waller: 
 
 While, from afar, we heard the cannon play, 
 Like distant thunder on a shiny day. 
 
 Certain of the stanzas in Annus Mirabilis, as has 
 been said, struggled not unsuccessfully to surmount 
 the rubbish that lay about them: 
 
 The moon shone clear on the becalmed flood, 
 
 Where, while her beams like glittering silver play, 
 
 Upon the deck our careful General stood, 
 And deeply mused on the succeeding day.
 
 io8 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 That happy sun, said he, will rise again, 
 Who twice victorious did our navy see; 
 
 And I alone must view him rise in vain, 
 Without one ray of all his star for me. 
 
 Yet like an English general will I die, 
 
 And all the ocean make my spacious grave; 
 
 Women and cowards on the land may die, 
 The sea's a tomb that's proper for the brave. 
 
 Restless he passed the remnants of the night. 
 Till the fresh air proclaimed the morning nigh; 
 
 And burning ships, the martyrs of the fight, 
 With paler fires beheld the eastern sky. 
 
 "The composition and fate of eight-and-twenty 
 dramas include too much of a poetical life to be 
 omitted," remarked Dr. Johnson. The dramas 
 which Dryden wrote in verse were of the first im- 
 portance in his metrical development; for it was in 
 them that he became fully aware of the energy 
 which is latent in the heroic couplet, and it was in 
 them that he cut the rhythmical pattern which was 
 to serve him during the remainder of his career. 
 He recognized that a writer of verse plays had first 
 of all to write swiftly; for "all that is said is sup- 
 posed to be the effect of sudden thought; which . . . 
 admits . . . not anything that shows remoteness of 
 thought, or labor in the writer." He learned to ad- 
 just his load while the load was light. Some of his 
 plays were largely dependent for their success upon 
 the quality of their meter, or perhaps the quantity. 
 Writing them with a flesh-and-blood audience, an 
 actually hearing audience in mind, he could not be
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 109 
 
 inattentive to the claims of the ear. His dramatic 
 triumph, such as it was, was a triumph chiefly of 
 the ear. He won his way to fame through sheer 
 metrical genius, this metrical genius first manifest- 
 ing itself in the heroic plays. 
 
 You in the people's ears began to chime, 
 
 And please the Town with your successful Rime, 
 
 grudgingly admitted Shadwell in the Medal of 
 John Bayes. The heroic plays, generally speaking, 
 were of manifold origin; they derived from English 
 tragicomedy, from French romance, and from 
 French tragedy. Their verse too derived from 
 more than a single source, perhaps; but Corneille 
 stands forth as a great progenitor of English heroic 
 versifiers for the stage. Dryden adduced "the 
 example of Corneille and some French poets" when 
 in the essay Of Heroic Plays he was explaining the 
 pieces which Davenant had produced under the Com- 
 monwealth; and Dryden himself knew a good deal 
 about the French dramatist, both as critic and as 
 poet. He found in Corneille a vein of oratory 
 which was effective as poetry no less than as drama; 
 like Corneille he had a fondness for stage argument 
 and for stoic declamation, and from him he learned 
 the value of an obvious, unbroken melody. Dry- 
 den was fascinated at an early point by rhymed 
 argumentation. He spoke in the Essay of Dramatic 
 Poesy of "the quick and poynant brevity" of rep- 
 artee; "and this," he said, "joined with the ca- 
 dency and sweetness of the rhyme, leaves nothing in 
 the soul of the hearer to desire." He employed the
 
 i io THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 give-and-take of rhymed repartee chiefly in the 
 heroic plays, but strains of it also appeared amidst 
 his blank verse and his prose, at such times as he 
 could not resist the temptation to chime. Dryden 
 was fascinated again by the possibilities of mere 
 rhyme, possibilities which are naturally very great 
 in English. The heroic plays were staged with an 
 elaborate musical accompaniment, and it is certain 
 that the audiences accepted the verse as only a por- 
 tion of a greater ensemble. As the authors of The 
 Censure of the Rota less charitably put it, "An heroic 
 poem never sounded so nobly, as when it was height- 
 ened with shouts, and clashing of swords; . . . drums 
 and trumpets gained an absolute dominion over the 
 mind of the audience (the ladies, and female spirits) ; 
 . . . Mr. Dryden would never have had the courage 
 to have ventured on a Conquest had he not writ with 
 the sound of drum and trumpet." The Indian Em- 
 peror (1665) made the first great impact upon Eng- 
 lish ears. The Wild Gallant (1663), in prose, and 
 The Rival Ladies (1664), in glib Fletcherian blank 
 verse, had contained only a few perfunctory couplets; 
 and The Indian Queen (1664), almost entirely the 
 work of Sir Robert Howard, had lacked rhythmical 
 plunge although it was composed throughout in 
 couplets or quatrains. The Indian Emperor must 
 have sounded suddenly and loudly like a gong. 
 Dryden broke forth in it with consummate rhetoric, 
 consummate bluff, and consummate rhyme. The 
 secret of the spell which it cast lay in its pound- 
 ing regularity of cadence and its unfailing emphasis 
 upon the rhyme even at the expense of sense and
 
 THE TRUE FIRE in 
 
 natural word order. Whether a scene is being 
 sketched from Nature after the manner of some 
 Latin poet or whether a nervous argument is being 
 thrummed out of Dryden's own vocabulary, the 
 cadences never cease to pound or the rhymes to 
 ring. Montezuma demands of his son Guyomar: 
 
 I sent thee to the frontiers; quickly tell 
 The cause of thy return; are all things well? 
 
 Guyomar describes the appearance of the Spanish 
 vessels: 
 
 I went, in order, sir, to your command, 
 
 To view the utmost limits of the land; 
 
 To that sea-shore where no more world is found; 
 
 But foaming billows breaking on the ground; 
 
 Where, for a while, my eyes no object met, 
 
 But distant skies that in the ocean set; 
 
 And low-hung clouds that dipt themselves in rain. 
 
 To shake their fleeces on the earth again. 
 
 At last, as far as I could cast my eyes 
 
 Upon the sea, somewhat methought did rise, 
 
 Like blueish mists, which still appearing more, 
 
 Took dreadful shapes, and moved towards the shore. 
 
 There is not a single departure here from the iambic 
 norm; the diversity which Dryden had already 
 achieved in the early complimentary poems is 
 thrown away. But we are compensated by a more 
 powerful ground-rhythm than has been heard be- 
 fore. It was this metrical bound which was the dis- 
 covery and glory of the heroic plays. It was exactly 
 this which was to give spring to Augustan heroic
 
 ii2 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 verse. The theological disputation between Mon- 
 tezuma and the Christian priests in Act V is a good 
 example of Dryden's controversial chime; and the 
 second scene of the first act sees Cydaria and Cortez 
 falling in love in heroic quatrains: 
 
 Cydaria. My father's gone, and yet I cannot go; 
 
 Sure I have something lost or left behind! 
 
 (Aside) 
 
 Cortez. Like travellers who wander in the snow, 
 I on her beauty gaze 'till I am blind. 
 
 (Aside) 
 
 The Maiden Queen (1667), in excellent prose and de- 
 cent blank verse, admitted a few rhymes which 
 were out of place and in no way impressive. Tyran- 
 nic Love (1669) brought back the old rage. In the 
 preface to the printed version of 1670 Dryden 
 described the effect which he believed his verse to 
 have: "By the harmony of words we elevate the 
 mind to a sense of devotion, as our solemn music, 
 which is inarticulate poesy, does in churches." In 
 the second act there is a doctrinal war between St. 
 Catherine and Maximin the Tyrant, and in general 
 there is a vast deal of splendid absurdity. The two 
 parts of The Conquest of Granada (1670), which 
 drew Dryden out to his fullest length, are justly 
 famous. They are The Indian Emperor in full and 
 double bloom. It is unnecessary to quote more 
 than a dozen lines: four to show the hero and the 
 heroine in give-and-take: 
 
 Almahide: My light will sure discover those who talk 
 Who dares to interrupt my private walk?
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 113 
 
 Almanwr: He, who dares love, and for that love must 
 
 die, 
 And, knowing this, dares yet love on, am I; 
 
 and eight to illustrate a new cumulative energy in 
 Dryden which demands enjambement and elevates 
 the verse to another level of music: Almanzor re- 
 plies to Lyndaraxa, who has made advances, 
 
 Fair though you are 
 
 As summer mornings, and your eyes more bright 
 Than stars that twinkle in a winter's night; 
 Though you have eloquence to warm and move 
 Cold age, and praying hermits, into love; 
 Though Almahide with scorn rewards my care; 
 Yet, than to change, 'tis nobler to despair. 
 My love's my soul; and that from fate is free; 
 'Tis that unchanged and deathless part of me. 
 
 There is a rise here, with no corresponding fall, 
 that denotes new technical powers. The next rhym- 
 ing play, or "opera," as it was called, the State of 
 Innocence, carried on further experiments in archi- 
 tectural verse. 1 Triplets and Alexandrines added 
 embroidery to trie old pattern, which perhaps now 
 seemed a little plain. Raphael tells Adam of the 
 home he is to find in Paradise : 
 
 A mansion is provided thee, more fair 
 Than this, and worthy Heaven's peculiar care; 
 Not framed of common earth, nor fruits, nor flowers 
 Of vulgar growth, but like celestial bowers; 
 The soil luxuriant, and the fruit divine, 
 Where golden apples on green branches shine, 
 And purple grapes dissolve into immortal wine; 
 1 See Chapter VI.
 
 ii 4 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 For noon-day's heat are closer arbours made, 
 And for fresh evening air the opener glade. 
 Ascend; and, as we go, 
 More wonders thou shalt know. 
 
 The well-known prologue to Aureng-Zebe (1675), 
 Dryden's last heroic tragedy, struck off the fetters 
 of rhyme in drama, and thereafter no more rhyme 
 was used, except for a few tail-speeches in (Edipus 
 (1679) an d The Duke of Guise (1682), until the last 
 three plays of all, Amphitryon (1690), Cleomenes 
 (1692), and Love Triumphant (1694), into each of 
 which a few rocking scenes were allowed to enter. 
 "According to the opinion of Harte," said Dr. 
 Johnson, "who had studied his works with great 
 attention, he settled his principles of versification in 
 the . . . play of Aureng-Zebe." What this means is 
 not clear; nor is it true to the extent that it can be 
 used to explain the versification of a poem like The 
 Hind and the Panther. Aureng-Zebe still comes short 
 of the political poems in pliability. Yet advances 
 have been made over The Indian Emperor. Under 
 the influence of Shakespeare's blank verse, and fol- 
 lowing up the various licenses with which he had 
 distinguished the State of Innocence, Dryden has 
 arrived in Aureng-Zebe at a limper, more natural 
 texture of rhyme than he had achieved before in any 
 play. Nourmahal tells the hero: 
 
 I saw with what a brow you braved your fate; 
 
 Yet with what mildness bore your father's hate. 
 
 My virtue, like a string wound up by art 
 
 To the same sound, when yours was touched, took part, 
 
 At distance shook, and trembled at my heart.
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 115 
 
 The rhymed plays alone did not bring Dryden to his 
 metrical maturity. The prologues and epilogues 
 which he wrote to accompany them contributed 
 an important, racy, vocal note which their dialogue 
 never contained. And blank verse, though the 
 connection between it and Dryden's rhyme is not 
 easy to make, was also a valuable school for style. 
 His earlier blank verse is not significant, being easy 
 and banal in the late Elizabethan way, so that the 
 printer was as likely as not to set it up for prose; 
 verse of this sort may be found in The Rival Ladies, 
 The Maiden Queen, The Tempest (1667), An Even- 
 ings Love (1668), Marriage a la Mode (1672), 
 The Assignation (1672), and Amboyna (1673). It 
 was not until All for Love (1678), and the ensuing 
 pair of tragedies composed in the light of French 
 ideals, (Edipus and Troilus and Cressida (1679), 
 that Dryden attained to any remarkable justice 
 or roundness in his blank verse. The style of All 
 for Love is virtually impeccable; it has made the 
 play. It is richly and closely woven, but it is ab- 
 solutely clear, and it bears no traces of compla- 
 cency in composition. The Spanish Friar (1681) 
 sought again the Fletcherian levels of conversation, 
 as did Amphitryon in 1690. In Don Sebastian (1690) 
 and Cleomenes (1692) Dryden reverted to what he 
 believed to be an Elizabethan "roughness of the 
 numbers and cadences," even departing here and 
 there into a veritable Marstonian crabbedness. In 
 general, all that can be said of his blank verse is 
 that it gave him ample training in the manipula- 
 tion of phrases. It made no direct contribution to
 
 ii6 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 what is after all of most consequence in him, his 
 fund of knowledge about the heroic couplet. 
 
 It is not a simple matter to calculate the influence 
 of France on Dryden's style after about 1675, but 
 one may be sure that the influence was of no small 
 account. French characteristics in English manners 
 and English expression throughout the last three- 
 quarters of the seventeenth century have often 
 been exaggerated by historians, yet their signifi- 
 cance cannot be brought in question. Under 
 Charles I, after his marriage to Henrietta Maria of 
 France, there had bloomed faintly but truly the 
 precieuse spirit of the Hotel de Rambouillet, with 
 its dilettante elegance. During the Commonwealth 
 the Royalist exiles to France had seen a good deal of 
 the best refinement which the continent possessed. 
 And with the Restoration there had flooded back 
 across the Channel a strong tide of Gallic modern- 
 ism, involving new fashions of costume, carriage, 
 conduct, cooking, new ideas of medicine, painting, 
 architecture, music, dancing, new accents in culti- 
 vated speech, and a new impatience with heavy 
 learning and staid chivalry. Most of what was im- 
 possible in the new fashions soon disappeared from 
 English life under the pressure of ridicule. The 
 best remained; and beginning about 1675 a really 
 solid set of improvements were made in taste and 
 speech under the triple guidance of the French for- 
 mal criticism of men like Le Bossu, the French good 
 sense of Rapin and Boileau, and the French "taste" 
 of which Longinus had been found to be the best 
 expression. As far back as 1668 Dryden had shown
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 117 
 
 himself in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy to be famil- 
 iar with the critical works of Sarrasin, Le Mes- 
 nardiere, Chapelain, and Corneille; and it is to be 
 supposed that subsequently he had kept well abreast 
 of the literary developments in France, for he 
 was one of the first Englishmen during the fol- 
 lowing decade to acclaim Rapin and Boileau. 
 Rapin sems to have found at all times a ready au- 
 dience in England. His Reflections upon the Use of the 
 Eloquence of these Times appeared at Oxford in 1672, 
 his Comparison of Plato and Aristotle at London in 
 1673, and his Reflections on Aristotle's Treatise of 
 Poesie at London in 1674, the same year that it was 
 published in Paris. Dry den drew upon the last 
 work for the famous definition of wit with which he 
 closed his Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic Li- 
 cense in 1677, "a propriety of thoughts and words." 
 Thomas Rymer was Rapin's translator; the French- 
 man and the Englishman between them gradually 
 led Dryden to give a classical turn to tragedy and to 
 renounce his pristine "bladdered greatness." The 
 year 1674 was remarkable in France for the publica- 
 tion of five new works by Boileau: the second and 
 third Epistles, the first four books of the Lutrin, the 
 Art Poetique, and the translation of Longinus. Dry- 
 den became acquainted with at least the fourth and 
 fifth of these almost immediately upon their appear- 
 ance. He was powerfully moved by the Longinus, 
 which it seems he had not known in John Hall's 
 English translation of 1652; and the Art Poetique 
 never ceased to appeal to him as a magazine of max- 
 ims. Dryden was in an important degree responsi-
 
 ii8 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 ble for Boileau's vogue in England through his collab- 
 oration with Sir William Soame in 1680-1 upon a 
 translation of the Art of Poetry. Up to that time 
 Boileau's effect had been felt chiefly in satire; Ether- 
 ege, Buckingham, Rochester, Butler, and Oldham in 
 turn had imitated him in that department. Now it 
 was Boileau's whole outlook which was transferred to 
 England. Now it was that the accepted meanings of 
 "wit" and "sense" and "nature" and "the classics" 
 began to draw together; now it was that English 
 speech and English writing in all their parts began 
 to seem nearly civilized. The Earl of Mulgrave's 
 E,ssay Upon Poetry (1682) and the Earl of Ros- 
 common's Essay on Translated Verse (1684), two 
 sensible poems in the manner of Horace and Boil- 
 eau, stamped aristocratic approval upon the French- 
 man's creeds at the same time that they spoke 
 his language and breathed his spirit. Almost the 
 first of English verse-essays, they set the stand- 
 ard of decency and urbanity to which Augustans 
 were continually returning over the next three or 
 four decades. St. Evremond, the French exile who 
 spent the greater part of his life in London, was 
 another Gallic influence on Dryden. In 1683, in the 
 Life of Plutarch, Dryden remarked that he had 
 been "casually casting [his] eye on the works of a 
 French gentleman, deservedly famous for wit and 
 criticism." This was St. Evremond, who began in 
 1685 to make his appearance in English print. St. 
 Evremond was not a profound gentleman, but he 
 was a believer in conversation, and his emphasis 
 upon the choicer phases of intercourse went not with-
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 119 
 
 out its effect on Dryden, who, it will be remembered, 
 "was not a very genteel man." 
 
 Dryden's best style, then, the style of the i68o's, 
 the style of Absalom and Achitophel, the Religio 
 Laid, and The Hind and the Panther, owed a good 
 deal to France. The debt was to French criticism 
 and to French ideals exquisitely expressed rather 
 than to any French poetry that Dryden read. The 
 thinking which he was led by Rapin and Boileau and 
 Longinus to do, and the conviction which they 
 forced upon him that adequacy of expression is the 
 first and last rule of writing, bore fruit, if only di- 
 rectly, in the great satires and ratiocinative poems. 
 But French poetry itself never had Dryden's re- 
 spect. "Impartially speaking," he wrote in the 
 dedication of the ASneis, "the French are as much 
 better critics than the English as they are worse 
 poets." His habit of depreciation he had con- 
 tracted in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, where the 
 regularity of the French had been declared too thin 
 for English blood. A number of prologues in the 
 next decade cordially damned French farce and 
 opera. Doralice, in Marriage a la Mode, says to 
 Palamede: "You are an admirer of the dull French 
 poetry, which is so thin, that it is the very leaf-gold 
 of wit, the very wafers and whipped cream of sense, 
 for which a man opens his mouth and gapes, to 
 swallow nothing; and to be an admirer of such pro- 
 found dulness, one must be endowed with a great 
 perfection of impudence and ignorance." In the 
 Argument to his Sixth Juvenal Dryden compared 
 the French affectations of his England with the
 
 120 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Greek affectations of the early Roman empire. In 
 the dedication of the JEneis he made the compari- 
 son between the French greyhound and the English 
 mastiff which already has been quoted. 1 "The 
 affected purity of the French has unsinewed their 
 heroic verse," he declared. He was by no means 
 alone in this dislike. The distaste for French "thin- 
 ness" was common. Oldham condemned it in his 
 poem on Ben Jonson, and Roscommon wrote in his 
 Essay: 
 
 But who did ever in French authors see 
 
 The comprehensive English Energy? 
 
 The weighty Bullion of one Sterling Line, 
 
 Drawn to French Wire, would thro' whole Pages shine. 
 
 The French themselves were ready to admit a dis- 
 tinction. Rymer's translation of Rapin's Reflec- 
 tions in 1674 contained a confession, taken literally 
 from Rapin, that the "beauty" of "number and 
 harmony" is "unknown to the French tongue, 
 where all the syllables are counted in the verses, and 
 where there is no diversity of cadence." Englishmen 
 have always been proud of the difference between 
 French verse and their own, a difference which has 
 been used at various times to point various morals; 
 in Dryden's time it was the last refuge of those who, 
 like Dryden himself, leaned upon the tradition of 
 English magnificence and steadfastly refused to 
 recognize a thinning in the contemporary product. 
 
 Two-thirds of Dryden's non-dramatic verse con- 
 sisted of translations from the classics. It is not to 
 
 1 See page 43.
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 121 
 
 be supposed that so much labor was without im- 
 portant results. The sheer experience involved in 
 composing some twenty thousand couplets was 
 bound either to intrench him in whatever ground of 
 style he already occupied or to draw him forward 
 onto new surfaces of expression. It did both things; 
 but more often it did the first. More often than 
 not Dryden failed to learn anything by his trans- 
 lating. Doing most of it under pressure from the 
 printers, he missed that margin of leisure which 
 allows reflection and experimentation. As a rule 
 Dryden performed well under pressure; but there 
 are limits, which in Dryden' s case meant that he 
 was reduced to turning out a great number of stale 
 and undistinguished lines. Yet in a respectable 
 number of instances he did unquestionably enlarge 
 himself through his identification with ancient 
 masters, so that in translating them he produced 
 what cannot be considered other than great orig- 
 inal poems. Domestication of Greek and Roman 
 writers was the order of the day in England. A 
 society whose cultivated members lived exclusively, 
 without warm vision and without much concern 
 for problems that pressed, was pleased to feed on 
 echoes of past grandeur and to take frequent ac- 
 count of that "stock of life," as St. Evremond 
 affectionately called it, which the classics furnished 
 in circumscribed and compendious form. Thomas 
 Creech's Lucretius, Horace, and Theocritus in 1682 
 and 1684 were marks of the rising tide in trans- 
 lation which was to sweep Dryden and Jacob Ton- 
 son on to their great successes. Dryden believed
 
 122 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 that a translator was bound in all honor to enter 
 generously into the spirit of his original and pre- 
 sent him fairly as the individual which he once 
 had been. His prefaces abound in distinctions 
 nicely maintained between Homer and Virgil, Ju- 
 venal and Persius, Juvenal and Horace, Virgil and 
 Ovid, and so on. He had a true translator's 
 conscience, and liked to think that for the time 
 being he and his masters were "congenial souls." 
 But he seldom succeeded in bestowing individuality 
 anywhere; his translations read very much alike; 
 only his Juvenal and his Lucretius are really living 
 men. Altogether he turned his hand to eight of 
 the ancients: Ovid, Theocritus, Lucretius, Horace, 
 Juvenal, Persius, Virgil, and Homer. 
 
 He began with Ovid in 1680, when he contributed 
 three pieces to a volume of Translations from Ovid's 
 Epistles. He was always an admirer of Ovid's 
 fertility, and of his faculty for "continually varying 
 the same sense an hundred ways," but his admira- 
 tion in general was tempered by a conviction that 
 the author of the Metamorphoses was a cheaper man 
 then Virgil. He lacked taste; "he never knew how 
 to give over, when he had done well." Only rarely 
 did Dryden translate him with distinction. The 
 three Epistles of 1680 were loose and Latinistic. A 
 brisker piece, the nineteenth elegy of the second 
 book of the Amores, appeared in Tonson's first 
 Miscellany in 1684. The third Miscellany, called 
 Examen Poeticum, which was published in 1693, 
 contained Dryden's version of the entire first book 
 of the Metamorphoses and the "fables" of I phis and
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 123 
 
 lanthe and Ads, Polyphemus and Galatea, from the 
 ninth and thirteenth books respectively. From 
 only one passage in the three poems does genius 
 emerge; the impassioned speech of Polyphemus to 
 Galatea is in Dryden's best vein of suasion. The 
 Art of Love and the first and fourth elegies of the 
 first book of the Amores were done by Dryden 
 while he was occupied with his Virgil; they were 
 not printed during his lifetime. The Fables found him 
 in better form, yet even in that venerable volume 
 the Ovidian poems are the least engaging. Dryden 
 learned speed and audacity from Ovid, but nothing 
 richer. It has been Ovid's narrative materials rather 
 than his personal qualities that have fired the mod- 
 ern poets; his stories are inexhaustible, but his ex- 
 terior too often glitters and leaves one cold. 
 
 Dryden's four Idylls from Theocritus, the third, 
 the eighteenth, the twenty-third, and the twenty- 
 seventh, printed in the first and second Miscellanies 
 of 1684 and 1685, professed to speak in the "Doric 
 dialect" which Dryden thought had "an incompar- 
 able sweetness in its clownishness, like a fair shep- 
 herdess in her country russet, talking in a York- 
 shire tone." The dialect is difficult to distinguish 
 from Dryden's customary language. When Theoc- 
 ritus writes simply, "O dark eye-browed maiden 
 mine," Dryden writes, 
 
 O Nymph, . . . 
 
 Whose radiant eyes your ebon brows adorn, 
 
 Like midnight those and these like break of morn. 
 
 This is handsome, but its sound is that of a trumpet
 
 124 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 rather than that of a shepherd's pipe. Dryden 
 never can be said to have expanded his poetic per- 
 sonality so as to include the rare Sicilian. 
 
 Dryden's Lucretius is another story. What he 
 tried to reproduce in Lucretius was a certain "noble 
 pride, and positive assertion of his opinions." His 
 success was signal in at least two out of the five 
 selections which he chose to translate for the second 
 Miscellany in 1685. His passages from the second 
 and third books of the De Rerum Natura must be 
 numbered among the most convincing specimens of 
 ratiocinative poetry in any language. The spirit of 
 the Roman has invaded and actually moved the 
 Englishman; for a time he is another person. These 
 lines on the fear of death are executed with a new 
 delicacy and a new precision: 
 
 We, who are dead and gone, shall bear no part 
 
 In all the pleasures, nor shall feel the smart 
 
 Which to that other mortal shall accrue, 
 
 Whom of our matter time shall mold anew. 
 
 For backward if you look on that long space 
 
 Of ages past, and view the changing face 
 
 Of matter, tossed and variously combined 
 
 In sundry shapes, 'tis easy for the mind 
 
 From thence t' infer, that seeds of things have been 
 
 In the same order as they now are seen; 
 
 Which yet our dark remembrance cannot trace, 
 
 Because a pause of life, a gaping space, 
 
 Has come betwixt, where memory lies dead, 
 
 And all the wandering motions from the sense are fled. 
 
 For whose'er shall in misfortunes live, 
 
 Must be, when those misfortunes shall arrive; 
 
 And since the man who is not, feels not woe,
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 125 
 
 (For death exempts him, and wards off the blow, 
 Which we, the living, only feel and bear,) 
 What is there left for us in death to fear? 
 When once that pause of life has come between, 
 'Tis just the same as we had never been. 
 
 The skill with which the movement of the verse is 
 made to correspond to the progress and the outline 
 of the idea can quite reasonably be called inspired. 
 Dryden has learned much from Lucretius. This 
 poem on the fear of death is Dryden's own. 
 
 It is rather to be regretted that Dryden never 
 imitated the satires of Horace as Pope did. He 
 touched only three odes and an epode, versions of 
 which appeared under his name in the second Mis- 
 cellany of 1685. The pieces are of no consequence 
 in connection with the present inquiry. Dryden 
 could not possibly succeed in miniatures. The 
 twenty-ninth ode of the third book he made one of 
 his masterpieces, but only by transforming it into a 
 Pindaric ode and so egregiously distending it. 1 He 
 required more space than Horace ever would allow. 
 
 The five satires of Juvenal which Dryden pub- 
 lished in 1693 along with the whole of Persius are a 
 triumph quite comparable to the Lucretius. In the 
 Discourse with which he prefaced the volume he 
 analyzed what he had found to be the distinction of 
 Juvenal, his impetuosity. The five satires as he 
 gave them are not only impetuous; they are close 
 and powerful. A full weight of brutal wrath bears 
 down upon the antitheses and the rhymes. There is 
 no tender enjambement; the couplets thump and 
 
 1 See Chapter VI.
 
 126 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 crackle. The sixth, against women, is one of the 
 most terrible poems in English. It cannot be quoted 
 where quotation would most score; the opening gives 
 only a taste of that which follows: 
 
 In Saturn's reign, at Nature's early birth, 
 
 There was that thing called Chastity on earth; 
 
 When in a narrow cave, their common shade, 
 
 The sheep, the shepherds, and their gods were laid; 
 
 When reeds, and leaves, and hides of beasts were spread 
 
 By mountain huswifes for their homely bed, 
 
 And mossy pillows raised, for the rude husband's head. 
 
 Unlike the niceness of our modern dames, 
 
 (Affected nymphs with new affected names,) 
 
 The Cynthias and the Lesbias of our years, 
 
 Who for a sparrow's death dissolve in tears; 
 
 Those first unpolished matrons, big and bold, 
 
 Gave suck to infants of gigantic mold; 
 
 Rough as their savage lords who ranged the wood, 
 
 And fat with acorns belched their windy food. 
 
 The largeness of these lines is not specious. Dry- 
 den has developed another voice while in the com- 
 pany of Juvenal. 
 
 Dryden began to work with Virgil as early as the 
 first Miscellany in 1684, when he contributed to 
 that volume translations of the fourth and ninth 
 Pastorals. The fourth Pastoral as he allowed it to 
 be printed was extremely licentious metrically, and 
 an unworthy performance. The ninth was full of 
 a fresh melody which at once cast a shade over 
 John Ogilby's Firgil, a respectable and often sump- 
 tuously printed work which had appeared first in 
 1649 and which up until Dryden's folio was not
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 127 
 
 superseded. Ogilby had been stingy and literal. 
 Where Virgil's Moeris says regretfully: 
 
 Omnia fert aetas, animum quoque; saepe ego longos 
 Cantando puerum memini me condere soles: 
 Nunc oblita mihi tot carmina, vox quoque Moerim 
 lam fugit ipsa; lupi Moerim videre priores, 
 
 Ogilby's says: 
 
 Age all things wastes, and spends our lively heat. 
 I but a boy, could singing set the sun. 
 Now all those notes are lost, and my voice gone; 
 A wolf saw Moeris first; 
 
 while Dryden's shepherd sings: 
 
 The rest I have forgot; for cares and time 
 Change all things, and untune my soul to rhyme. 
 I could have once sung down a summer's sun; 
 But now the chime of poetry is done; 
 My voice grows hoarse; I feel the notes decay, 
 As if the wolves had seen me first today. 
 
 Dryden seems keenly to have relished his occupa- 
 tion with the pastorals of Virgil, and it was by no 
 means seldom that he achieved therein a sweet and 
 shining clarity. In the second eclogue his Corydon 
 thus runs over the favors which the nymphs will 
 bestow upon Alexis: 
 
 White lilies in full canisters they bring, 
 
 With all the glories of the purple spring. 
 
 The daughters of the flood have searched the mead 
 
 For violets pale, and cropped the poppy's head, 
 
 The short narcissus and fair daffodil, 
 
 Pansies to please the sight, and cassia sweet to smell;
 
 128 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 And set soft hyacinths with iron-blue, 
 
 To shade marsh marigolds of shining hue; 
 
 Some bound in order, others loosely strewed, 
 
 To dress thy bower, and trim thy new abode. 
 
 Myself will search our planted grounds at home, 
 
 For downy peaches and the glossy plum; 
 
 And thrash the chestnuts in the neighbouring grove, 
 
 Such as my Amaryllis used to love; 
 
 The laurel and the myrtle sweets agree; 
 
 And both in nosegays shall be bound for thee. 
 
 The second Miscellany in 1685 contained versions 
 by Dryden of three episodes from the JEneid: the 
 episode of Nisus and Euryalus, from the fifth and 
 ninth books, the episode of Mezentius and Lausus 
 from the tenth, and the speech of Venus to Vulcan 
 from the eighth. The third Georgic was inserted 
 in the fourth Miscellany of 1694; and three years 
 later the complete folio itself issued from Jacob 
 Tonson's shop with all the pomp of a state event. 
 Dryden had come very near to despair more than 
 once while he was engaged with Virgil. "Some of 
 our countrymen," he explained to the Earl of Mul- 
 grave, "have translated episodes and other parts of 
 Virgil, with great success; ... I say nothing of Sir 
 John Denham, Mr. Waller, and Mr. Cowley; 'tis 
 the utmost of my ambition to be thought their 
 equal . . . but 'tis one thing to take pains on a frag- 
 ment, and translate it perfectly; and another thing 
 to have the weight of a whole author on my shoul- 
 ders." "I do not find myself capable of trans- 
 lating so great an author," he wrote to Tonson; and 
 in the dedication of the jEneis he admitted that he
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 129 
 
 had done "great wrong to Virgil in the whole 
 translation," offering as reasons "want of time, the 
 inferiority of our language, the inconvenience of 
 rhyme." By his own confession, he kept the manu- 
 script of the Earl of Lauderdale's translation by him 
 and "consulted it as often as I doubted of my auth- 
 or's sense," or as often, more likely, as he felt 
 pressed for time. Some two hundred lines of that 
 nobleman's version he appropriated without any al- 
 teration at all, and some eight hundred came over 
 only slightly recast. The readiness of the Earl to 
 place his work at the poet's disposal may be accounted 
 for by the fact that he himself had made free with the 
 translations of the episodes of Nisus and Euryalus 
 and Mezentius and Lausus as they had stood under 
 Dryden's name since the Miscellany of 1685. There 
 is a tradition that Dryden regretted before he was 
 through that he had not chosen blank verse for his 
 medium. An jEneid in the style of All for Love 
 might be a truly superb performance. He had been 
 advised to make the attempt. Thomas Fletcher, in 
 the preface to his Poems of 1692, had repeated Ros- 
 common's condemnation of rhyme, and had sug- 
 gested that "If a Dryden (a master of our Language 
 and Poetry) would undertake to translate Virgil in 
 blank Verse, we might hope to read him with as 
 great pleasure in our Language as his own." But 
 it is likely that Dryden on the whole was satisfied 
 with his couplets. He had reasons for dissatisfac- 
 tion with the poem on other grounds. It is vastly 
 imperfect. The Cyclops, the funeral games, and the 
 gathering of the clans in the JEneis are handled in a
 
 130 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 manner worthy of the best heroic tradition, and 
 every page without exception bristles with energy. 
 Yet in the main the texture of the verse is coarse; 
 Dry den has made no advance in subtlety of speech, 
 he is only applying standard formulas and securing 
 standard results. Virgil has eluded him as Lucretius 
 and Juvenal did not. 
 
 Dryden was "fixing his thoughts" on Homer in 
 his last years and halfway projecting a new folio 
 which should stand as a companion to the FirgiL 
 He had a notion that Homer was more suited to his 
 genius than Virgil, since he was more "violent, im- 
 petuous, and full of fire." He had done into Eng- 
 lish The Last Parting of Hector and Andromache for 
 the third Miscellany in 1693, and he included in the 
 Fables a complete version of the first book of the 
 Iliad. He got no further with Homer, which is to 
 be regretted; for although the two specimens he 
 left behind are neither violent, impetuous, nor full 
 of fire in a preternatural degree, they are honest and 
 various as few translations are. 
 
 It is not to be supposed that Dryden had been 
 without his English masters all along. Shakespeare, 
 Spenser, and Milton were constantly enriching 
 him, if not with direct gifts then with less tangi- 
 ble inspirations. His unqualified admiration for 
 Shakespeare scarcely needs to be cited; the tributes 
 to him which Dryden paid in the Essay of Dramatic 
 Poesy, the dedication of the Rival Ladies, the prologue 
 to the Tempest, and the prologue to Troilus and Cres- 
 sida are loci classici of criticism. He knew the text 
 of Shakespeare's major dramas as well as he knew
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 131 
 
 his own works; his plays are reminiscent, often only 
 trivially, in word and phrase of Hamlet, King Lear, 
 Macbeth, and Julius Caeser. Imitation of Shake- 
 speare on a significant scale was out of the question, 
 as it must be always; and it must be confessed that 
 had Shakespeare never written Dryden might never 
 have ranted; yet it is not unreasonable to derive the 
 greatest of the Augustans in a fairly straight line 
 from the greatest of the Elizabethans. The differ- 
 ences are huge, but the line that joins them does not 
 need to be broken. Spenser offered gifts of style 
 which were easier to accept and put in use. "I 
 must acknowledge," wrote Dryden in the dedica- 
 tion of the JEneis, discussing the general problem of 
 "numbers," "that Virgil in Latin, and Spenser in 
 English, have been my masters." Spenser he con- 
 sidered in a degree the creator of English harmony, 
 and Spenser's fluency seemed to him to the last a 
 glorious marvel. Fluency as such is a quality which 
 cannot be fingered over by a follower of influences; 
 hence its passage from Spenser into Dryden can be 
 better announced than proved. The passage did 
 occur, Spenser's broad current eventually envelop- 
 ing the little stream of Waller that flowed to Dryden. 
 Dryden seems to have been thoroughly versed in 
 the Faerie Queene, Occasional lines clearly recall 
 its sensitive author, as these two from the Episode 
 of Nisus and Euryalus: 
 
 Black was the brake, and thick with oak it stood, 
 With fern all horrid, and perplexing thorn. 
 
 The accounts of the fairies at the beginning of The
 
 132 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Wife of Bath, Her Tale and in The Flower and the 
 Leaf, in the Fables, are Chaucer plus Spenser plus 
 Shakespeare. And Thomas Warton pointed out 
 that the sleeping Iphigenia in Cymon and Iphigenia 
 owes certain of her beauties to the Elizabethan who 
 best of all could paint enchanting forms. 
 
 Milton's impact upon Dryden was not sudden, 
 nor was his influence of a permeating kind. The 
 two poets were worlds apart. Yet Dryden was 
 among the first Englishmen who conferred impor- 
 tant honors upon Milton dead; and his works re- 
 flect careful reading not only of Paradise Lost but of 
 the minor poems, the prose, and Samson Agonistes 
 as well. Milton's Ode on the Morning of Christ's 
 Nativity, as has been remarked, is probably respon- 
 sible for Dryden's thirty-fifth stanza on Cromwell. 1 
 Stanza 232 of Annus Mirabilis, which Settle declared 
 was stolen from Cowley, vaguely recalls Lycidas as 
 well as the Davideis, 
 
 Old Father Thames raised up his reverend head, 
 But feared the fate of Simoeis would return; 
 
 Deep in his ooze he sought his sedgy bed, 
 And shrunk his waters back into his urn, 
 
 and stanza 293 certainly suggests the Areopagitica: 
 
 Methinks already, from this chymick flame, 
 
 I see a city of more precious mold; 
 Rich as the town which gives the Indies name, 
 
 With silver paved, and all divine with gold. 
 
 That the State of Innocence is a tagged Paradise 
 Lost needs no mention; though the proverbial 
 
 1 See page 3.
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 133 
 
 corollary that it is a wretched poem calls for em- 
 phatic denial. Langbaine pointed out a borrowing 
 in Aureng-Zebe from Samson Agonistes. "Now 
 give me leave," he asked in his Account of the Eng- 
 lish Dramatic k Poets (1691), "to give you one 
 Instance ... of his borrowing from Mr. Milton's 
 Sampson Agonistes: 
 
 Dal. I see thou art implacable, more deaf 
 
 To Prayers than winds and seas; yet winds to seas 
 Are reconcil'd at length, and sea to shore; 
 Thy anger unappeasable still rages, 
 Eternal Tempest never to be calm'd. 
 
 Emp. Unmov'd she stood, and deaf to all my prayers, 
 As Seas and Winds to sinking Mariners; 
 But Seas grow calm, and Winds are reconciled; 
 Her Tyrant Beauty never grows more mild" 
 
 A still more interesting levy on Milton's tragedy 
 was made by Dryden in the first act of (Edipus. 
 The blind Tiresias comes upon the stage led by his 
 daughter Manto and addressing her as follows: 
 
 A little farther; yet a little farther, 
 Thou wretched daughter of a dark old man, 
 Conduct my weary steps. . . . Now stay; 
 Methinks I draw more open, vital air. 
 Where are we? 
 
 Manto: Under covert of a wall; 
 
 The most frequented once, and noisy part 
 Of Thebes; now midnight silence reigns even 
 
 here, 
 And grass untrodden springs beneath our feet. 
 
 Tiresias: If there be nigh this place a sunny bank, 
 There let me rest awhile.
 
 134 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Dryden may have had in mind here at least five 
 different scenes in classical tragedy. The spectacle 
 of a blind old man being led upon the stage was 
 familiar to Greek audiences. In the (Edipus Tyran- 
 nus of Sophocles Tiresias appears hand in hand 
 with a boy; in the (Edipus Coloneus CEdipus follows 
 after Antigone, whom he pities as "the wretched 
 child of a blind old man," and who conducts him to 
 a rocky seat. In the Phaenissez of Euripides Tire- 
 sias is conducted upon the scene by Manto, "the eye 
 of his feet." Seneca begins his Phcenisstf with An- 
 tigone leading CEdipus, and in his (Edipus Manto 
 guides Tiresias along. Dryden may have had any 
 of these scenes vividly in his memory. Yet the 
 opening of Samson Agonistes must have furnished 
 him with certain of his words, and must have 
 suggested two details for his tableau which neither 
 the Greeks nor Seneca had provided: the sunny 
 bank and the 'draughts of fresh air. Milton's lines 
 run thus: 
 
 Samson: A little onward lend thy guiding hand 
 To these dark steps, a little further on; 
 For yonder bank hath choice of sun or shade. 
 There I am wont to sit, when any chance 
 Relieves me from my task of servile toil, 
 Daily in the common prison else enjoined me, 
 Where I, a prisoner chained, scarce freely draw 
 The air imprisoned also, close and damp, 
 Unwholesome draught; but here I feel amends, 
 The breath of Heav'n fresh blowing, pure and 
 
 sweet, 
 With day-spring born.
 
 THE TRUE FIRE 135 
 
 The parallel is of interest only as showing that Dry- 
 den really knew Milton. The poems on public 
 affairs drew heavily upon Paradise Lost for epic 
 machinery and accent. The speeches in Absalom 
 and Achitophel are Satanic or Godlike much in Mil- 
 ton's way, and the account in The Hind and the Pan- 
 ther (II., 499-514) of Christ's accepting in Heaven 
 the burden of man's sin follows Milton's recital in 
 his third book with remarkable fidelity. Instances 
 might be multiplied without establishing further 
 types of obligation. The obligation was never spirit- 
 ual; it was rarely that Dry den was moved by any- 
 thing other than the diction of a great poet. Shake- 
 speare, Spenser, Milton remain on the other side of 
 the world from Dry den; but he visits them and takes 
 from them whatever he can carry away. 
 
 By dint of manifold experience, then, and mani- 
 fold discipleship, Dryden rolled and beat into shape 
 the poetic medium which had descended to him. 
 But he did more than make that medium perfectly 
 clear and strong. He stamped it peculiarly with 
 himself. His genius was for grouping; his passion 
 was for form. He had above most poets "that en- 
 ergy," as Dr. Johnson put it, "which collects, com- 
 bines, amplifies, and animates." He had a mind; 
 he had grasp; he could follow a subject home. His 
 poems lived. He loved to see things take shape. 
 At the beginning of his dedication of the Rival 
 Ladies he told the Earl of Orrery in words which 
 later haunted the imagination of Lord Byron that 
 his play had once been "only a confused mass of 
 thoughts, tumbling over one another in the dark;
 
 136 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 when the fancy was yet in its first work, moving the 
 sleeping images of things towards the light." As 
 many as a dozen times throughout his works he 
 played with the notion of a world of scattered atoms, 
 rejecting it for the image of a world composed with 
 care. He wrote to Sir Robert Howard in 1660, 
 
 This is a piece too fair 
 To be the child of chance, and not of care; 
 No atoms casually together hurled 
 Could e'er produce so beautiful a world. 
 
 He insisted that a good play could not be a heap of 
 "huddled atoms;" an epic could never succeed if 
 "writ on the Epicurean principles." This genius of 
 his took effect in two ways. It made him a master 
 in the art of grouping and throwing swiftly together 
 statements, reasons, instances, implications; it made 
 him the most irresistible discursive and ratiocina- 
 tive poet in English. And it supplied him with a 
 powerful rhythmical pulse; it set his verse rolling 
 and welling, leaping and bounding; it established 
 the paragraph, the passage, as his unit of metrical 
 advance, not the line or the couplet; it made him a 
 mighty metrist. Such was Dryden's best manner. 
 Dryden's best material, it has been said, lay in per- 
 sonalities, actions, ideas, art. The two in conjunc- 
 tion brought forth his best poetry, occasional, jour- 
 nalistic, lyric, or narrative.
 
 IV 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 
 
 There is a sense in which every poem that Dry- 
 den wrote was occasional. Not sudden convictions, 
 or happy perceptions of identities in the world of 
 nature and man, but circumstances were required 
 to draw him out on paper. Births, deaths, literary 
 events, political incidents tapped in him the richest 
 commenting mind that English poetry has known. 
 He is the celebrant, the signalizer par excellence. 
 He succeeded Ben Jonson, the other great occasional 
 poet of the seventeenth century, in a kind of writing 
 that was peculiarly Augustan. Jonson had created 
 the kind in England, clearing off a broad field for it 
 and practicing it with rare compactness and right- 
 ness. He had planted every variety of it which was to 
 have a successful growth: the official panegyric, the 
 complimentary epistle, the epigram, the epitaph, the 
 elegy, the prologue, the epilogue. The growth had 
 been rapid before Dryden. The temper of the cen- 
 tury had swiftly become suited to a sort of expres- 
 sion aiming "rather at aptitude than altitude," as 
 Thomas Jordan put it in the dedication of his Poems 
 and Songs in 1664. It had become more and more 
 agreeable to read and write verses that suavely 
 wreathed themselves around plain, social facts. 
 The main line of descent from Jonson to Dryden
 
 138 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 had been through men like Cartwright and Waller. 
 Most of Milton's sonnets had been occasional poems 
 of another order, instinct with the passions of am- 
 bition, anger, or worship. True Augustan verse was 
 to be impersonal, containing no bursts that might 
 embarrass. Even Milton had approximated the 
 type in his sonnets to Lawes, to Lawrence, and to 
 Cyriack Skinner. The type was to be first of all 
 civil. Every year of the world will see occasional 
 poetry; but fashions vary, and only at intervals is 
 hard civility the mode. Poets since Dryden have 
 been softer, and have expressed themselves upon more 
 precious occasions; upon receiving a mother's picture, 
 upon turning up a field mouse with a plow, upon 
 hearing a lass sing at her reaping, upon spying a 
 primrose by a river's brim or a violet by a mossy 
 stone, upon seeing a peasant bent hopelessly over 
 his hoe, upon looking into the eyes of a harlot, upon 
 dreaming weird dreams, upon thinking fine-spun 
 thoughts. The Augustans kept such experiences, if 
 they had them, to themselves. Their subjects were 
 prescribed and classified. Their minds were for- 
 mal, stored with categories and proprieties. Writ- 
 ing upon a subject meant turning it over casually in 
 the mind and exposing it to preconceptions. The 
 aim was not at revelation or surprise but at the sat- 
 isfaction which comes] from a topic perfectly cov- 
 ered. 
 
 Dryden was a great occasional poet because he 
 was more than merely that. He was more than 
 equal to his occasions, few of which moved him. He 
 condescended to them, brought to them richer
 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 139 
 
 stores of thought and melody than were adequate. 
 He operated with self-control, he was generally dis- 
 creet and right; yet there are overtones to be dis- 
 tinguished in all his pieces. He was a large poet 
 writing largely about medium things. His genius 
 for grouping and shaping was of extraordinary con- 
 sequence here. More easily than any other English 
 poet he could assemble ripe clusters of apposite 
 ideas, rounding them off by the pressure of his 
 swift, disciplined mind and welding them into their 
 true proportions with rhythm. 
 
 If we disregard for a moment the satires and the 
 ratiocinative poems, which can better be considered 
 by themselves in connection with a study of Dryden 
 as a journalist in verse, it appears that Dryden's 
 occasional pieces fall into four divisions: the pan- 
 egyrics, celebrating public events and compliment- 
 ing public characters; the epistles and personal ad- 
 dresses; the epigrams, epitaphs and elegies; and the 
 prologues and epilogues. 
 
 The ten years between 1660 and 1670 saw in Eng- 
 land a flowering of panegyric that necessarily re- 
 calls certain other rather distant periods in the 
 world's literature. Greeks and Italians have a well- 
 known capacity for voluble laudation; the classics 
 are replete with praise. "The inimitable Pindar" 
 needs only to be mentioned. Isocrates and Demos- 
 thenes in ancient Greece and Cicero in ancient 
 Rome wrote in a golden age of panegyrical prose. 
 Rome saw a silver age in the famous twelve Pane- 
 gyrici Veteres of later days, among whom was 
 Pliny the Younger; Pliny's oration on Trajan Dry-
 
 i 4 o THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 den knew and quoted in Annus Mirabilis. The last 
 great Roman poet, Claudian, was a professional 
 panegyrist; his verses in praise of Honorius and 
 Stilicho at the end of the fourth century look for- 
 ward to the poetry of Dryden in respect of their 
 fertility, ingenuity, and general temper. The fif- 
 teenth century in Italy was a century of adulation. 
 A dark period of Latinity that interposed itself 
 between the brilliant times of Dante, Petrarch, and 
 Boccaccio and the brilliant times of Ariosto and 
 Tasso, it witnessed the reigns of petty despots who 
 called themselves descendants of the Roman Em- 
 perors and thirsted for a Roman kind of praise. The 
 praise was forthcoming, in prose and in verse; the 
 great Poliziano expended as much effort upon 
 Lorenzo de Medici as he did upon the Greek and 
 Roman poets whom he so intensely admired. In 
 England, Queen Elizabeth received at least her meed 
 of formal flattery, and Prince Henry's death in 
 1612 was the occasion for a veritable Augustan 
 abundance of eulogy. Upon the occasions of visits 
 by James I to the universities, the learned outdid 
 themselves in hyperbole of welcome. Cromwell had 
 his Marvell as well as his Dryden. But it was only 
 with the return of Charles II from France and the 
 setting up of what was believed would be a perma- 
 nent little social court that literary England came 
 for a while to be something like literary Rome in the 
 fourth century or like literary Italy in the fifteenth. 
 The conditions of such a becoming include a certain 
 pettiness, a certain exclusiveness, a certain blind- 
 ness, and a certain pretentious unreality in the offi-
 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 141 
 
 cial psychology. England during the first decade 
 after the Restoration supplied all these conditions. 
 London was intoxicated with peace, and with what 
 it greeted as an established order. Not until after 
 Clarendon's fall, not until after confidence in Charles 
 began to be less general, were larger perspectives 
 opened up. Not that panegyrics ever stopped al- 
 together. Southey and Byron were still to have 
 their turns with George the Third. But this partic- 
 ular Stuart decade must remain unique in English 
 history. 
 
 Dryden never ceased to exercise his panegyrical 
 vein while Charles and James were in power. But 
 what may more specifically be called his panegyri- 
 cal period extended only from 1660 to 1666. The 
 model of all then, including Dryden, was Waller. 
 
 He best can turn, enforce, and soften things, 
 To praise great Conquerors or to flatter Kings, 
 
 wrote Rochester in his Allusion to Horace; and 
 when Dryden inserted his English names in Soame's 
 Boileau he substituted "Waller" for "Malherbe" 
 in the line, 
 
 Malherbe, d'un heros peut vanter les exploits. 
 Waller a hero's mighty acts extol. 
 
 Waller could be rapt and smooth and fatuous in 
 pleasant proportions. Dryden added other quali- 
 ties to those three. His official praise rings with a 
 round Roman grandeur. He writes as if he lived to 
 praise, not praised to live. His lines speak con- 
 tempt for all things small small passions, small
 
 I 4 2 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 deeds, small wit. He is warm yet decorous; he 
 is effectual because of his great confidence and 
 his unremitting eloquence. And his resources are 
 infinite. "He appears never to have impoverished 
 his mint of flattery by his expenses, however 
 lavish," says Dr. Johnson. "He had all the forms 
 of excellence, intellectual and moral, combined 
 in his mind, with endless variation . . . and brings 
 praise rather as a tribute than a gift, more de- 
 lighted with the fertility of his invention than mor- 
 tified by the prostitution of his judgment." The 
 Heroic Stanzas would seem to have been written 
 in an age rather remote from the Astraa Redux, 
 although only a year separated them. The differ- 
 ence in quality is the difference between Marvell 
 and Waller, or better yet, the difference between 
 Cromwell and Charles. The one has symmetry and 
 sinewy calm, the other slips along with a kind 
 of tepid abandon. The Astraa is somewhat more 
 shapeless and profuse than Dryden usually is in 
 his occasional poetry; he has not yet learned his 
 grouping. Yet the peroration is well gathered up. 
 The poem To His Sacred Majesty, a Panegyric on 
 His Coronation, composed about a year after the 
 Astrtza, is an improvement with respect to form. 
 The ideas are fewer, but each in its turn is rounded 
 out. The poem climbs in a series of flights, with in- 
 tervals or landings between, the melody mounting 
 continuously and tending to be cumulative within 
 the flights. The poem To My Lord Chancellor, 
 Presented on New Year's Day (1662) is profuse and 
 tepid again except for one nobly concentrated pas-
 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 143 
 
 sage on Charles I and Clarendon. The Annus 
 Mirabilis, published in 1667, is Dryden's most am- 
 bitious official compliment, being dedicated "to the 
 Metropolis of Great Britain," and celebrating both 
 a naval war and a great fire. The prophecy with 
 which it ends continues the central motif of his oc- 
 casional work in that it is collected and sustained. 
 The last twelve stanzas pile themselves up like the 
 Theban stones that obeyed Amphion's lyre. Dry- 
 den's panegyrical period now came to a close. The 
 Stuart spell was broken, Clarendon fled to France, 
 and Marvell, bitterly loyal to the best interests of 
 England, answered the vapid flatteries of Waller 
 and his train with exposures which made such men 
 as Pepys weep because they were so true. Nearly 
 twenty years passed before Dryden performed 
 again on his official pipes. This was at the death of 
 Charles II when he wrote his Threnodia Augustalis, 
 a "Funeral-Pindaric" which will be considered more 
 fully elsewhere, along with the other Pindarics. 1 
 The poem lies loosely about for want of any sincere 
 motive that can knit it together. The best con- 
 structed passage is that which summons up Dry- 
 den's happiest memories, his memories of peace: 
 
 For all those joys thy happy restoration brought, 
 For all the miracles it wrought, 
 
 For all the healing balm thy mercy poured 
 Into the nation's bleeding wound, 
 And care that after kept it sound, 
 
 For numerous blessings yearly showered, 
 And property with plenty crowned; 
 1 See Chapter VI.
 
 144 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 For freedom still maintained alive, 
 Freedom, which in no other land will thrive, 
 Freedom, an English subject's sole prerogative, 
 Without whose charms even peace would be 
 But a dull quiet slavery: 
 
 For these, and more, accept our pious praise. 
 
 Britannia 'Redivvoa (1688), on the birth of an heir to 
 James II, is a dull conclusion to the least distin- 
 guished division of Dryden's occasional poetry. 
 Like the Threnodia it lacks that sanguineness which 
 alone had justified the pieces of the i66o's and 
 which had given them a metrical structure interest- 
 ing enough to study now. These last two poems 
 lack what it is fatal for Dryden ever to lack, drive. 
 
 Dryden's personal epistles and complimentary 
 addresses bring us into a different world. Here he 
 is at home, for here he is speaking to private per- 
 sons and he is praising books. Three kinds of poeti- 
 cal epistles gained currency during the seventeenth 
 century. The Horatian or didactic kind began 
 with Daniel, Drayton, Donne, and Jonson, and cul- 
 minated in Pope. The Ovidian or "voluptuous" 
 kind got a start in volumes like Drayton's Heroical 
 Epistles and ran on to Pope's Eloisa and Abelard. 
 The third kind, the complimentary, was more pecul- 
 iarly modern and local. Rooted in Jonson, it 
 flowered in Dryden, who practiced virtually no 
 other sort. Having to praise both men and books, 
 he was never in want of excellent models. Jonson's 
 epistles to the owner of Penshurst and to Elizabeth, 
 Countess of Rutland, Drayton's to Sandys and 
 Reynolds, and Waller's to Falkland had established
 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 145 
 
 a distinguished line of personal compliment. Wal- 
 ler's verses to the young Viscount as he left for war 
 are among the most genuine which he composed, 
 one indication of which may be found in their radi- 
 cal enjambement, as in this passage: 
 
 Ah, noble friend! with what impatience all 
 That know thy worth, and know how prodigal 
 Of thy great soul thou art (longing to twist 
 Bays with that ivy which so early kissed 
 Thy youthful temples), with what horror we 
 Think on the blind events of war and thee! 
 To fate exposing that all-knowing breast 
 Among the throng, as cheaply as the rest; 
 Where oaks and brambles (if the copse be burned) 
 Confounded lie, to the same ashes turned. 
 
 The line of literary compliment which descended to 
 Dryden was more distinguished still. The more 
 firmly literary standards became fixed the readier 
 were men to praise whatever writing they liked, and 
 the more copious too became critical vocabularies. 
 In the seventeenth century praise of books might be 
 either interested or disinterested. It might be mo- 
 tivated by actual enthusiasm; but it also might be 
 motivated by personal friendship, by hope of pat- 
 ronage, by party feeling, by the fee of a printer, or 
 by something more canny yet, the expectation that 
 the author commended would reciprocate when next 
 he published a volume. Authors, at the instiga- 
 tion of publishers, traded compliments as freely as 
 boys trade marbles, and a book was very poor which 
 could not appear prefaced by at least two poetical
 
 146 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 puffs. Whatever the motives, the practice itself pro- 
 duced some of the best occasional poetry of the cen- 
 tury; and there is surely something logical about 
 the predilection of a critical age for critical verse. 
 The line, to resume, came down through such poems 
 as Jonson's to Shakespeare and Sir Henry Savile, 
 through the Jonsonus Firbius of 1638, and through 
 Waller's and Cowley's prefaces to Gondibert. Run- 
 ning into Dryden it found itself in the control of a 
 great man who was fond of bestowing judgments 
 and who was possessed of unexampled gifts in cas- 
 ual criticism. 
 
 Shortly after Dryden entered Trinity College, 
 Cambridge, in 1650, he contributed some commen- 
 datory verses to a volume of "divine Epigrams" 
 published by his friend John Hoddesdon. The 
 verses have a Puritan tinge and are clumsy in their 
 approbation. Ten years later he opened a freer 
 vein of compliment in the piece which he pre- 
 fixed to a volume of Sir Robert Howard's poems 
 published by Henry Herringman. Probably the 
 applause he gave to Howard, who after another 
 three years was to become his brother-in-law, was 
 not disinterested; possibly Herringman engaged 
 him to deliver it. At any rate, he wrote the lines 
 with real relish, achieving in a slight measure the 
 felicity, the fluency, and the plenitude of praise 
 which marked his maturest compliments. He also 
 indulged in a little general criticism, incidentally an- 
 nouncing some literary ideals of his own. He de- 
 nounced conceits, for instance, and informed How- 
 ard that
 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 147 
 
 To carry weight, and run so lightly too, 
 Is what alone your Pegasus can do. 
 
 So firm a strength, and yet withal so sweet, 
 Did never but in Samson's riddle meet. 
 
 In 1663 he furnished an epistle to Dr. Charleton 
 for insertion in his treatise on Stonehenge, which 
 Herringman was publishing. The epistle was the 
 first of Dryden's that set out to discuss a literary or 
 philosophical point. It is virtually an essay on the 
 conquest of Aristotelianism by experimental science. 
 The address to Lady Castlemaine which Dryden 
 probably made soon after the failure of his first 
 play in 1663 shows him fairly emancipated from the 
 pedantry and miscellaneity of the poems which pre- 
 ceded it. It runs straight on, swiftly and sweetly, 
 quickened into life by the sun of gallantry which 
 shines upon it. 
 
 What further fear of danger can there be? 
 Beauty, which captives all things, sets me free. 
 Posterity will judge by my success, 
 I had the Grecian poet's happiness, 
 Who, waiving plots, found out a better way; 
 Some god descended, and preserved the play. 
 When first the triumphs of your sex were sung 
 By those old poets, Beauty was but young, 
 And few admired the native red and white, 
 Till poets dressed them up to charm the sight; 
 So Beauty took on trust, and did engage 
 For sums of praises till she came of age. 
 But this long-growing debt to poetry 
 You justly, Madam, have discharged to me,
 
 148 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 When your applause and favor did infuse 
 New life to my condemned and dying Muse. 
 
 It will be observed that no accent here is in the 
 smallest degree misplaced. Another epistle did not 
 appear until 1677, when Dryden supplied a puff for 
 Lee, to go in front of his printed play, The Death of 
 Alexander the Great. The epistle begins with an in- 
 teresting reference to the practice of poetical log- 
 rolling which already has been described. Lee had 
 puffed Dryden's State of Innocence, Now, begins 
 Dryden, 
 
 The blast of common censure could I fear, 
 Before your play my name should not appear; 
 For 'twill be thought, and with some color too, 
 I pay the bribe I first received from you; 
 That mutual vouchers for our fame we stand, 
 And play the game into each other's hand; 
 
 but he proceeds to disclaim any other than the pur- 
 est motives in praising Lee's tragedy. He ends 
 with a defense of Lee's mad way of writing which in 
 seven sharply distinct couplets proves that Dryden 
 has mastered Ovid's art of "varying the same sense 
 an hundred ways " : 
 
 They only think you animate your theme 
 With too much fire, who are themselves all phle'me. 
 Prizes would be for lags of slowest pace, 
 Were cripples made the judges of the race. 
 Despise those drones, who praise while they accuse 
 The two much vigour of your youthful muse. 
 That humble style which they their virtue make, 
 Is in your power; you need but stoop and take.
 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 149 
 
 Your beauteous images must be allowed 
 By all, but some vile poets of the crowd. 
 But how should any signpost dauber know 
 The worth of Titian or of Angelo? 
 Hard features every bungler can command; 
 To draw true beauty shows a master's hand. 
 
 The Earl of Roscommon prefixed a complimentary 
 poem to a new issue of the Religio Laid in 1683. 
 Dryden came back the next year with some lines 
 applauding Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse. 
 The opening furnishes the most handsome example 
 in all Dryden of a piece of versified literary history. 
 The progress of rhyme from ancient Athens to 
 modern London is represented by a metrical pro- 
 gression which must have been the despair of all 
 living poets: 
 
 Whether the fruitful Nile, or Tyrian shore, 
 
 The seeds of arts and infant science bore, 
 
 'Tis sure the noble plant translated, first 
 
 Advanced its head in Grecian gardens nursed. 
 
 The Grecians added verse; their tuneful tongue 
 
 Made nature first and nature's God their song. 
 
 Nor stopped translation here; for conquering Rome 
 
 With Grecian spoils brought Grecian numbers home, 
 
 Enriched by those Athenian Muses more 
 
 Than all the vanquished world could yield before; 
 
 Till barbarous nations, and more barbarous times, 
 
 Debased the majesty of verse to rhymes; 
 
 Those rude at first: a kind of hobbling prose, 
 
 That limped along, and tinkled in the close. 
 
 But Italy, reviving from the trance 
 
 Of Vandal, Goth, and monkish ignorance, 
 
 With pauses, cadence, and well-vowelled words,
 
 ISO THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 And all the graces a good ear affords, 
 
 Made rhyme an art, and Dante's polished page 
 
 Restored a silver, not a golden age. 
 
 Then Petrarch followed, and in him we see 
 
 What rhyme improved in all its height can be; 
 
 At best a pleasing sound, and fair barbarity. 
 
 The French pursued their steps; and Britain, last, 
 
 In manly sweetness all the rest surpassed. 
 
 The wit of Greece, the gravity of Rome, 
 
 Appear exalted in the British loom; 
 
 The Muses' empire is restored again, 
 
 In Charles his reign, and by Roscommon's pen. 
 
 Roscommon here, however much as an anticlimax 
 he may come to a modern reader, comes at least 
 metrically as a truly stately climax. The manner if 
 not the matter of this sketch, which Dryden en- 
 joyed doing if he ever enjoyed doing anything at all, 
 is without flaw. The next epistle, To My Friend, 
 Mr. J. Northleigh, Author of the Parallel, On His 
 Triumph of the British Monarchy (1685) is short and 
 of no account. A year or two after this Dryden 
 wrote for the Earl of Middleton a letter in octosyl- 
 labic couplets to Sir George Etherege, who had sent 
 a similar piece to Middleton from Ratisbon. It was 
 for Dryden a tour de force. He was not fond of the 
 octosyllabic measure, nor was he temperamentally 
 equipped for a species of verse which seemed to fall 
 somewhere between Butler and Prior. His epistle 
 To My Ingenious Friend, Henry Higden, Esq., on His 
 Translation of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal (1687) 
 contained like the poem to Roscommon a literary 
 discussion, this time on the subject of ancient and
 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 151 
 
 modern satire. In 1692 he consoled Southerne for 
 the failure of his comedy called The Wives' Excuse 
 with an epistle that closed on a note of sage and 
 compendious counsel. The famous lines to Con- 
 greve on his Double-dealer (1694), and those to Sir 
 Godfrey Kneller of the same year, probably in ac- 
 knowledgment of a portrait of Shakespeare which 
 Kneller had given him, represent a more reflective 
 stage in the progress of Dryden's epistolary manner. 
 They do not charge upon their subjects with the 
 breathless speed of the early addresses; their dis- 
 course, which in one case is upon the dramatic 
 poetry of the last age and in the other case is upon 
 the history of painting, seems packed and ripe. The 
 poem to Congreve opens on a theme which Dryden 
 had often discussed in prose and which he once had 
 covered in an epilogue, the superiority of Restora- 
 tion wit to Jacobean humor. The handling here is 
 marked by rare composure; the edifice of modern 
 wit rises steadily and surely: 
 
 Well then, the promised hour is come at last; 
 
 The present age of wit obscures the past: 
 
 Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ, 
 
 Conquering with force of arms and dint of wit; 
 
 Theirs was the giant race before the flood; 
 
 And thus, when Charles returned, our empire stood. 
 
 Like Janus he the stubborn soil manured, 
 
 With rules of husbandry the rankness cured; 
 
 Tamed us to manners, when the stage was rude, 
 
 And boisterous English wit with art indued. 
 
 Our age was cultivated thus at length, 
 
 But what we gained in skill we lost in strength.
 
 i$2 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Our builders were with want of genius curst; 
 The second temple was not like the first: 
 Till you, the best Vitruvius, come at length, 
 Our beauties equal, but excel our strength. 
 Firm Doric pillars found our solid base; 
 The fair Corinthian crowns the higher space; 
 Thus all below is strength, and all above is grace. 
 
 The poem ends with a touching last will and testa- 
 ment which has never had to beg for praise, but 
 which borders, it must be admitted, upon the maud- 
 lin. In the epistles to Granville and Motteux in 
 1698 Dryden returned more or less to the glibness 
 of poems like the Roscommon. The verses to Mot- 
 teux the Frenchman, affixed to his tragedy called 
 Beauty in Distress, begin with a reply to the newly 
 arisen moral censor of the stage, Jeremy Collier, and 
 end with a tribute to Motteux's powers which af- 
 fords another example of Dryden's facility in turn- 
 ing over an idea and extracting from it all that 
 could be extracted: 
 
 Let thy own Gauls condemn thee, if they dare; 
 
 Contented to be thinly regular. 
 
 Born there, but not for them, our fruitful soil 
 
 With more increase rewards thy happy toil. 
 
 Their tongue, infeebled, is refined so much, 
 
 That, like pure gold, it bends at every touch; 
 
 Our sturdy Teuton yet will art obey, 
 
 More fit for manly thought, and strengthened with 
 
 allay. 
 
 But whence art thou inspired, and thou alone, 
 To flourish in an idiom not thy own? 
 It moves our wonder, that a foreign guest 
 Should overmatch the most, and match the best.
 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 153 
 
 In underpraising thy deserts, I wrong; 
 Here, find the first deficience of our tongue; 
 Words, once my stock, are wanting to commend 
 So great a poet and so good a friend. 
 
 The last two epistles of all appeared with consider- 
 able pomp in Dryden's last volume, the Fables. The 
 Palatnon and Arcite was preceded by a dedicatory 
 poem to the Duchess of Ormond and was followed 
 by a piece upon which Dryden expended a great 
 deal of effort and of which he was justly proud: To 
 My Honored Kinsman, John Driden, of Chesterton, 
 in the County of Huntingdon, Esquire. The lines to 
 "illustrious Ormond," though tawdry in a few 
 places, are suffused with a fine old man's gallantry; 
 the medieval lustre of the Fables has lent them a 
 new light. Their rapture has all the old pulse, but 
 it is chastened and poised: 
 
 O daughter of the rose, whose cheeks unite 
 The differing titles of the red and white; 
 Who heaven's alternate beauty well display, 
 The blush of morning, and the milky way; 
 Whose face is paradise, but fenced from sin: 
 For God in either eye has placed a cherubin. 
 All is your lord's alone; e'en absent, he 
 Employs the care of chaste Penelope. 
 For him you waste in tears your widowed hours, 
 For him your curious needle paints the flowers; 
 Such works of old imperial dames were taught; 
 Such, for Ascanius, fair Elisa wrought. 
 
 Only the most frigid reader would take exception to 
 the cherubim which God has stationed in the Duch- 
 ess' eyes. The poem to John Driden of Chesterton
 
 154 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 is the most Horatian of all the epistles. It is a eu- 
 logy of country life in general and a commendation 
 of the kinsman's own rural regimen in particular, 
 with digressions more or less sardonic upon mar- 
 riage, medicine, and the present state of Europe. 
 The closing paragraph is mathematically final: 
 
 O true descendant of a patriot line, 
 
 Who, while thou shar'st their luster, lend'st 'em thine, 
 
 Vouchsafe this picture of thy soul to see; 
 
 'Tis so far good as it resembles thee. 
 
 The beauties to the original I owe; 
 
 Which when I miss, my own defects I show; 
 
 Nor think the kindred Muses thy disgrace; 
 
 A poet is not born in every race. 
 
 Two of a house few ages can afford; 
 
 One to perform, the other to record. 
 
 Praiseworthy actions are by thee embraced; 
 
 And 'tis my praise, to make thy praises last. 
 
 For ev'n when death dissolves our human frame, 
 
 The soul returns to heaven, from whence it came; 
 
 Earth keeps the body, verse preserves the fame. 
 
 Dryden paraded a distaste for epigrams which 
 was consonant with the contemporary worship of 
 epic poetry; for from Bacon to Temple the heroic 
 poem crowded out of the general estimation all 
 forms that were less pretentious. "From Homer to 
 the Anthologia, from Virgil to Martial and Owen's 
 Epigrams, and from Spenser to Fleckno; that is, 
 from the top to the bottom of all poetry," wrote 
 Dryden in the Discourse of Satire. Yet he proved 
 upon a few occasions to have an epigrammatic turn 
 of some distinction. His epigram on Milton, which
 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 155 
 
 appeared in Tonson's 1688 folio edition of Paradise 
 Lost, is neatly put together. Its shape alone has 
 given it currency. Few have observed that it seems 
 to say more than it does. "Loftiness of thought" 
 and "majesty" seem to make a better antithesis 
 than in truth they do. DeQuincey, in a shrewd 
 essay on this poem, which he calls "the very finest 
 epigram in the English language," marvels at the 
 perfection of form which could intrigue a whole 
 century of readers into accepting as profound a 
 half dozen lines which really say nothing. Dryden 
 was probably drawn to the Greek Anthology long 
 before 1683, when he closed his Life of Plutarch 
 with this translation of the epigram by Agathias: 
 
 Cheronean Plutarch, to thy deathless praise 
 Does martial Rome this grateful statue raise; 
 Because both Greece and she thy fame have shared, 
 (Their heroes written, and their lives compared;) 
 But thou thyself couldst never write thy own; 
 Their lives have parallels, but thine hast none. 
 
 Dryden's eight epitaphs all derive a certain point- 
 edness and sufficiency from the shining Anthology, 
 although in the main their author tends to weave 
 a heavier burial cloth than that which was woven 
 by Antipater, Leonidas, and Simonides. He stiffens 
 his texture by means of conceits and antitheses, 
 with the result that his effect is likely to be one of 
 rectangularity. His epitaphs by no means lack that 
 seventeenth-century largeness which the next few gen- 
 erations could not muster, and the absence of which 
 in contemporary burial verses Dr. Johnson wrote an
 
 156 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 essay to lament. Dryden shows best in his lines on 
 John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, 
 and those on the Marquis of Winchester. Both 
 poems celebrate the lives and deaths of loyalists 
 who supported lost causes. The Marquis of Win- 
 chester had faught for Charles I, and the great 
 Graham of Claverhouse had been killed at Killie- 
 crankie in 1689. The epitaph on Winchester begins 
 with four couplets which draw or imply four dis- 
 tinctions : 
 
 He who in impious times undaunted stood, 
 And midst rebellion durst be just and good; 
 Whose arms asserted, and whose sufferings more 
 Confirmed the cause for which he fought before, 
 Rests here, rewarded by an heavenly prince, 
 For what his earthly could not recompense. 
 Pray, reader, that such times no more appear; 
 Or, if they happen, learn true honour here. 
 
 The epitaph on Dundee is a translation from a 
 Latin poem by Dr. Archibald Pitcairne. It follows 
 its original closely enough, but at the end it makes 
 a characteristic departure towards a greater pro- 
 fuseness in antithesis: 
 
 O last and best of Scots! who didst maintain 
 Thy country's freedom from a foreign reign; 
 New people fill the land now thou art gone, 
 New gods the temples, and new kings the throne. 
 Scotland and thee did each in other live; 
 Thou wouldst not her, nor could she thee survive. 
 Farewell, who living didst support the State, 
 And couldst not fall but with thy country's fate.
 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 157 
 
 The epitaphs on Lady Whitmore, on "A Fair Maiden 
 Lady who Died at Bath," on "Young Mr. Rogers 
 of Gloucestershire," on Mrs. Margaret Paston, on 
 Sir Palmes Fairborne (in Westminster Abbey), and 
 on Erasmus Lawton have no especial significance. 
 
 "We have been all born; we have most of us been 
 married; and so many have died before us, that our 
 deaths can supply but few materials for a poet," 
 wrote Dr. Johnson; and Goldsmith thought there 
 was nothing new to be said upon the death of a 
 friend after the standard classical elegies. Dry- 
 den's temper seems anything but elegiac if in con- 
 nection with elegiac we think of Theocritus Bion, 
 Moschus, Ovid, Dante, Petrarch, Spenser, and 
 Donne. The more mystical of the Elizabethan son- 
 nets on the subject of death, and the exquisite 
 dirges in Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher and 
 Webster were keyed above, or at least keyed in 
 another sphere of poetry than his. He is not a 
 prober among mysteries; he is not exquisite. He is 
 sober and symmetrical, and pays his tribute to the 
 dead with plain, manly melodies. His elegies and 
 Donne's are poles apart. His demand to be read 
 aloud, there being no reason why the music in them 
 should be subdued. Donne's take effect only upon 
 an inner ear and eye, back behind the curtain of the 
 senses, where they stage their dark, fierce little 
 dramas with Love and Hate and Fear and Jealousy 
 and Death in the leading roles. 
 
 Dryden's first elegy happens to be his worst 
 poem. It is scarcely necessary to say that when 
 writing the Hastings he was not much concerned
 
 158 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 either about the young departed lord or about the 
 idea of death in general. His next elegy might well 
 be called his best poem. If one is not pleased by 
 the lines To the Memory of Mr. Oldham one will not 
 be pleased by anything in Dryden; they are his 
 touchstone. They appeared in 1684 among several 
 laments which prefaced a volume of Oldham's 
 remains. That wrathful young satirist had died 
 the previous year at the age of thirty. Dryden had 
 owed him no trifling literary debts. He discharged 
 them posthumously as follows: 
 
 Farewell, too little and too lately known, 
 
 Whom I began to think and call my own: 
 
 For sure our souls were near allied, and thine 
 
 Cast in the same poetic mold with mine. 
 
 One common note on either lyre did strike, 
 
 And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike. 
 
 To the same goal did both our studies drive; 
 
 The last set out the soonest did arrive. 
 
 Thus Nisus fell upon the slippery place, 
 
 Whilst his young friend performed and won the race. 
 
 O early ripe! to thy abundant store 
 
 What could advancing age have added more? 
 
 It might (what nature never gives the young) 
 
 Have taught the numbers of thy native tongue. 
 
 But satire needs not those, and wit will shine 
 
 Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line: 
 
 A noble error, and but seldom made, 
 
 When poets are by too much force betrayed. 
 
 Thy generous fruits, tho' gathered ere their prime, 
 
 Still shewed a quickness; and maturing time 
 
 But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme. 
 
 Once more, hail and farewell; farewell, thou young,
 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 159 
 
 But ah too short, Marcellus of our tongue; 
 
 Thy brows with ivy and with laurels bound; 
 
 But fate and gloomy night encompass thee around. 
 
 The poem is artificial, perhaps (like Lycidas); it 
 is full of echoes; and its subject is literary. But 
 the melody is round and sure; every couplet sounds 
 "like a great bronze ring thrown down on marble;" 
 and the ideas erect themselves without commotion 
 into a perfectly proportioned frame of farewell. 
 There is not an original word in the poem. It is a 
 classical mosaic, pieces of which Dryden had had by 
 him for a long time. It is precisely as a mosaic, as a 
 composition, that it is triumphant. The passion- 
 ate farewell, the ave atque vale, had been a favorite 
 motif in Greek and Latin elegy. Dryden begins 
 with a line that savors of Juliet's bewildered out- 
 burst when she discovers Romeo's full identity at 
 the ball: 
 
 My only love, sprung from my only hate! 
 Too early seen unknown, and known too late! 
 
 Virgil had been fond of celebrating two souls that 
 were "near allied"; and Persius in the fifth Satire 
 had drawn a parallel between himself and his tutor 
 Cornutus of which Dryden's third and fourth lines 
 are reminiscent. The story of Nisus seems never to 
 have been out of Dryden's mind. As early as The 
 Indian Emperor he had made Guyomar declare to 
 Odmar, his rival for Alibech: 
 
 It seems my soul then moved the quicker pace; 
 Yours first set out, mine reached her in the race.
 
 160 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 And very recently he had been translating the epi- 
 sode of Nisus and Euryalus from Virgil for the sec- 
 ond Miscellany, which was to appear in a few 
 months. He had written then for Virgil, 
 
 One was their care, and their delight was one; 
 One common hazard in the war they shared. 
 
 And he had spoken for Ascanius to Euryalus thus: 
 
 But thou, whose years are more to mine allied. . . . 
 One faith, one fame, one fate, shall both attend. 
 
 "Young Marcellus" was the dead nephew of Au- 
 gustus whom Virgil had mourned in the sixth ^Eneid. 
 Dryden had inserted a similar lament for the Duke 
 of Ormond's (Barzillai's) son in Absalom and Achit- 
 ophel (11. 830-855). The ivy, the laurel, the fate, 
 and the gloomy night encompassing around were 
 venerable adornments which could scarcely be 
 avoided. Additional parallels can be of no con- 
 sequence; these in themselves are enough to show 
 how Dryden was able to pour his memories out 
 upon an occasion. Nothing except his genius can 
 explain the precision with which he grouped those 
 memories in this case, or the harmony with which 
 his passion suffused them. He never succeeded so 
 well in elegy again. The ode in memory of Anne 
 Killigrew is more interesting as an ode than as an 
 elegy, and is reserved for consideration as such. 1 
 Eleonora (1692), composed for a fat fee in honor of the 
 late Countess of Abingdon, whom Dryden had never 
 seen, was declared by Sir Walter Scott, the gentlest 
 
 1 See Chapter VI.
 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 161 
 
 critic whom the poet has had, to be "totally defi- 
 cient in interest." It is a catalogue of female 
 Christian virtues, virtues which Dryden was not 
 much moved by. It suffers from a threadbare 
 piety everywhere except at the end, in what Dry- 
 den calls the "Epiphonema, or close of the poem." 
 Here, as usual, he quickens his pulse and gathers 
 his powers. He is probably inspired in this case by 
 Ben Jonson, who began an epigram to the Earl of 
 Pembroke with the lines, 
 
 I do but name thee, Pembroke, and I find 
 It is an epigram on all mankind. 
 
 Dryden writes: 
 
 Let this suffice: nor thou, great saint, refuse 
 This humble tribute of no vulgar muse; 
 Who, not by cares, or wants, or age depressed, 
 Stems a wild deluge with a dauntless breast; 
 And dares to sing thy praises in a clime 
 Where vice triumphs, and virtue is a crime; 
 Where ev'n to draw the picture of thy mind 
 Is satire on the most of humankind; 
 Take it, while yet 'tis praise; before my rage, 
 Unsafely just, break loose on this bad age; 
 So bad, that thou thyself hadst no defense 
 From vice, but barely by departing hence. 
 
 Be what, and where thou art; to wish thy place 
 Were, in the best, presumption more than grace. 
 Thy relics (such thy works of mercy are) 
 Have, in this poem, been my holy care; 
 As earth thy body keeps, thy soul the sky, 
 So shall this verse preserve thy memory; 
 For thou shalt make it live, because it sings of thee.
 
 162 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 An elegy of uncertain date On the Death of a Very 
 Young Gentleman is even less interesting than 
 Eleonora. The account may close with Dryden's 
 only attempt at a pastoral elegy, a poem On the 
 Death of Amyntas, also undated. It is a dialogue 
 between Damon and Menalcas. It opens with a 
 fine rush of melody: 
 
 'Twas on a joyless and a gloomy morn, 
 Wet was the grass, and hung with pearls the thorn; 
 When Damon, who designed to pass the day 
 With hounds and horns, and chase the flying prey, 
 Rose early from his bed; but soon he found 
 The welkin pitched with sullen clouds around, 
 An eastern wind, and dew upon the ground. 
 Thus while he stood, and sighing did survey 
 The fields, and cursed th' ill omens of the day, 
 He saw Menalcas come with heavy pace; 
 Wet were his eyes, and cheerless was his face; 
 He wrung his hands, distracted with his care, 
 And sent his voice before him from afar. 
 
 But it soon ceases to give out sound, proceeding 
 through some of the flattest moralizing in Dryden 
 and ending with a very inferior conceit. 
 
 As a class, the prologues and epilogues of Dryden 
 are the richest and best body of his occasional verse. 
 There is no surer way to become convinced of his 
 superbly off-hand genius than to read the ninety- 
 five pieces which he is known to have composed for 
 delivery from the front of the Restoration stage. 
 They give, more adequately than any other division 
 of his work, a notion of his various powers: his
 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 163 
 
 speed, his precision, his weight, his melody, his tact. 
 He seems to have been braced in writing them by 
 his consciousness that they would be heard by acute 
 and critical ears in actual playhouses; for he has 
 purged himself of conceits, bombast, and mannered 
 elegance. They are his most speaking poems; they 
 have the warmth of flesh and blood. He has writ- 
 ten some of them as much for fun as for money, and 
 consciously or unconsciously he has revealed him- 
 self in them all to an important extent. They are 
 a running commentary on forty years of his life, as 
 well as a living mirror in which the tiny theatrical 
 world of Charles and James is shrewdly reflected. 
 
 Dryden is the master of the prologue and epilogue 
 in English. His peculiar authority was felt in his 
 own day before even a dozen of his supple, terse 
 addresses had been delivered by members of the 
 King's Company; and eventually he was acknowl- 
 edged to be without any rival in the art of pre- 
 senting new dramas to old audiences. It came to be 
 understood that a prologue by Mr. Dryden might 
 mean the making of a green playwright or the saving 
 of an unprepossessing play. Spectators relished his 
 confidences and his innuendoes; often there was more 
 real meat in his forty lines of introduction than the 
 whole ensuing tragedy or comedy could furnish 
 forth. The secret of his success lay in the intimacy 
 yet dignity of his harangue. He was both easy and 
 important; he was fluent, but he was also condensed. 
 There was something peculiarly satisfying in his 
 form; he rounded off his little speeches as though 
 they were clay and his brain was a potter's wheel.
 
 164 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 The final impression was one of many riches cas- 
 ually summoned but faultlessly disposed. 
 
 There is nothing exactly like these pieces of Dry- 
 den's in any literature. The classical drama ap- 
 proximated them nowhere except in the parabeses 
 of Aristophanes, when the Chorus came forward 
 for the author and delivered torrents of audacious 
 remarks to the audience. Greek tragedies might 
 be prefaced with prologues, but they were more or 
 less integral in the action, and were not personal. 
 Plautus and Terence used prologues mainly to 
 explain the events which were to follow, though 
 Terence in his conducted mild literary quarrels 
 around charges of plagiarism; their epilogues were 
 only perfunctory bids for applause. The French 
 drama never developed either form extensively; 
 the English drama began at an early stage to culti- 
 vate both, scarcely, however, in the direction of 
 Dryden. Marlowe introduced his Tamburlaine 
 with high astounding terms. Shakespeare pre- 
 served a chaste anonymity in the playhouse; his 
 Prologue in Henry V is strictly necessary; only in 
 the epilogue to As You Like It and in the prologue 
 and epilogue to Henry VIII does he take his audi- 
 ence into his confidence, and even there he has his 
 reserves. Ben Jonson opened a vein which was 
 followed along by none of his contemporaries or 
 immediate successors. He was the first English 
 playwright to harangue the pit; he was the father of 
 the militant prologue. He first showed how lit- 
 erary criticism could be run serially, preceding 
 plays; his prologue to Every Man in his Humour
 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 165 
 
 sounds like Dryden. Dekker and Heywood were 
 more modest; Beaumont and Fletcher did much to 
 discourage altogether the bold, direct address to the 
 audience. The Restoration brought in a new mode. 
 Theater-goers were now more sophisticated and be- 
 longed more to a single class; being somewhat fa- 
 miliar as well with the fashionable literary canons, 
 they liked an occasional dash of criticism from a 
 poet not too pedantic to be interesting or even 
 saucy. As time went on, more intimate relations 
 came to be established among dramatists, players, 
 and spectators within the four walls of the theaters; 
 the fortunes of both authors and actors became 
 of real concern to a now well-seasoned public; a 
 greater body of common knowledge took shape; it 
 became possible for audiences to be addressed on 
 certain fairly specialized subjects. Prologues and 
 epilogues were now poems that could stand alone; 
 often it made very little difference at what play or 
 in what order they were spoken. "Now, gentle- 
 men," says Bayes in the Rehearsal, "I would fain 
 ask your opinion of one thing. I have made a Pro- 
 logue and an Epilogue, which may both serve for 
 either; that is, the prologue for the epilogue, or the 
 epilogue for the prologue; (do you mark?) nay, they 
 may both serve too, 'egad for any other play as well 
 as this." Bayes was right; prologues and epilogues 
 had become social events. Etherege helped to set 
 the tone of Restoration performances in this kind, 
 with his pungent reflections on the tastes of the pit 
 and his cavalier trick of speaking of his Muse as his 
 mistress; but Etherege wrote little at the most.
 
 i66 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Outside of Dryden the best Restoration performers 
 were Lee, Mrs. Behn, Otway, and Congreve, with 
 their varying degrees of sprightliness and author- 
 ity. Dryden could stand against them all; they 
 could please, but he could take by storm. The 
 Restoration saw the prologue and the epilogue at 
 their height. The revolutions in taste which intro- 
 duced the new age of Steele and Gibber and Lillo 
 brought more heterogeneous crowds to the theaters, 
 and it seemed less important to hear what the au- 
 thor, whoever he might be, had to say each day. 
 Yet so old a habit could not be broken at once, and 
 many excellent sets of verses continued to precede 
 and follow plays, particularly farces, throughout the 
 eighteenth century. Pope, Thomson, Goldsmith, 
 and Johnson wrote respectable pieces; but the mas- 
 ters in this century were Fielding and Garrick. 
 Fielding had all of Dryden's energy and wickedness, 
 if not his richness and his form. He pretended to 
 write prologues under protest, 
 
 As something must be spoke, no matter what; 
 No friends are now by prologues lost or got. . . . 
 I wish with all my heart, the stage and town 
 Would both agree to cry all prologues down, 
 That we, no more obliged to say or sing, 
 Might drop this useless, necessary thing. 
 
 Garrick has more of the useless things to his credit 
 than has any other Englishman; he is always dex- 
 terous, but he does not carry any considerable 
 weight. 
 
 It is likely that Dryden began to write prologues
 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 167 
 
 and epilogues perfunctorily, without any notion of 
 their possibilities; and to the end he maintained a 
 certain nonchalance with reference to them that he 
 could not easily muster for other forms. He felt 
 free in them, for instance, to indulge in feminine 
 rhymes, which elsewhere he renounced as too famil- 
 iar. Yet he came early to see that some of these 
 poems were almost his best writing. He arranged 
 for the first Miscellany in 1684 to include eighteen 
 of the riper specimens; and his relish for the exer- 
 cise in general steadily increased. He was under no 
 obligations in this form; he could damn the small 
 critics of the pit and he could pour no end of ridicule 
 upon the general taste. Yet he could exercise his 
 gifts of compliment too if he liked. Tom Brown 
 affected to believe that Dryden's flattery of Oxford 
 was very gross, and Dryden himself wrote to Roch- 
 ester remarking, "how easy 'tis to pass any thing 
 upon an university, and how gross flattery the 
 learned will endure." He took increasing pains to 
 render himself effective, and to make it clear to all 
 that he excelled. He compared the prologue in his 
 hands to a church-bell in the hands of the sexton: 
 
 Prologues, like bells to churches, toll you in 
 With chiming verse, till the dull plays begin; 
 With this sad difference, tho', of pit and pew, 
 You damn the poet, but the priest damns you; 1 
 
 or to a military assault conducted on a large and 
 fierce scale. He compared the epilogue to a bene- 
 diction : 
 
 1 Prologue to Tht Assignation.
 
 i68 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 As country vicars, when the sermon's done, 
 
 Run huddling to the benediction; 
 
 Well knowing, tho* the better sort may stay, 
 
 The vulgar rout will run unblest away; 
 
 So we, when once our play is done, make haste 
 
 With a short epilogue to close your taste. l 
 
 He selected the most intelligent and vivacious 
 players as his spokesmen, and adapted his lines to 
 their known dispositions: Nell Gwynn could do the 
 surprising, saucy things; Mrs. Bracegirdle, Mrs. 
 Mountfort, and Mrs. Marshall could deliver more 
 scurrilous and scandalous messages; Mr. Betterton 
 could be infinitely grave, as when he impersonated 
 the ghost of Shakespeare; and Mr. Hart could be 
 choice and elegant, for the prologues at Oxford. 
 Nell Gwynn was twice called upon to succeed by 
 sensational means: in the prologue to the first part 
 of the Conquest of Granada, which she recited 
 wearing a hat as broad as a coach-wheel, and in the 
 epilogue to Tyrannic Love, which she spoke only 
 after resisting the efforts of the bearers to convey 
 her dead body off the stage: 
 
 (To the Bearer): Hold, are you mad, you damned con- 
 founded dog, 
 
 I am to rise, and speak the epilogue. 
 (To the Audience}: I come, kind gentlemen, strange news 
 
 to tell ye, 
 I am the ghost of poor departed 
 
 Nelly. 
 
 Dryden came also more and more to pack his pieces 
 with criticism and allusion. His serried dialectic 
 
 1 Epilogue to Sir Martin Mar-All.
 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 169 
 
 flattered the audience which was expected to follow 
 it; though the following was made somewhat easier 
 by the practice of circulating folio copies of the pro- 
 logue and epilogue before the play began, so that the 
 hearers were likely to be familiar with the lines when 
 it came time for them to be recited. If Dryden wrote 
 his first prologues and epilogues perfunctorily, it is 
 plain that he wrote his later ones both with instinc- 
 tive delight and with due attention to the precautions 
 necessary for insuring their success. 
 
 For his measure he has confined himself almost 
 wholly to the heroic couplet; though the prologues 
 to his Wild Gallant and to Joseph Harris' Mistakes 
 are in part prose dialogues; and the prologue to the 
 Maiden Queen, the epilogue to the Tempest, the pro- 
 logue to Limberham, and the prologue to the King 
 and Queen (1682) are in triplets, the effect of which 
 is often slily jovial: 
 
 Old men shall have good old plays to delight 'em; 
 And you, fair ladies and gallants, that slight 'em, 
 We'll treat with good new plays; if our new wits can 
 write 'em. 
 
 He is fond of leading off with a simile or metaphor and 
 elaborating it throughout the length of the piece; as 
 witness the prologue to the Wild Gallant, Revived, 
 where the author's dramatic muse is compared to a 
 raw young squire who has come up to London 
 bent on making an impression swiftly. He falls at 
 times, for the sake of emphasis, into aphorism, as 
 here in the prologue to All for Love:
 
 170 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow; 
 
 He who would search for pearls must dive below; 
 
 or here in the epilogue to Lee's Mithridates: 
 
 Love is no more a violent'desire; 
 'Tis a mere metaphor, a painted fire. . . . 
 Let honour and preferment go for gold, 
 But glorious beauty is not to be sold. 
 
 Only in the satires is his pen as pointed; and indeed 
 it was largely from the sixty-five prologues and 
 epilogues which he had written by 1681 that the 
 author of Absalom and Achitophel had learned to 
 wield irresistible satiric cadences. Scorn for French 
 farces and for Whig reformers had been sharpening 
 Dryden's claws during the late i67o's. He had 
 learned the accents of mockery in such lines as these 
 from the prologue to Carlell's Arviragus: 
 
 If all these ills could not undo us quite, 
 A brisk French troop is grown your dear delight, 
 Who with broad bloody bills call you each day 
 To laugh and break your buttons at their play; 
 Or see some serious piece, which we presume 
 Is fallen from some incomparable plume. 
 
 He had taken his turn at the Popish Plot in the pro- 
 logues to Lee's Casar Borgia and Tate's Loyal Gen- 
 eral. Always there had been his audience at which 
 he could rail. 
 
 The most compendious method is to rail; 
 Which you so like, you think yourselves ill used 
 When in smart prologues you are not abused. 
 A civil prologue is approved by no man; 
 You hate it as you do a civil woman,
 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 171 
 
 he had declared as early as 1667, in the epilogue to 
 the Maiden Queen. The fun he was to have with Og 
 and Doeg was very much like the fun he had had 
 with the yawning faces in the stalls at Casar Borgia: 
 
 You sleep o'er wit, and by my troth you may; 
 Most of your talents lie another way. 
 You love to hear of some prodigious tale, 
 The bell that tolled alone, or Irish whale. 
 
 Roughly speaking, there are nine subjects treated 
 in Dryden's prologues and epilogues, or nine reasons 
 for their being. These will not serve as the basis for 
 an exact classification, because certain pieces turn on 
 more than one point; but an enumeration of those pro- 
 logues and epilogues which play notably on each of 
 the nine strings may stand as a guide through this 
 most miscellaneous department of Dryden's poetry. 
 
 First, there are those which celebrate theatrical 
 occasions, such as the "Prologue Spoken on the First 
 Day of the King's House Acting after the Fire," the 
 "Prologue for the Women when they Acted at the 
 Old Theater in Lincoln's Inn Fields," the prologue 
 and epilogue to "The Maiden Queen, when Acted 
 by the Women Only," and the prologues and epilogue 
 "Spoken at the Opening of the New House" in 1674. 
 
 Second, there are those which compliment dis- 
 tinguished spectators or flatter special audiences, 
 like the prologues and epilogues spoken at Oxford, 
 the prologue and epilogue for The Unhappy Favourite 
 "Spoken to the King and the Queen at their Coming 
 to the House," the "Prologue to his Royal Highness 
 [the Duke of York], Upon His First Appearance at
 
 172 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 the Duke's Theater Since His Return from Scotland," 
 the "Prologue to the Duchess [of York] on Her Re- 
 turn from Scotland," and the prologue and epilogue 
 "To the King and Queen at the Opening of their 
 Theater upon the Union of the Two Companies in 
 1682." Of all these the prologues spoken at Oxford 
 are deservedly the best known, containing as they 
 do some of Dryden's most genial verse. One, which 
 is seldom quoted, shows him in a particularly merry 
 humor. It is the prologue spoken at the University 
 during the Duke of York's residence in Scotland in 
 1681. Certain members of the company, it seems, 
 had followed the Duke up to Holyrood House: 
 
 Our brethern are from Thames to Tweed departed, 
 
 And of our sisters all the kinder-hearted 
 
 To Edenborough gone, or coached, or carted. 
 
 With bonny bluecap there they act all night 
 
 For Scotch half-crown, in English threepence hight. 
 
 One nymph, to whom fat Sir John Falstaff 's lean, 
 
 There with her single person fills the scene; 
 
 Another, with long use and age decayed, 
 
 Dived here old woman, and rose there a maid. 
 
 Our trusty doorkeepers of former time 
 
 There strut and swagger in heroic rhyme. 
 
 Tack but a copper lace to drugget suit, 
 
 And there's a hero made without dispute; 
 
 And that which was a capon's tail before 
 
 Becomes a plume for Indian Emperor. 
 
 Mrs. Marshall took this pretty farewell of the learned 
 in 1674: 
 
 Such ancient hospitality there rests 
 
 In yours, as dwelt in the first Grecian breasts,
 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 173 
 
 Whose kindness was religion to their guests. 
 Such modesty did to our sex appear, 
 As had there been no laws we need not fear, 
 Since each of you was our protector here. 
 Converse so chaste, and so strict virtue shown, 
 As might Apollo with the Muses own. 
 Till our return, we must despair to find 
 Judges so just, so knowing, and so kind. 
 
 Third, there are those which deal in literary crit- 
 icism, such as the first prologue to the Maiden Queen, 
 on the French and English rules, the epilogue to The 
 Wild Gallant, Revived, on the difficulties of writing 
 comedy, the prologue to the Tempest, on Shakespeare, 
 the prologue to Albumazar, on plagiarism, the pro- 
 logue to Tyrannic Love, on poetic license, the epilogue 
 to the second part of the Conquest of Granada, on 
 Elizabethan and modern wit, the famous prologue 
 to Aureng-Zebe, on rhyming plays, the prologue and 
 epilogue to (Edipus, on anglicizing Greek tragedy, 
 the prologue to Troilus and Cressida, on Shakespeare 
 again, and the prologue to Amphitryon, on the sub- 
 ject of contemporary satire. The epilogue to the 
 second part of the Conquest of Granada is as a whole 
 the most perfect of these poems. The contrast be- 
 tween Jonson's humor and King Charles's wit is 
 developed with economy and precision and yet with 
 a staggering copiousness. The subject is turned 
 every possible way; the seventeen couplets lay on 
 seventeen different pieces of fuel to brighten the fire. 
 Dryden exhausts the subject without exhausting the 
 reader. He varies one sense seventeen ways, but 
 each of the ways is fresh and contributive.
 
 174 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Fourth, there are those which introduce young 
 playwrights, such as the prologue to Circe, introduc- 
 ing Charles Davenant, the epilogue to Tamerlane, 
 commending Charles Saunders, the prologue and 
 epilogue to the Loyal Brother, introducing Thomas 
 Southerne, and the epilogue to The Husband his 
 Own Cuckold, introducing Dryden's own son John. 
 
 Fifth, there are those which berate the audience 
 for its low taste, for its preferring French farce to 
 English comedy, and for the fools and critics that 
 largely compose it. These railing prologues and epi- 
 logues are legion. The general taste is lamented the 
 most reproachfully in the prologue to the Rival 
 Ladies, the epilogue to Aureng-Zebe, the prologue to 
 Limberham, the prologue to Ccesar Borgia, the pro- 
 logue to the Loyal General, the prologue to King 
 Arthur, and the prologue to Cleomenes. The weak- 
 ness for French literary goods is hit the best blows 
 in the epilogue to An Evenings Love, the prologue to 
 Arviragus, the epilogue to the Man of Mode, the pro- 
 logue to the Spanish Friar, and the prologue to 
 Albion and Albanius. Critics and fools are both 
 abhorred alike in the prologue to the Rival Ladies, the 
 epilogue to the Indian Emperor, the second prologue 
 to the Maiden Queen, the prologue to the second part 
 of the Conquest of Granada, the prologue to All for 
 Love, and the epilogue to the Man of Mode. 
 
 Sixth, there are those which play with contem- 
 porary manners in the town and in the theaters; like 
 the prologues written for the women only, the pro- 
 logue to Marriage a la Mode, which makes out a piti- 
 ful case for "poor pensive punk" now that the braves
 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 175 
 
 are all gone off to war, the prologue to The True 
 Widow, on certain familiar vices, the prologue to the 
 Spanish Friar, the prologue to the Princess of Cleves, 
 the epilogue to the King and Queen, and the prologue 
 to Southerne's Disappointment. 
 
 Seventh, there are those which seem to have been 
 calculated to please through sheer brutal innuendo. 
 These are unquotable but superb; they are incontest- 
 ably expert at the game they play. They are the 
 exercises of an adroit and tireless imagination which 
 hesitated at nothing. The prologues and epilogues 
 for the women only, the prologue to The Wild Gal- 
 lant, Revived, the prologue to An Evening's Love, the 
 epilogue to the Assignation, the epilogue to Limber- 
 ham, the prologue and epilogue to the Princess of 
 Cleves, the prologue to the Disappointment, the epi- 
 logue to Constantine the Great, the epilogue to Don 
 Sebastian, the epilogue to Amphitryon, the epilogue 
 to Cleomenes, the epilogue to Bancroft's Henry II, 
 and in fact almost every prologue or epilogue there- 
 after, must be dispatched to this category. 
 
 Eighth, there are the political prologues and epi- 
 logues. "A Lenten Prologue" of 1683, probably by 
 Shadwell, pointed the way to the new type: 
 
 Our prologue wit grows flat; the nap's worn off, 
 And howsoe'er we turn and trim the stuff, 
 The gloss is gone that looked at first so gaudy; 
 'Tis now no jest to hear young girls talk bawdy, 
 But plots and parties give new matters birth, 
 And state distractions serve you here for mirth. 
 
 Shadwell, if Shadwell it was, referred to Dryden's
 
 176 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 X 
 
 and Lee's Duke of Guise (1682). A prologue at Ox- 
 ford in 1680 had compared critics in the theater to 
 Whigs in the state. During the ten years that fol- 
 lowed, almost every prologue or epilogue of Dryden's 
 bore more or less directly upon the constitutional 
 conflict of that decade; the series closing in 1690 with 
 the prologue to Fletcher's Prophetess, which contained 
 covert sneers at the Revolution and presented King 
 William's Irish campaign in a ludicrous light. 
 
 Ninth, there are those which are personal or con- 
 troversial, and take the audience into the poet's con- 
 fidence. The epilogue to Marriage a la Mode is an 
 apology for a chaste play. The epilogue to Fletcher's 
 Pilgrim (1700) is a none too sober moral recantation 
 following the attacks of Collier and others upon the 
 manners of the stage. The prologue to Don Sebastian, 
 Dryden's last play after the Revolution, asks that 
 civil grudges be forgotten, and begs forgiveness for 
 supposed political sins. The prologue to Love Tri- 
 umphant, Dryden's last play of all, is a will and 
 testament bequeathing his various dramatic gifts 
 to the critics and the beaux. It is a sly, ripe piece of 
 raillery, a portion of which should be fitting as a tail- 
 piece to a chapter which has aimed to convey a sense 
 of Dryden's occasional riches. The lines were spoken 
 by Mr. Betterton : 
 
 So now, this poet, who forsakes the stage, 
 
 Intends to gratify the present age. 
 
 One warrant shall be signed for every man. 
 
 All shall be wits that will, and beaux that can. . . . 
 
 He dies, at least to us, and to the stage, 
 
 And what he has he leaves this noble age.
 
 THE OCCASIONAL POET 177 
 
 He leaves you first, all plays of his inditing, 
 
 The whole estate which he has got by writing. 
 
 The beaux may think this nothing but vain praise; 
 
 They'll find it something, the testator says; 
 
 For half their love is made from scraps of plays. 
 
 To his worst foes he leaves his honesty, 
 
 That they may thrive upon't as much as he. 
 
 He leaves his manners to the roaring boys, 
 
 Who come in drunk, and fill the house with noise. 
 
 He leaves to the dire critics of his wit 
 
 His silence and contempt of all they writ. 
 
 To Shakespeare's critic, he bequeaths the curse, 
 
 To find his faults, and yet himself make worse. . . . 
 
 Last, for the fair, he wishes you may be, 
 
 From your dull critics, the lampooners, free. 
 
 Tho' he pretends no legacy to leave you, 
 
 An old man may at least good wishes give you.
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 
 
 "Is it not great pity to see a man, in the flower of 
 his romantic conceptions, in the full vigour of his 
 studies on love and honour, to fall into such a dis- 
 traction, as to walk through the thorns and briers 
 of controversy?" So Tom Brown, in his Reflections 
 on the Hind and Panther, pretended to lament Dry- 
 den's defection from the theaters in the i68o's and 
 his alliance with the new powers of politics and 
 religion. The change, as is well known, meant relief 
 to Dryden from modes of expression which were not 
 altogether adapted to his disposition and by his 
 subjection to which over a period of approximately 
 twenty years he had been somewhat bored. There 
 were a number of reasons, as a matter of fact, for 
 the new departure. Not all of the plays had been 
 successful. "I gad," Bayes had said in the Rehearsal, 
 "the Town has used me as scurvily, as the Players 
 have done. . . . Since they will not admit of my 
 Plays, they shall know what a Satyrist I am. And 
 so farewell to this stage forever, I gad." In the 
 dedication of Aureng-Zebe to Lord Mulgrave in 1676, 
 Dryden had confessed to his patron that he was 
 weary of play-writing and had asked that the King 
 be sounded on the question of an epic, for which 
 leisure and hence a pension would be required. In
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 179 
 
 1690, in the preface to Don Sebastian, he recalled 
 further reasons why he had deserted the stage ten 
 years before. "Having been longer acquainted with 
 the stage than any poet now living, and having ob- 
 served how difficult it was to please; that the humours 
 of comedy were almost spent; that love and honour 
 (the mistaken topics of tragedy) were quite worn 
 out; that the theaters could not support their charges; 
 that the audience forsook them; that young men 
 without learning set up for judges, and that they 
 talked loudest who understood the least; all these 
 discouragements had not only weaned me from the 
 stage, but had also given me a loathing of it." Still 
 another set of circumstances must have been im- 
 pressing themselves upon him during the half dozen 
 years that preceded Absalom and Achitophel. The 
 Court, which had served as a setting and a justifi- 
 cation for the heroic drama and which in its self- 
 sufficiency had tended to cramp the imagination 
 and restrict the field of literary enterprise, had begun 
 to lose somewhat in significance; politics had grown 
 more complicated; the formation of parties was im- 
 minent; and journalism promised new rewards to 
 men who could comment with effect upon topics 
 absorbing the general attention. The Popish Plot 
 injected new fevers into the general blood; violent 
 ups and downs in public fortunes came again, as 
 during the Civil War, to seem matters of course; 
 dramatic reversals of position like those of Titus 
 Gates, who was in glory in 1679, was flogged almost 
 to death in 1685, but was set up with a pension in 
 1689, were now quite regularly to be looked for. The
 
 i8o THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 climax of Dryden's career was coincident with these 
 new crises. The poems on public affairs which he 
 wrote during the six years between Absalom and 
 Achitophel in 1681 and the Hind and the Panther in 
 1687 furnished him as a class with his best opportuni- 
 ties and must always, as a class, deserve to be the 
 best known of his work. 
 
 Throughout the closing years of his main dramatic 
 period Dryden had been wont to express a strong 
 dislike for those "abominable scribblers," the pam- 
 phleteers. It was not only that the pamphleteers 
 of the country party in particular offended his sense 
 of political propriety; pamphleteering in general 
 offended his sense of the dignity of literature and 
 poetry. Meanwhile he was developing a public 
 voice of his own. The prologues and epilogues, the 
 controversial prefaces, and both the rhymed tragedies 
 and the prose comedies in so far as they involved 
 exercise in repartee, had trained his powers of attack, 
 had taught him the damage that might be done with 
 cool, insulting analysis and loaded innuendo. All the 
 while, as it has been seen, he had been discovering 
 important new resources of the heroic couplet, and 
 he had been suppling his medium so that a great 
 variety of materials could be run through it. The 
 new materials were to make severe demands upon 
 his verse, but he came equipped to meet any. 
 He came with unexampled stores of energy and with 
 an incorruptible literary conscience that precluded 
 his writing anything trivial or feeble. "If a poem 
 have genius," he remarked in the preface to Absalom 
 and Achitophel i "it will force its own reception in the
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 181 
 
 world." Dr. Johnson's father, the bookseller, has 
 attested the reception which Absalom and Achitophel 
 forced in its world; genius paid in that one case at 
 least. Dryden came also with an abiding sense of 
 his superiority; he arrived on a high level from which 
 he looked down not only upon other controversi- 
 alists but even upon the events which he was to 
 treat; he maintained that elevation and that com- 
 posure which are never found except in the company 
 of an artistic confidence. He came finally with his 
 most valuable gift of all, his gift of shaping thoughts 
 and composing full, round pictures of men and 
 principles. 
 
 He came, it must be admitted at once, without con- 
 spicuous principles of his own concerning Church or 
 State. Bishop Burnet denied him religious convic- 
 tions of any complexion whatsoever, and his name has 
 always been synonymous with " turn-coat " in politics. 
 First of all, as he himself said, he was "naturally 
 inclined to scepticism;" it is not to be believed that 
 he was converted to Catholicism by the works of 
 Bossuet at the age of fifty-four in the same sense that 
 Gibbon was converted at the age of sixteen, though 
 Gibbon thought he was following in Dry den's tracks; 
 nor is it to be believed that he ever possessed 
 a set of nicely distinguished, carefully pondered 
 political ideas. In the second place, he was not as 
 much convinced that principles were necessary as it 
 is generally assumed he should have been; he was 
 not a prophet or a hero, but a party writer, writing 
 at a time when a comparatively neutral field of 
 public opinion had not as yet been cleared. In the
 
 1 82 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 third place, such principles as he did possess were 
 not so much principles as prejudices, all of which 
 can be summed up by saying that he hated and 
 feared disturbance of any kind. By temperament 
 a firm believer in order, he learned from Hobbes to 
 set a peculiar value on "peaceable, social and com- 
 fortable living" even at the expense of justice and 
 the general health. He was absorbed in the status 
 quo, and his instinct was to strike desperately at 
 whatever new thing threatened a dissipation of 
 authority. 
 
 All other errors but disturb a state, 
 But innovation is the blow of fate, 
 
 he wrote in Absalom and Achitophel. He had all of 
 Hobbes' distrust of the multitude, "that numerous 
 piece of monstrosity," as Sir Thomas Browne put it, 
 "which, taken asunder, seem men, and reasonable 
 creatures of God; but, confused together, make but 
 one great beast." He declined to believe that the 
 crowd knew what it wanted. 
 
 The tampering world is subject to this curse, 
 To physic their disease into a worse. 
 
 What it needed, he said, was "common quiet," and 
 common quiet could only be imposed by a single 
 authority, the King. He had no superstitions about 
 the divine right, but he had no faith in democracy. 
 "Both my nature, as I am an Englishman, and my 
 reason, as I am a man, have bred in me a loathing to 
 that specious name of a Republick," he told the 
 Earl of Danby in the dedication of All for Love three
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 183 
 
 years before the appearance of Absalom and Achito- 
 phel: "that mock-appearance of a liberty, where all 
 who have not part in the government are slaves; 
 and slaves they are of a viler note than such as are 
 subjects to an absolute dominion." Where power 
 already was, there were his sympathies. Any priest 
 or any politician who questioned that power or of- 
 fered to repair the machinery of state was an enemy 
 of mankind. Dryden's dread of change was neither 
 reasonable nor noble, but it was consistent. 
 
 Given a consistent outlook, it was not required 
 that a seventeenth century journalist in verse be a 
 subtle scholar. When journalism becomes subtle, 
 it must go over into prose. It being desirable in 
 that day to work in plain blacks and whites rather 
 than in shades of gray, a type of expression such as 
 Dryden was master of could not fail to be effectual. 
 Both in satire and in ratiocination he wrote with a 
 pulse that could be distinctly felt. His political 
 poems and his religious poems beat against whatever 
 consciousness there was with a regular and powerful 
 rhythm. 
 
 Testimony is varied as to Dryden's satirical tem- 
 per. "Posterity is absolutely mistaken as to that 
 great man," ran an octogenarian 's letter in the Gentle- 
 man's Magazine in 1745; "tho' forced to be a satirist, 
 he was the mildest creature breathing. . . . He was 
 in company the modestest man that ever conversed." 
 It is recorded that latterly at least he was short, fat, 
 florid, had "a down look," and could be "easily 
 discountenanced." He spoke in the preface to the 
 second Miscellany of his "natural diffidence," and
 
 184 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 in the dedication of Troilus and Cressida he said, 
 no doubt facetiously in part, "I never could shake 
 off the rustic bashfulness which hangs upon my na- 
 ture." It was notorious that he could not read his 
 own lines aloud without hesitation and embarrass- 
 ment. "He had something in his nature," asserted 
 Congreve, "that abhorred intrusion into any society 
 whatsoever . . . and, consequently, his character 
 might become liable both to misapprehensions and 
 misrepresentations." George Granville, Lord Lans- 
 downe, defended him thus against Bishop Burnet's 
 charge that he had been "a monster of immodesty": 
 "modesty in too great a degree was his failing. He 
 hurt his fortune by it; he was sensible of it; he com- 
 plained of it, and never could overcome it." All 
 this does not consort with the notion one is likely to 
 have entertained that Dryden was personally formi- 
 dable, even overbearing. The scourge of Shaftes- 
 bury, Buckingham, Shadwell, and Settle by rights 
 should have been towering and scowling; the man who 
 is said to have sent a messenger to Tonson with a 
 scathing triplet and with the words, "Tell the dog 
 that he who wrote these lines can write more," should 
 have been fearful in some physical aspect or other. 
 Yet the only remark which has come down from his 
 time which even indirectly connects satire with him 
 personally is a remark which Aubrey inserted in 
 his life of Milton: "He pronounced the letter R 
 (littera canina) very hard a certaine signe of a 
 Satyricall Witt from Jo. Drey den." Dry den's 
 power seems to have issued solely from his words. 
 He had mastered the satirical kind of expression as
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 185 
 
 he had mastered other kinds before, and what he 
 was like behind his mask of phrases remained of 
 no consequence. He bitterly hated few persons, 
 perhaps none, but he was capable of a sublime con- 
 tempt, and it was contempt that he knew perfectly 
 how to put into meter. At Shadwell he never did 
 anything but laugh. He was never stupefied with 
 rage as the average man is stupefied in the face of 
 idiocy or infamy. He never forgot that he would 
 be effective only as he remembered to be an artist. 
 "There is a pride of doing more than is expected 
 from us," he said, "and more than others would 
 have done." "There's a sweetness in good verse," 
 ran the preface to Absalom and Achitophel, "which 
 tickles even while it hurts, and no man can be 
 heartily angry with him who pleases him against 
 his will." 
 
 Tradition distinguishes between satirists who are 
 mild and well-mannered, like Varro, Horace, and 
 Cowper, and those who are angry and rough, like Lu- 
 cilius, Juvenal, Persius, Hall, Marston, and Church- 
 ill. Dryden belongs with Juvenal, but not in the 
 sense that he is angry or rough. His animus is con- 
 trolled, and his satirical surface is as smooth as worn 
 stone. What he has in common with Juvenal is a 
 huge thoroughness, a quality which he himself 
 attributes to the Roman in the Discourse of Satire: 
 "He fully satisfies my expectation, he treats his 
 subject home ... he drives his reader along with 
 him. . . . When he gives over, it is a sign the sub- 
 ject is exhausted." This largeness and this complete- 
 ness have seldom come together in a satirical poet.
 
 1 86 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Juvenal alone among the Romans had the combi- 
 nation in a notable degree. Medieval satire lacked 
 distinction if it had thoroughness. The so-called 
 classical satirists at the end of Elizabeth's reign in 
 England were angry and rough, but they were nei- 
 ther exalted nor exhaustive. Cleveland, Denham, 
 and Marvell, the first English party satirists, were 
 at best ragged and hasty, however earnest. Butler 
 cannot be compared with anyone, least of all with 
 Dryden, whose laughter never went off into chuckles. 
 John Oldham gave the most promise before Dryden 
 of becoming the English Juvenal. With "satire in 
 his very eye," as a contemporary put it, he went to 
 Boileau for form and appropriated current passions 
 for material. His Satires Upon the Jesuits, written 
 in 1679, first in England treated specific contem- 
 porary affairs with dramatic grandeur and swell- 
 ing dignity. The Elizabethans had not been spe- 
 cific; Cleveland, Denham, and Marvell had not been 
 grand. Oldham, who still seems fresh, must have 
 struck his first readers with remarkable force. His 
 solid, angry lines gave warning of an original and 
 impetuous spirit. Dryden, as the poem which he 
 wrote in 1684 certifies, was vividly impressed by his 
 junior. It was from the Satires Upon the Jesuits, 
 particularly from Loyola's speech in the third part, 
 as well as from Paradise Lost that he drew the state- 
 liness of Absalom and Achitophel. He added humor 
 to Oldham 's preponderating gloom, he modified 
 Oldham's abruptness to directness, and he avoided 
 the infelicities of rhyme and meter with which Old- 
 ham had thought to approximate the fervor of Ju-
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 187 
 
 venal. But the great original force of the man Dry- 
 den did not pretend or wish to modulate. Oldham on 
 his own side had learned much from the elder poet, 
 as numerous passages in his works discover. It is a 
 question whether a couplet that appears in Oldham's 
 Letter from the Country to a Friend in Town (1678), 
 
 That, like a powerful cordial, did infuse 
 New life into his speechless, gaping Muse, 
 
 can be a paraphrase of the conclusion of Dryden's 
 epistle to Lady Castlemaine; 1 Dryden's poem seems 
 never to have been printed before the third Miscellany 
 in 1693, and it is possible that in preparing it for 
 that volume Dryden borrowed the couplet from 
 Oldham to reinforce his ending. But there are six- 
 teen lines near the end of the Letter which cer- 
 tainly "transverse," as the saying then was, the 
 opening of the dedication of the Rival Ladies, pub- 
 lished fourteen years before : 2 
 
 'Tis endless, Sir, to tell the many ways 
 
 Wherein my poor deluded self I please: 
 
 How, when the Fancy lab 'ring for a birth, 
 
 With unfelt throes brings its rude issue forth: 
 
 How after, when imperfect shapeless thought 
 
 Is by the judgment into fashion wrought; 
 
 When at first search I traverse o'er my mind, 
 
 None but a dark and empty void I find; 
 
 Some little hints at length, like sparks, break thence, 
 
 And glimm'ring thoughts just dawning into sense; 
 
 Confused awhile the mixt ideas lie, 
 
 With naught of mark to be discovered by, 
 
 1 See page 147. 
 1 See page 135.
 
 1 88 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Like colours undistinguished in the night, 
 Till the dusk Images, moved to the light, 
 Teach the discerning faculty to choose 
 Which it had best adopt, and which refuse. 
 
 What might be called the satirical accent in Dry- 
 den is noticeable from the beginning. The Juvena- 
 lian portions of the Hastings have already been re- 
 marked. Shadwell, in his Medal of John Bayes, 
 with what foundation is unknown, declares: 
 
 At Cambridge first your scurrilous vein began, 
 When saucily you traduced a nobleman. 
 
 The Astrcza Redux is not without strains of sarcasm, 
 as here: 
 
 Thus banished David spent abroad his time, 
 When to be God's anointed was his crime. 
 
 The Annus Mirabilis comes perilously near to dis- 
 respect of Charles when it says of him that he 
 
 Outweeps an hermit, and out-prays a saint. 
 
 And so on through the prologues and epilogues, 
 Dryden all the while adding steadily to his stock 
 of satirical devices. PJe learns that Alexandrines 
 are of little value in a form where the motion must 
 be swift aftd regular; his major satires have seven' 
 altogether. He learns that the medial pause is the 
 most telling in the long run; he perfects himself in 
 antithesis and balance. He discovers that allitera- 
 tion gives emphasis and helps to set the meter rocK- 
 ing. He sees that pyrrhic feet give speed and assist 
 in making the transitions natural. He finds that
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 189 
 
 the stressing of penultimates stamps out lines which 
 are unforgettable: 
 
 He curses God, but God before cursed him. 
 
 The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull 
 With this prophetic blessing: Be thou dull. 
 
 I will not rake the dung-hill of thy crimes, 
 
 For who would read thy life that reads thy rhymes? 
 
 To talk like Do-eg and to write like thee. 
 
 And gradually he secures full possession of the secret 
 which is to aid him in becoming the most famous of 
 English satirists, the secret of the contemptuous 
 
 "Characters" are as old as literature, as old as 
 human life itself. The summing up of traits was 
 an instinct before it was an art. With Theophras- 
 tus it was a moral exercise. As a branch of the 
 satiric art it was elaborated first by Horace and 
 Juvenal, who by this and other means gave tones 
 to satire which at all its high points it has never 
 lacked. The two Romans went about in different 
 ways, of course, to sketch personalities. Horace 
 worked with a smile, delighting most in scraps of 
 action and dialogue which revealed the fools he knew 
 in Rome. The bore who joined him along the Via 
 Sacra (Sat. I, 9) and Tigellius the Sardinian singer 
 (Sat. I, 3) were laughably real. Tigellius was like 
 Dryden's Zimri: 
 
 This man never did anything of a piece. One while he 
 would run as if he were flying from an enemy; at other 
 times he would walk with as solemn a pace as he who
 
 190 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 carries a sacrifice to Juno. Sometimes he had two hun- 
 dred servants, sometimes only ten. Now he would talk 
 of kings and tetrarchs, and everything great; now he 
 would say, I desire no more than a three-footed table, a 
 little clean salt, and a gown (I do not care how coarse), 
 to defend me from the cold. Had you given this fine 
 manager a thousand sesterces, who was as well satisfied 
 with a few, in five days his pockets would be empty. He 
 would frequently sit up all night, to the very morning, and 
 would snore in bed all day. There never was anything so 
 inconsistent with itself. 
 
 Dryden knew this Tigellius; and once he took oc- 
 casion to praise the Rupilius and the Persius who 
 are presented by Horace in a somewhat different 
 manner in the seventh satire of the first book. They 
 too are shown in action, but Rupilius is introduced 
 by a series of epithets which anticipates Juvenal. 
 
 Durus homo, atque odio qui posset vincere Regem; 
 Confidens, tumidusque; adeo sermonis amari, 
 Sisennos, Barros ut equis pnecurreret albis. 
 
 Juvenal invented the chain of scornful epithets and 
 was partial to it in his satiric practice. If he re- 
 sorted to action at all he made it swift and savage, 
 like that of Messalina going to the stews. His fourth 
 satire is a gallery of portraits, in the manner of 
 Absalom and Achitophel; the various councillors who 
 come to advise the emperor what he shall do with 
 his monstrous turbot are seized by a firm hand and 
 dressed in sinister new robes. The Greek parasite 
 described in the third satire is even more of a Zimri 
 than Tigellius was :
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 191 
 
 Ingenium velox, audacia perdita, sermo 
 Promptus et Isaeo torrentior. Ede quid ilium 
 Esse putes. Quemvis hominem secum attulit ad nos: 
 Grammaticus rhetor geometres pictor aliptes 
 Augur schoenobates medicus magus, omnia novit 
 Graeculus esuriens. 
 
 Dryden has translated the passage thus: 
 
 Quick-witted, brazen-faced, with fluent tongues, 
 
 Patient of labours, and dissembling wrongs. 
 
 Riddle me this, and guess him if you can, 
 
 Who bears a nation in a single man? 
 
 A cook, a conjurer, a rhetorician, 
 
 A painter, pedant, a geometrician, 
 
 A dancer on the ropes, and a physician. 
 
 All things the hungry Greek exactly knows. 
 
 The Middle Ages and the Renaissance were rich in 
 "characters" of types and individuals. Clerics and 
 laymen, allegorists and chroniclers were busy at por- 
 traiture. No one has disposed of individuals in more 
 cursory, stinging phrases than those which Dante 
 used; no one has drawn types better than Chaucer. 
 Barclay's Ship of Fools was full to sinking. Awde- 
 ley's Fraternity of Vagabonds (1565) was a populous 
 gallery of English rogues. In Elizabeth's reign men 
 like Greene and Nash brought forward other rascals 
 to the light; and formal satirists like Hall and Donne 
 gave a general flaying to the London coxcombs. 
 Donne was a fourth-dimensional Horace; the fop who 
 adorns his first satire deserves to be one of the most 
 famous of all literary effigies.
 
 192 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 The seventeenth century, in England and else- 
 where, saw an extraordinary development in the art 
 of portraying personages both generalized and real. 
 The abstract Theophrastian "character" is now a 
 well-known form of Jacobean and Caroline prose. 
 The "humours" of Ben Jonson were almost its 
 starting-point; Sir Thomas Overbury, Joseph Hall, 
 John Stevens, John Earle, Nicholas Breton, Geoffrey 
 Minshull, Wye Saltonstall, Donald Lupton, Rich- 
 ard Flecknoe, and Samuel Butler handed it along, en- 
 riching it all the time with observation and humor, 
 until Addison and Steele, who also knew LaBruyere 
 and the French type, appropriated it for their Sir 
 Roger de Coverley papers, and Fielding grafted on 
 its stem his own Squire Western. Dryden was well 
 acquainted with this body of prose. But his es- 
 pecial contribution was to be made in the field of 
 personal portraiture, a field which began to be culti- 
 vated in prose and in verse somewhat later than the 
 other. The Civil War had created a new public in- 
 terest in public men, and during the Restoration it 
 had rapidly become profitable for political writers to 
 indulge at considerable length in personalities. The 
 Theophrastian essay modified itself to suit this tend- 
 ency, admitting each year a more direct observation 
 and a greater proportion of particular and satiric 
 details. But the tendency was best served by an- 
 other form of prose "character" altogether, the 
 historical-biographical, a form which was evolved 
 simultaneously in France and in England. The 
 models were furnished by the classical historians, 
 chiefly Plutarch, Tacitus, and Suetonius, and by such
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 193 
 
 modern writers of history as the Italian Davila, who 
 treated the Civil Wars of France. In France the de- 
 velopment proceeded through the historians, the 
 writers of Memoires like Richelieu and Cardinal de 
 Retz, the romancers like Madeleine de Scudery, and 
 the composers of portraits like Mademoiselle deMont- 
 pensier. In England the Earl of Clarendon was the 
 master of the historical "character," with a not very 
 close second in Bishop Burnet. George Savile, Mar- 
 quis of Halifax, wrote brilliant political estimates of 
 Charles II and others; Walton, Aubrey, and Sprat 
 made some of the earliest attempts at careful bio- 
 graphical delineation; and in many cases remark- 
 able traits were observed by keen eyes and set down 
 on paper from no other motive than pure private 
 delight. The first Earl of Shaftesbury, Dryden's 
 Achitophel, and therefore an important name in the 
 history of caricature, has left in his fragmentary Au- 
 tobiography a portrait which for richness and clarity 
 of detail ought to have a place among the best known 
 passages of seventeenth century prose. It is given 
 here in full because it illustrates better than any 
 Theophrastian piece or any historian's draft the gift 
 possessed by Dryden's contemporaries of represent- 
 ing flesh and blood in graphic sentences. The sub- 
 ject is his neighbor Henry Hastings, of Woodlands, 
 Dorsetshire, a country gentleman of the old school 
 who was born in 1551 and who died in 1650. 
 
 Mr. Hastings, by his quality, being the son, brother 
 and uncle to the Earls of Huntingdon, and his way of liv- 
 ing, had the first place amongst us. He was peradventure
 
 194 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 an original in our age, or rather the copy of our nobility 
 in ancient days in hunting and not warlike times: he was 
 low, very strong and very active, of a reddish flaxen hair, 
 his clothes always green cloth, and never all worth when 
 new five pounds. His house was perfectly of the old fash- 
 ion, in the midst of a large park well stocked with deer, 
 and near the house rabbits to serve his kitchen, many fish- 
 ponds, and great store of wood and timber; a bowling- 
 green in it, long but narrow, full of high ridges, it being 
 never levelled since it was ploughed; they used round sand 
 bowls, and it had a banqueting-house like a stand, a large 
 one built in a tree. He kept all manner of sport-hounds 
 that ran buck, fox, hare, otter, and badger, and hawks long 
 and short winged; he had all sorts of nets for fishing; he had 
 a walk in the New Forest and the manor of Christ Church. 
 This last supplied him with red deer, sea and river fish; 
 and indeed all his neighbours' grounds and royalties were 
 free to him, who bestowed all his time in such sports, but 
 what he borrowed to caress his neighbours' wives and 
 daughters, there being not a woman in all his walks of the 
 degree of a yeoman's wife or under, and under the age of 
 forty, but it was extremely her fault if he were not inti- 
 mately acquainted with her. This made him very popular, 
 always speaking kindly to the husband, brother, or father, 
 who was to boot very welcome to his house whenever he 
 came; there he found beef pudding and small beer in great 
 plenty, a house not so neatly kept as to shame him or his 
 dirty shoes, the great hall strewed with marrow bones, 
 full of hawks' perches, hounds, spaniels, and terriers, the 
 upper sides of the hall hung with the fox-skins of this and 
 the last year's skinning, here and there a polecat inter- 
 mixed, guns and keepers' and huntsmen's poles in abun- 
 dance. The parlour was a large long room, as properly 
 furnished; in a great hearth paved with brick lay some 
 terriers and the choicest hounds and spaniels; seldom but
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 195 
 
 two of the great chairs had litters of young cats in them, 
 which were not to be disturbed, he having always three or 
 four attending him at dinner, and a little white round stick 
 of fourteen inches long lying by his trencher that he might 
 defend such meat as he had no mind to part with to them. 
 The windows, which were very large, served for places 
 to lay his arrows, crossbows, stonebows, and other such 
 like accoutrements; the corners of the room full of the 
 best chose hunting and hawking poles; an oyster-table at 
 the lower end, which was of constant use twice a day all 
 the year round, for he never failed to eat oysters before 
 dinner and supper through all seasons: the neighbouring 
 town of Poole supplied him with them. The upper part 
 of this room had two small tables and a desk, on the one 
 side of which was a church Bible, on the other the Book 
 of Martyrs; on the tables were hawks' hoods, bells, and 
 such like, two or three old green hats with their crowns 
 thrust in so as to hold ten or a dozen eggs, which were of 
 a pheasant kind of poultry he took much care of and fed 
 himself; tables, dice, cards, and boxes were not wanting. 
 In the hole of the desk were store of tobacco-pipes that 
 had been used. On one side of this end of the room was the 
 door of a closet, wherein stood the strong beer and the wine, 
 which never came thence but in single glasses, that being 
 the rule of the house exactly observed, for he never ex- 
 ceeded in drink or permitted it. On the other side was a 
 door into an old chapel not used for devotion; the pulpit, 
 as the safest place, was never wanting of a cold chine of 
 beef, pasty of venison, gammon of bacon, or great apple- 
 pie with thick crust extremely baked. His table cost 
 him not much, though it was very good to eat at, his 
 sports supplying all but beef and mutton, except Friday, 
 when he had the best sea-fish he could get, and was the 
 day that his neighbours of best quality most visited him. 
 He never wanted a London pudding, and always sung it
 
 196 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 in with "my part lies therein-a." He drank a glass of 
 wine or two at meals, very often syrrup of gilliflower in 
 his sack, and had always a tun glass without feet stood 
 by him holding a pint of small beer, which he often stirred 
 with a great sprig of rosemary. He was well natured, but 
 soon angry, calling his servants bastard and cuckoldy 
 knaves, in one of which he often spoke truth to his own 
 knowledge, and sometimes in both, though of the same 
 man. He lived to a hundred, never lost his eyesight, but 
 always writ and read without spectacles, and got to horse 
 without help. Until past fourscore he rode to the death 
 of a stag as well as any. l 
 
 Defoe or Fielding or Scott might have done a series 
 of novels on Achitophel's Henry Hastings; the seven- 
 teenth century, so prodigal of its human material, 
 used him neither for that nor for any other purpose. 
 The type of verse "character" which Dryden 
 found at hand in 1681 was already of a good many 
 years' standing. In the course of its evolution it 
 had drawn upon each of the prose types, the abstract 
 and the individual, for certain of its qualities. From 
 the Theophrastian sketch it had derived a Euphuis- 
 tic, antithetical niceness of phrasing which tended to 
 resolve it into a pleasant dance of categories. From 
 the historical or biographical or political sketch it 
 had derived its allusiveness, its concreteness, and its 
 pungency. Ever since the days of the Short Parlia- 
 ment there had been Clevelands, Marvells, and 
 nameless writers who had achieved concreteness and 
 pungency, but rarely or never had a note of niceness 
 
 1 A full length portrait of Mr. Hastings is reproduced in John Hutchin's 
 History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset, 3d ed., London, 1868, 
 vol. Ill, p. 155.
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 197 
 
 been heard. Satirists had balanced their epithets, 
 but only roughly; the movement of their verse had 
 been spasmodic rather than fleet. The Earl of Mul- 
 grave's Essay upon Satire, which was circulated in 
 manuscript in 1679 and 1680 and thought by many, 
 because of its slashing directness, to be Dryden's, had 
 showed great improvement in the form of its "char- 
 acters;" that of Tropos (Lord Chief Justice Scroggs), 
 
 At bar abusive, on the bench unable, 
 Knave on the woolsack, fop at council table, 
 
 and that of Rochester, for which Dryden was beaten 
 in Rose Street, Covent Garden, 
 
 Mean in each action, lewd in every limb, 
 Manners themselves are mischievous in him, 
 
 had been powerful and swift of dispatch. Now Dry- 
 den came with his contribution, which to begin with 
 was a metrical contribution. His Achitophel and 
 his Zimri captivated the town first of all by virtue 
 of their felicity and finish. Without being in the 
 least labored they were felt at once to be important; 
 they had the accent of authority. The "characters" 
 of Arod and Malchus in the anonymous Roman 
 Catholic poem, Naboth's Fineyard, which had been 
 printed in 1679 as a protest against the condemna- 
 tion of Lord Strafford under cover of the Popish Plot, 
 and which more than any other verse pamphlet, by 
 virtue of its epic solemnity, its Biblical tissue, and 
 its general plan, gave Dryden the cue for his own 
 masterpiece, had failed to make a great impression, 
 possibly because Oldham's more striking Satires had
 
 i 9 8 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 circulated the same year. In Naboth's Vineyard, 
 Jezabel, King Achab's malicious queen and counsel- 
 lor, had leagued herself with Arod, a kind of Achi- 
 tophel : 
 
 She summons then her chosen instruments, 
 Always prepared to serve her black intents; 
 The chief was Arod, whose corrupted youth 
 Had made his soul an enemy to truth; 
 But nature furnished him with parts and wit, 
 For bold attempts, and deep intriguing fit. 
 Small was his learning; and his eloquence 
 Did please the rabble, nauseate men of sense. 
 Bold was his spirit, nimble and loud his tongue, 
 Which more than law, or reason, takes the throng. 
 
 Arod, in turn, had had for his tool a kind of Gates : 
 
 Malchus, a puny Levite, void of sense, 
 
 And grace, but stuffed with voice and impudence, 
 
 Was his prime tool; so venomous a brute, 
 
 That every place he lived in spued him out; 
 
 Lies in his mouth, and malice in his heart, 
 
 By nature grew, and were improved by art. 
 
 Mischief his pleasure was; and all his joy 
 
 To see his thriving calumny destroy 
 
 Those, whom his double heart and forked tongue 
 
 Surer than vipers' teeth to death had stung. 
 
 Arod had been invoked at another point in the poem 
 exactly as Zimri was to be introduced on Dryden's 
 stage : 
 
 In the first rank of Levites Arod stood, 
 Court-favour placed him there, not worth or blood.
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 199 
 
 The "characters" in Naboth's Vineyard had been 
 interesting, but they had not been felt to be impor- 
 tant, they had made no hit; whereas Achitophel and 
 Zimri, who derived directly from them, within the 
 first month after their appearance were known to 
 all the men about town. 
 
 Of these the false Achitophel was first, 
 
 A name to all succeeding ages curst: 
 
 For close designs and crooked counsels fit, 
 
 Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit. 
 
 Restless, unfixed in principles 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. 
 
 A daring pilot in extremity; 
 
 Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high 
 
 He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit, 
 
 Would steer too nigh the sands to boast his wit. 
 
 Great wits are sure to madness near allied, 
 
 And thin partitions do their bounds divide; 
 
 Else why should he, with wealth and honour blest, 
 
 Refuse his age the needful hours of rest? 
 
 Punish a body which he could not please; 
 
 Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease? 
 
 And all to leave what with his toil he won, 
 
 To that unfeathered two-legg'd thing, a son; 
 
 Got, while his soul did huddled notions try; 
 
 And born a shapeless lump, like anarchy. 
 
 In friendship false, implacable in hate; 
 
 Resolved to ruin or to rule the State. 
 
 To compass this the triple bond he broke; 
 
 The pillars of the public safety shook,
 
 200 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 And fitted Israel for a foreign yoke: 
 
 Then seized with fear, yet still affecting fame, 
 
 Usurped a patriot's all-atoning name. 
 
 So easy still it proves in factious times, 
 
 With public zeal to cancel private crimes. 
 
 How safe is treason and how sacred ill, 
 
 When none can sin against the people's will! 
 
 Where crowds can wink, and no offense be known, 
 
 Since in another's guilt they find their own. 
 
 Yet fame deserved no enemy can grudge; 
 
 The statesman we abhor, but praise the judge. 
 
 In Israel's courts ne'er sat an Abbethdin 
 
 With more discerning eyes, or hands more clean; 
 
 Unbribed, unsought, the wretched to redress; 
 
 Swift of dispatch, and easy of access. 
 
 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 chymist, 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,
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 201 
 
 He had his jest, and they had his estate. 
 
 He laughed 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 amd wise Achitophel. 
 
 Thus, wicked but in will, of means bereft, 
 
 He left not faction, but of that was left. 
 
 Dryden continued throughout his career to exercise 
 a dictatorship in the world of "characters." Often 
 he seemed to be saying the last word about a man 
 when actually he was saying almost nothing; he 
 seemed to weave a close garment about his subject 
 when in truth he only latticed him over with antith- 
 eses. He became the acknowledged master of the 
 cadenced epithet. Yet it would be absurd to imply 
 that his success was merely technical. His authority 
 was that of a knowing and a smiling man as well as 
 that of a virtuoso; humor, imagination, wisdom, 
 and thoroughly competent cynicism were also his 
 contributions. He testified in the Discourse of Satire 
 that the fine etching of characters was not a simple 
 trick. ' 'Tis not reading, 'tis not imitation of an 
 author, which can produce this fineness; it must be 
 inborn; it must proceed from a genius, and particu- 
 lar way of thinking, which is not to be taught. . . . 
 How easy is it 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! . . . there is still a vast 
 difference betwixt 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. . . .
 
 202 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 The character of Zimri in my Absalom is, in my opin- 
 ion, worth the whole poem: it is not bloody, but it 
 is ridiculous enough; and he, for whom it was in- 
 tended, was too witty to resent it as an injury. If 
 I had railed, I might have suffered for it justly; but 
 I managed my own work more happily, perhaps more 
 dexterously. I avoided the mention of great crimes, 
 and applied myself to the representing of blindsides, 
 and little extravagancies; to which, the wittier a 
 man is, he is generally the more obnoxious. It suc- 
 ceeded as I wished; the jest went round, and he was 
 laughed at in his turn who began the frolic." No 
 one will deny that Dryden's pictures of men and 
 parties between the Exclusion Bill and the Declara- 
 tion of Indulgence are works of genius. Competent 
 historians agree that his comments, if not always 
 fair, still throw a brighter light upon those six years 
 than do all other contemporary records combined; 
 subsequent research has only increased their respect 
 for the man who left his studies on love and honor 
 and fell into such a distraction as to walk through 
 the thorns and briars of controversy. Nor can any- 
 one fail to pay tribute to a mind so various that it 
 could proceed from Achitophel and Zimri to Jotham, 
 from Jotham to the rollicking Og and Doeg, from 
 them to the sects in The Hind and the Panther, and 
 from the sects to Bishop Burnet, the Buzzard. Only 
 Pope in the next generation, with his Atticus, his 
 Sporus, and his Wharton, succeeded in carving images 
 as rare as Dryden's. The Queen Anne poetasters as 
 a rule lacked the necessary intellectual resources. 
 As the author of Uzziah and Jotham had rather
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 203 
 
 mournfully remarked in his preface in 1690, "Ab- 
 salom and Achitophel was a masterpiece" beyond 
 which none might expect to go. But the cadences 
 of the Drydenian " character," if nothing more, 
 sounded distinctly and constantly through all Au- 
 gustan verse. The poems that answered the Ab- 
 salom fell into its rhythms, and there were complete 
 copyists like Duke in his Review or Mainwaring in 
 his Tarquin and Tullia and his Suum Cuisque. After 
 Pope the cadences were less plainly heard. Churchill 
 went out of his way to recall them; but neither Gold- 
 smith in his Retaliation nor Cowper in his Conversa- 
 tion found them indispensable. 
 
 Dryden's experience before Absalom and Achito- 
 phel gave him many contacts with the stuff of human 
 nature. The writing of twenty plays, for instance, 
 afforded him an acquaintance with postures, figures, 
 and mental complexions. He was not brilliant in 
 dramatic characterization; his men and women are 
 seldom easy to visualize; but he grew adept in the 
 specification of traits, he mastered the phraseology 
 of personal description. His great example was 
 Shakespeare, whom he approached in gusto though 
 not in penetration. He has a number of energetic 
 Beatrices, although he has said of none of them, 
 
 Disdain and Scorn ride sparkling in her eyes. 
 
 The heroic plays abound in creatures who are garn- 
 ished with symmetrical, balanced hyperbole but 
 who have no significance as human beings. The 
 comedies are much happier. In the writing of his 
 prose comedies Dryden touched upon such stock
 
 204 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 types as the spendthrift, the rake, the witty mis- 
 tress, the scold, the affected woman, the swash- 
 buckler. English dramatists from Jonson on had 
 left him a rich legacy of language with which to 
 treat such figures, and he managed his inheritance 
 with some dexterity. The French comic writers, 
 particularly Moliere, furnished him at the same time 
 with admirable models for portraits precieuses. The 
 outcome was that he acquired a turn for hitting off 
 the blindsides and extravagancies of his people not 
 so much through action, though he does that bril- 
 liantly in Marriage a la Mode, as through elaborate 
 comments by other participants in the scene. His 
 Sir Martin Mar-All, originally a creation of Moliere 's, 
 becomes in his hands a really integral clown. "I 
 never laughed so in all my life," said Pepys, who went 
 to see him. The writing of critical essays and pref- 
 aces gave Dryden another kind of acquaintance 
 with the outlines of character. His estimates in the 
 Essay of Dramatic Poesy of authors past and present, 
 of Wild, Cleveland, Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont 
 and Fletcher, together with the frequent contrasts 
 and parallels which he drew between famous poets, 
 taught him discrimination in praise and opprobrium; 
 the critical prologues and epilogues encouraged 
 pertinency and concentration. The writing of com- 
 plimentary prose and verse did not make for dis- 
 crimination in the distribution of excellences, but 
 it added to Dryden 's stock of attributes and it in- 
 volved important exercise in the grouping of them. 
 The specialized "character-cadences" which jolted 
 Achitophel and Zimri into fame were by no means
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 205 
 
 new to Dryden in 1681, although they had not been 
 exactly prominent in his verse before. They had 
 appeared as early as the Annus Mirabilis, when it 
 was said of the "Belgian" admirals, 
 
 Designing, subtile, diligent, and close, 
 They knew to manage war with wise delay. 
 
 They had been heard in the State of Innocence, when 
 Adam declared against woman, 
 
 Add that she's proud, fantastic, apt to change, 
 Fond without art, and kind without deceit. 
 
 Often, as in the Spanish Friar, blank verse characters 
 had been sketched in the later Elizabethan cadences 
 rather than in those which were to become known 
 as Dryden 's and Pope's. Pedro had spoken thus of 
 Dominick : 
 
 I met a reverend, fat, old gouty friar, 
 With a paunch swolPn so high, his double chin 
 Might rest upon it; a true son of the church; 
 Fresh-coloured, and well thriven on his trade, 
 Come puffing with his greasy bald-pate choir, 
 And fumbling o'er his beads in such an agony, 
 He told them false, for fear. About his neck 
 There hung a wench, the label of his function, 
 Whom he shook off, i' faith, methought, unkindly. 
 It seems the holy stallion durst not score 
 Another sin, before he left the world. 
 
 Restoration blank verse, it will be seen, encouraged 
 a boundless extravagance in portraiture rather than 
 a Gallic justness, or appearance of justness.
 
 206 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Absalom and Achitophel, then, like Waller's poetry, 
 came out forty thousand strong before the wits were 
 aware. Its impression on Dryden himself was fully 
 as remarkable as its impression on its readers or on 
 the other poets of London. Dryden realized at once 
 that he had woven patches of verse which would 
 wear like iron, and proceeded to acquaint himself 
 with all the varieties of texture which the new weave 
 would admit. From 1681 to 1700 he wrote scarcely 
 a poem which he did not enrich with "characters" 
 or the cadences of "characters." The Medal was 
 one long likeness of Shaftesbury, with a few concen- 
 trated passages like the following, which showed 
 that gifted Whig sitting for the engraver: 
 
 Five days he sate for every cast and look; 
 
 Four more than God to finish Adam took. 
 
 But who can tell what essence angels are, 
 
 Or how long Heaven was making Lucifer? 
 
 O could the style that copied every grace, 
 
 And plowed such furrows for an eunuch face, 
 
 Could it have formed his ever-changing will, 
 
 The various piece had tired the graver's skill! 
 
 A martial hero first, with early care 
 
 Blown, like a pigmy by the winds, to war. 
 
 A beardless chief, a rebel, ere a man. 
 
 (So young his hatred to his prince began.) 
 
 Next this, (how wildly will ambition steer!) 
 
 A vermin wriggling in the usurper's ear. 
 
 Bartering his venal wit for sums of gold, 
 
 He cast himself into the saintlike mold; 
 
 Groaned, sighed, and prayed, while godliness was gain, 
 
 The loudest bagpipe of the squeaking train.
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 207 
 
 Mac Flecknoe, whenever it may have been composed, 
 began with a "character" which for sheer cumulative 
 destructiveness has no equal in satire. Says Fleck- 
 noe: 
 
 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 pretense, 
 
 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 fabrick fills the eye 
 
 And seems designed for thoughtless majesty: 
 
 Thoughtless as monarch oaks that shade the plain, 
 
 And, spread in solemn state, supinely reign. 
 
 The second part of Absalom and Achitophel, with its 
 Ben-Jochanan, its Og and its Doeg, opened a new 
 world of broad comedy; for once Dry den frolicked 
 like Rabelais. Doeg, or Settle, and Og, or Shadwell, 
 are irresistible. Merriment elbows resentment aside 
 in lines like these: 
 
 Doeg, though without knowing how or why, 
 
 Made still a blundering kind of melody; 
 
 Spurred boldly on, and dashed through thick and thin, 
 
 Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in; 
 
 Free from all meaning, whether good or bad, 
 
 And in one word, heroically mad; 
 
 He was too warm on picking-work to dwell, 
 
 But fagotted his notions as they fell,
 
 208 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 And if they rhymed and rattled, all was well. 
 Spiteful he is not, though he wrote a Satyr, 
 For still there goes some thinking to ill-nature; 
 He needs no more than birds and beasts to think, 
 All his occasions are to eat and drink. 
 If he call rogue and rascal from a garret, 
 He means you no more mischief than a parrot; 
 The words for friend and foe alike were made, 
 To fetter 'em in verse is all his trade. 
 
 Now stop your noses, readers, all and some, 
 
 For here's a tun of midnight work to come, 
 
 Og from a treason tavern rolling home. 
 
 Round as a globe, and liquored every chink, 
 
 Goodly and great he sails behind his link; 
 
 With all his bulk there's nothing lost in Og, 
 
 For every inch that is not fool is rogue: 
 
 A monstrous mass of foul corrupted matter, 
 
 As all the Devils had spewed to make the batter. 
 
 When wine has given him courage to blaspheme, 
 
 He curses God, but God before cursed him; 
 
 And if man could have reason, none has more, 
 
 That made his paunch so rich and him so poor. . . . 
 
 But though Heaven made him poor, (with reverence 
 
 speaking,) 
 
 He never was a poet of God's making; 
 The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull, 
 With this prophetic blessing Be thou dull; 
 Drink, swear and roar, forbear no lewd delight, 
 Fit for thy bulk, do anything but write. 
 Thou art of lasting make, like thoughtless men, 
 A strong nativity but for the pen; 
 Eat opium, mingle arsenick in thy drink, 
 Still thou mayst live, avoiding pen and ink. 
 I see, I see, 'tis counsel given in vain,
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 209 
 
 For treason botched in rhyme will be thy bane; 
 
 Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck, 
 
 'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck. 
 
 Why should thy meter good King David blast? 
 
 A psalm of his will surely be thy last. 
 
 Dar'st thou presume in verse to meet thy foes, 
 
 Thou whom the penny pamphlet foiled in prose? 
 
 Doeg, whom God for mankind's mirth has made, 
 
 O'ertops thy talent in thy very trade; 
 
 Doeg to thee, thy paintings are so coarse, 
 
 A poet is, though he's the poet's horse. 
 
 A double noose thou on thy neck does pull, 
 
 For writing treason and for writing dull; 
 
 To die for faction is a common evil, 
 
 But to be hanged for nonsense is the Devil. 
 
 Hadst thou the glories of thy king expressed, 
 
 Thy praises had been satire at the best; 
 
 But thou in clumsy verse, unlicked, unpointed, 
 
 Hast shamefully detiled the Lord's anointed: 
 
 I will not rake the dung-hill of thy crimes, 
 
 For who would read thy life that reads thy rhymes? 
 
 But of King David's foes be this the doom, 
 
 May all be like the young man Absalom; 
 
 And for my foes may this their blessing be, 
 
 To talk like Doeg and to write like thee. 
 
 Dryden had not stopped laughing a year later when 
 in The Vindication of the Duke of Guise he answered 
 three pamphleteering adversaries, one of whom he 
 believed to be Shadwell. "Og may write against 
 the King if he pleases, so long as he drinks for him," 
 he observed; "and his writings will never do the 
 Government so much harm, as his drinking does it 
 good; for true subjects will not be much perverted
 
 210 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 by his libels, but the wine duties rise considerably 
 by his claret. He has often called me an atheist in 
 print; I would believe more charitably of him, and 
 that he only goes the broad way because the other 
 is too narrow for him. He may see by this, I do 
 not delight to meddle with his course of life, and 
 his immoralities, though I have a long bead-roll of 
 them. I have hitherto contented myself with the 
 ridiculous part of him, which is enough in all con- 
 science to employ one man: even without the story 
 of his late fall at the Old Devil, where he broke no 
 ribs, because the hardness of the stairs could reach no 
 bones; and for my part, I do not wonder how he 
 came to fall, for I have always known him heavy; 
 the miracle is, how he got up again. . . . But to 
 leave him, who is not worth any further considera- 
 tion, now I have done laughing at him. Would every 
 man knew his own talent, and that they who are only 
 born for drinking, would let both poetry and prose 
 alone." So cheerfully it was that Mr. Bayes shed 
 the venom of his assailants. The Religio Laid in- 
 dulged in a more subdued kind of caricature when 
 it summed up the accomplishments of the private 
 spirit in theology. The Hind and the Panther was 
 crowded with mature and calm though none the 
 less vivid pictures of persons and sects: the Roman 
 Catholic milk-white Hind herself (I, 1-8) ; the Inde- 
 pendents, the Quakers, the Freethinkers, the Ana- 
 baptists, and the Arians (I, 35-61); the Presbyte- 
 rians (I, 160-189); tne Brownists (I, 310-326); the 
 noble Anglican Panther (I, 327-510); the mind of 
 the Anglican establishment (III, 70-79) :
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 211 
 
 Disdain, with gnawing envy, fell despite, 
 And cankered malice stood in open sight; 
 Ambition, interest, pride without control, 
 And jealousy, the jaundice of the soul; 
 Revenge, the bloody minister of ill, 
 With all the lean tormentors of the will; 
 
 the Latitudinarians (III, 160-172); the Huguenot 
 exiles (III, 173-190); the Anglican tradition (III, 
 400-409) : 
 
 Add long prescription of established laws, 
 And pique of honour to maintain a cause, 
 And shame of change, and fear of future ill, 
 And zeal, the blind conductor of the will; 
 And chief among the still-mistaking crowd, 
 The fame of teachers obstinate and proud, 
 And, more than all, the private judge allowed; 
 Disdain of Fathers which the dance began, 
 And last, uncertain whose the narrower span, 
 The clown unread, and half-read gentleman; 
 
 the Martin, or Father Petre (III, 461-468); James 
 II, "a plain good man" (III, 906-937); the Angli- 
 can clergy (III, 944-954); and finally the Buzzard, 
 or Bishop Burnet (III, 1 141-1 191) : 
 
 More learn 'd than honest, more a wit than learn 'd. . . . 
 
 Prompt to assail, and careless of defense, 
 
 Invulnerable in his impudence, 
 
 He dares the world and, eager of a name, 
 
 He thrusts about and justles into fame. 
 
 Frontless and satire-proof, he scours the streets, 
 
 And runs an Indian muck at all he meets.
 
 212 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 So fond of loud report, that not to miss 
 Of being known, (his last and utmost bliss,) 
 He rather would be known for what he is. 
 
 The blank verse tragedies which Dryden wrote after 
 the Revolution were gorgeously hung with portraits. 
 Shakespearean cadences prevailed in them; yet now 
 and then the old lilt would insist upon a hearing, as 
 in the second act of Don Sebastian: 
 
 What honour is there in a woman's death! 
 Wronged, as she says, but helpless to revenge, 
 Strong in her passion, impotent of reason, 
 Too weak to hurt, too fair to be destroyed. 
 Mark her majestic fabric; she's a temple 
 Sacred by birth, and built by hands divine; 
 
 or in the third act of the same play: 
 
 The genius of your Moors is mutiny; 
 They scarcely want a guide to move their madness; 
 Prompt to rebel on every weak pretense; 
 Blustering when courted, crouching when oppressed; 
 Wise to themselves, and fools to all the world; 
 Restless in change, and perjured to a proverb. 
 They love religion sweetened to the sense; 
 A good, luxurious, palatable faith. 
 
 The Juvenal and the Persius, as might be expected, 
 contain a number of ruthlessly consummate de- 
 lineations; the Vectidius of Persius (IV, 50-73) is 
 one of Dryden 's most mocking. As Dryden pro- 
 ceeded with his translations and his narratives he 
 came more and more to rely upon the antithetical 
 paragraph as a device for introductions, transitions,
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 213 
 
 and summaries. It proved useful not only for analy- 
 zing the natures of men but for sketching scenes 
 and stating situations. Almost every page of the 
 Virgil and the Fables rang with the familiar cadences. 
 Chaucer himself had not been without his rocking 
 rhythms; so when Dryden found lines in the Canter- 
 bury Tales that were suited to his purpose he brought 
 them straight over. Such a line as this in the 
 Knight's Tale, 
 
 Blak was his herd, and manly was his face, 
 
 was no way altered except in spelling. More of 
 Chaucer yet would have been appropriated without 
 change had his syllabication possessed utility for 
 Dryden. The "Character of a Good Parson" in 
 the Fables, elaborated from Chaucer's Prologue at 
 the request of Samuel Pepys, was like most of Dry- 
 den's Christian poems, tame. The last "character" 
 of all was one of the best. The ten lines on the 
 Rhodian militia in Cymon and Iphigenia have as 
 much satiric meat in them as have any ten lines in 
 Dryden or in English. Their cadences, which are 
 well under the poet's control, express burly, amused 
 contempt : 
 
 The country rings around with loud alarms, 
 
 And raw in fields the rude militia swarms; 
 
 Mouths without hands; maintained at vast expense; 
 
 In peace a charge, in war a weak defence; 
 
 Stout once a month they march, a blustering band, 
 
 And ever, but in times of need, at hand. 
 
 This was the morn when, issuing on the guard,
 
 214 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Drawn up in rank and file they stood prepared 
 
 Of seeming arms to make a short essay, 
 
 Then hasten to be drunk, the business of the day. 
 
 Dryden 's ratiocinative pulse beats with a longer, 
 slower stroke, but it is never feeble. "Reasoning!" 
 exclaimed Bayes in the Rehearsal, "I gad; I love 
 reasoning in verse." Tom Brown, offering once to 
 explain who Dryden was at all, said "He is that 
 accomplished person, who loves reasoning so much in 
 verse, and hath got a knack of writing it smoothly." 
 "The favourite exercise of his mind was ratioci- 
 nation," thought Dr. Johnson. "When once he had 
 engaged himself in disputation, thoughts flowed in 
 on either side; he was now no longer at a loss; he 
 had always objections and solutions at command." 
 That is to say, Dr. Johnson implied, Dryden may 
 often have looked about him for images which he 
 could not find, but he never needed to scour for 
 reasons or inferences. "They cannot be good poets," 
 said Dryden himself, "who are not accustomed to 
 argue well." Dryden was fascinated by the technical 
 problems involved in making rhyme and reason lie 
 down together. He was a versifier of propositions 
 rather than a philosopher resorting to poetry, or 
 even a poet speculating. No mind mastered him as 
 Epicurus mastered Lucretius, or even, to come much 
 farther down, as Bolingbroke mastered Pope. His 
 imagination did not deeply explore as Dante's and 
 Milton's explored. He was not curious, and ab- 
 sorbed, and quaintly condensed, like Sir John Davies, 
 nor had he a trace of Cowper's neighborly discursive- 
 ness. His two chief ratiocinative poems dealt with
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 215 
 
 the most transitory of topics, creeds and ecclesiastical 
 expedients. The Religio Laid and The Hind and 
 the Panther never have been and never will be read 
 by many persons. The first attracted only slight 
 attention even when it was timely; the second was 
 never timely, for it had its thunder stolen by James's 
 Declaration of Indulgence before it was printed, 
 and within a year it was nullified in most respects 
 by the Revolution. Here, as elsewhere in Dryden, 
 it is riot his ideas but his way of thinking that is 
 important. From such a point of view the Religio 
 Laid is a truly engaging poem; The Hind and the 
 Panther is a great representative work; and Gray's 
 "thoughts that breathe and words that burn" is 
 not an impossible phrase. 
 
 It is hardly worth while to become exercised over 
 the question whether Dryden's ratiocinative poems 
 are really poems. It has been categorically denied 
 that argument has any place in poetry. Whatever 
 the truth may be in vacuo, it remains that Dryden 
 has achieved an effect of his own which has been 
 achieved by no other writer, in prose or in verse. 
 Congreve was off the scent when he wrote: "Take 
 his verses and divest them of their rhyme, disjoint 
 them in their numbers, transpose their expressions, 
 make what arrangement and disposition you please 
 of his words, yet shall there eternally be poetry, and 
 something which will be found incapable of being 
 resolved into absolute prose." Horace's test is not 
 to be applied to Dryden. It is precisely in his rhymes, 
 his numbers, his expressions, his arrangements, and 
 his dispositions that Dryden has been an artist. The
 
 216 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 triumph is a fragile one; the spell would be broken 
 by translation; The Hind and the Panther in French 
 would almost certainly be dull; but while the spell 
 lasts it is real. Dryden's devices were numerous, his 
 ratiocinative technique was complex. Tom Brown 
 thought arguing in verse to be a simple matter. 
 "To do this," he said, "there is no need of brain, 'tis 
 but scanning right; the labor is in the finger, not in 
 the head." Brown, quite naturally, was not inter- 
 ested in the subtleties which labor of this kind in- 
 volves. It may not be too fantastic to say that 
 Dryden's brains were in his fingers, that he thought 
 in meter. Alliteration in him binds words, phrases, 
 lines, couplets, paragraphs together. Rhyme, by 
 holding the reader's mind, as Taine says, "on the 
 stretch," gives to the poet's statements a strange 
 factitious potency, so that they satisfy the curiosity 
 of the ear rather than that of the mind. Alexan- 
 drines close discussions as if forever. Enjambement 
 allows the imagination leisure to thread its way 
 through meditative passages. Series of well-chosen 
 adjectives advance a proposition with steady strides: 
 
 Not that tradition's parts are useless here, 
 When general, old, disinterested and clear. 
 
 Metaphors unobtrusively employed clinch a point 
 before the reader is aware of the advantage which 
 is being taken of him: 
 
 This was the fruit the private spirit brought, 
 Occasioned by great zeal and little thought. 
 While crowds unlearned, with rude devotion warm, 
 About the sacred viands buzz and swarm.
 
 THE JOURNALIST IN VERSE 217 
 
 Exclamations draw many meanings briskly together. 
 Queries serve for transitions. Catchwords and con- 
 nectives like "then," "granting that," "True, 
 but," "thus far," "'tis true," keep the game of 
 ratiocination animated and going. Aphorisms set 
 off arguments. Repetition and refrain speak pros- 
 elyting sincerity or else confessional ecstasy. Abrupt 
 apostrophes seem to denote overwhelming convic- 
 tions suddenly arrived at. Passages of limpid and 
 beautiful statement appear the issues of a serenely 
 composed conscience. Angry, headlong digressions 
 subside into mellow confessions of faith. 
 
 Neither the Religio Laid nor The Hind and the 
 Panther can be exhibited with any success in frag- 
 ments. The strength of the two lies in what De 
 Quincey called their "sequaciousness." They must 
 be known in all their ins and outs before they can 
 begin to impress a stranger with the variety yet con- 
 tinuity of their pattern. If some passage must be 
 quoted, one should be lifted from a section lying 
 somewhere between those extremes which are "near- 
 est prose" and those which are most impassioned. 
 This extract from the Hind's address to the Panther 
 on the subject of the Apostolic Succession contains 
 a fair share of Dryden's ratiocinative accents: 
 
 Tis said with ease, but never can be proved, 
 The Church her old foundations has removed, 
 And built new doctrines on unstable sands: 
 Judge that, ye winds and rains; you proved her, 
 
 yet she stands. 
 
 Those ancient doctrines, charged on her for new, 
 Shew when, and how, and from what hands they grew.
 
 2i 8 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 We claim no power, when heresies grow bold, 
 To coin new faith, but still declare the old. 
 How else could that obscene disease be purged, 
 When controverted texts are vainly urged? 
 To prove tradition new, there's somewhat more 
 Required than saying: " 'Twas not used before." 
 Those monumental arms are never stirred, 
 Till schism or heresy call down Goliah's sword. 
 
 Thus what you call corruptions are in truth 
 The first plantations of the gospel's youth; 
 Old standard faith; but cast your eyes again, 
 And view those errors which new sects maintain, 
 Or which of old disturbed the Church's peaceful reign: 
 And we can point each period of the time, 
 When they began, and who begot the crime; 
 Can calculate how long the eclipse endured, 
 Who interposed, what digits were obscured: 
 Of all which are already passed away, 
 We know the rise, the progress and decay. 
 
 Despair at our foundations then to strike, 
 Till you can prove your faith apostolic; 
 A limpid stream drawn from the native source; 
 Succession lawful in a lineal course. 
 Prove any Church, opposed to this our head, 
 So one, so pure, so unconfinedly spread, 
 Under one chief of the spiritual State, 
 The members all combined, and all subordinate. 
 Shew such a seamless coat, from schism so free, 
 In no communion joined with heresy. 
 If such a one you find, let truth prevail; 
 Till when, your weights will in the balance fail; 
 A Church unprincipled kicks up the scale.
 
 VI 
 THE LYRIC POET 
 
 Dryden owes his excellence as a lyric poet to his 
 abounding metrical energy. The impetuous mind 
 and the scrupulous ear which Wordsworth admired 
 nourished a singing voice that always was powerful 
 and sometimes was mellow or sweet. The songs, the 
 operas, and the odes of Dryden are remarkable first 
 of all for their elan. 
 
 The seventeenth century was an age of song. 
 Composers like John Dowland, Thomas Campion, 
 William and Henry Lawes, Nicholas Laniere, John 
 Wilson, Charles Coleman, William Webb, John 
 Gamble, and the Purcells, together with publishers 
 like John and Henry Playford, to mingle great with 
 small, maintained a long and beautiful tradition of 
 "ayres;" miscellanies and "drolleries," with their 
 fondness for reckless, rollicking tavern tunes, urged 
 on a swelling stream of popular melody; while poets, 
 from Ben Jonson to Tom D'Urfey, never left off 
 trifling with measured catches high or low. But 
 there were changes from generation to generation. 
 The poets of the Restoration sang in a different key 
 from that of the Jacobeans; and it was generally be- 
 lieved that there had been a falling off. 
 
 "Soft words, with nothing in them, make a song," 
 wrote Waller to Creech. It was charged that France
 
 220 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 had corrupted English song with her Damons and 
 Strephons, her "Chlorisses and Phylisses," and that 
 the dances with which she was supposed to have 
 vulgarized the drama and the opera had introduced 
 notes of triviality and irresponsibility into all lyric 
 poetry. Dryden for one was fond of dances, and 
 ran them into his plays whenever there was an ex- 
 cuse. In Marriage a la Mode Melantha and Palamede 
 quote two pieces from Moliere's ballet in Le Bour- 
 geois Gentilhomme. Voiture's airy nothings also had 
 their day in England. The second song in Dryden's 
 Sir Martin Mar-All, beginning, 
 
 Blind love, to this hour, 
 Had never, like me, a slave under his power. 
 
 Then blest be the dart 
 
 That he threw at my heart, 
 For nothing can prove 
 A joy so great as to be wounded with love, 
 
 was adapted from Voiture: 
 
 L 'Amour sous sa loy 
 
 N'a jamais eu d'amant plus heureux que moy; 
 
 Benit soit son flambeau, 
 
 Son carquois, son bandeau, 
 
 Je suis amoreux, 
 
 Et le ciel ne voit point d'amant plus heureux. 
 
 But the most serious charge against France was 
 brought against her music. 
 
 Music had an important place in the education of 
 gentlemen and poets throughout the Europe of the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A larger pro-
 
 THE LYRIC POET 221 
 
 portion of trained minds than before or since then 
 claimed fairly intimate acquaintance with musical 
 technique. The studies of philosophers as well as 
 poets included ecclesiastical and secular song, the 
 uses made of it being various, of course. Hobbes, 
 says Aubrey, "had alwayes bookes of prick-song 
 lyeing on his Table: e. g. of H. Lawes &c. Songs 
 which at night, when he was abed, and the dores 
 made fast, & was sure nobody heard him, he sang 
 aloud, (not that he had a very good voice) but to 
 cleare his pipes : he did beleeve it did his Lunges good, 
 and conduced much to prolong his life." Poets drew 
 much of their best knowledge and inspiration from 
 musicians, so that any alteration in musical modes 
 was certain to affect the styles of verse. The seven- 
 teenth century in England was a century of seculari- 
 zation, first under Italian and then under French in- 
 fluences. In former times, when music had been 
 bound to the service of the church, clear-cut rhythms 
 had been avoided as recalling too much the mo- 
 tions of the body in the dance, and composers of mad- 
 rigals had been confined to the learned contrivances of 
 counterpoint. John Dowland, the Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge lutanist, Thomas Campion, magical both as 
 poet and as composer, and Henry Lawes, the friend 
 of all good versifiers, three seventeenth century na- 
 tive geniuses who were also disciples of Italy, intro- 
 duced in succession new and individual song rhythms 
 which were so compelling that by the time of the 
 Restoration there had come into being an excellent 
 body of sweet and simple secular airs with just 
 enough strains of the older, more intricate harmonies
 
 222 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 lingering in them to remind of the golden age. Even 
 in church and chamber music there had been a ten- 
 dency to substitute songs for madrigals and dance- 
 tunes for choral measures. The Restoration saw 
 complete and rapid changes. Charles II, who in- 
 sisted on easy rhythms at his devotions to which he 
 cquld beat time with his hand, sent his choir-boys 
 to France to school, and encouraged his musicians 
 to replace the lute and the viol with the guitar and 
 the violin. The violin or fiddle, which John Playford 
 called "a cheerful and sprightly instrument," was 
 as old as the Anglo-Saxons, but it had been used 
 before only for dancing, not in the church or the 
 chamber. It was the rhythm of the dance that now 
 pervaded theater and chapel and all the world of 
 lyric poetry. There was hearty objection to the new 
 mode. Playford began the preface to his Musick's 
 Delight on the Cither a (1666) with the remark: "It 
 is observed that of late years all solemn and grave 
 musick is much laid aside, being esteemed too heavy 
 and dull for the light heels and brains of this nimble 
 and wanton age." The preface to the sixth edition 
 of the same author's Skill of Musick in 1672 continued 
 the complaint: "Musick in this age ... is in low 
 esteem with the generality of people. Our late and 
 solemn Musick, both Vocal and Instrumental, is now 
 justled out of Esteem by the new Corants and Jigs 
 of Foreigners, to the Grief of all sober and judicious 
 understanders of that formerly solid and good Mu- 
 sick." John Norris of Bemerton, in the preface to 
 his Poems (1687), declared that music like poetry 
 had degenerated "from grave, majestic, solemn
 
 THE LYRIC POET 223 
 
 strains . . . where beauty and strength go hand in 
 hand. 'Tis now for the most part dwindled down to 
 light, frothy stuff." Henry Purcell objected on the 
 whole with greater effect than the others against 
 what he called "the levity and balladry of our neigh- 
 bours;" for his attack upon French opera in favor of 
 Italian opera was in the end entirely successful. Yet 
 even Purcell was well aware that French music had 
 "somewhat more of gayety and Fashion" than any 
 other, and he was not so insensible to current de- 
 mands as to compose songs for the stage that were 
 lacking in Gallic vivacity. Fryden, who had se- 
 cured the services of a F reach musician, Grabut, 
 for his opera Albion and Albanius in 1685, was con- 
 sidered in 1690 a convert to "the English school" 
 when in the dedication of Amphitryon he wrote of 
 "Mr.JPujrce.lJL in whose person we have at length 
 found an Englishman, equal with the best abroad. 
 At least my opinion of him has been such, since his 
 happy and judicious performances in the late opera 
 (The Prophetess], and the experience I have had of 
 him in the setting my three songs for this 'Amphi- 
 tryon." 1 Before Purcell died in 1695 he had not 
 only written the accompaniment for an opera of 
 Dryden's, King Arthur, but he had set to music the 
 songs from Cleomenes, The Indian Emperor, an 
 adaptation of the Indian Queen, Aureng-Zebe, (Edi- 
 pus, The Spanish Friar, Tyrannic Love, and The Tem- 
 pest; so that Dryden had the full advantage of an 
 association with this powerful composer who, as 
 Motteux put it in the first number of his Gentleman's 
 Journal in 1692, joined "to the delicacy and beauty
 
 224 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 of the Italian way, the graces and gayety of the 
 French." 
 
 It is doubtful whether the potency of the musical 
 personalities of Purcell and contemporary composers 
 was in general a good or a bad influence on Restora- 
 tion lyric style. It is at least thinkable that as the 
 new rhythms asserted themselves more powerfully 
 the writers who supplied words for songs were some- 
 how the losers in independence and originality. 
 There was complaint at the end of the century that 
 the obvious, almost jingling music from France had 
 won the field and was domineering over poetry. 
 Charles Gildon in his Laws of Poetry (1721) pointed 
 to a degeneration in song, attributing it to "the slav- 
 ish care or complaisance of the writers, to make their 
 words to the goust of the composer, or musician: 
 being obliged often to sacrifice their sense to certain 
 sounding words, and feminine rhymes, and the like; 
 because they seem most adapted to furnish the com- 
 poser with such cadences which most easily slide into 
 their modern way of composition." Others besides 
 Gildon felt with justice that genius was being ironed 
 out of lyric verse; song was becoming singsong. Re- 
 lations between poets and composers were now the 
 reverse of what they had been in the time of Henry 
 Lawes. Lawes had been content to subordinate his 
 music to the words; for him the poetry was the thing. 
 If it seemed difficult at the first glance to adapt a 
 given passage to music, the difficulty was after all 
 the composer's, and the blame for infelicities must 
 accrue to him. "Our English seems a little clogged 
 with consonants," he wrote in the preface to the
 
 THE LYRIC POET 225 
 
 first book of Ayres and Dialogues (1653), "but that's 
 much the composer's fault, who, by judicious setting, 
 and right tuning the words, may make it smooth 
 enough." Milton was acknowledging the generous, 
 pliant technique of his friend in the sonnet of 1646: 
 
 Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured song 
 First taught our English music how to span 
 Words with just note and accent, not to scan 
 With Midas' ears, committing short and long; 
 Thy worth and skill exempts thee from the throng, 
 With praise enough for Envy to look wan; 
 To after age thou shalt be writ the man 
 That with smooth air could humour best our tongue. 
 
 It was the delicacy and justness of Lawes that won 
 him the affection of the most gifted lyrists of the 
 mid-century; it will always be remembered of him 
 that he loved poetry too well to profane the intricate 
 tendernesses of songs like Herrick's to the daffodils. 
 Whatever conditions imposed themselves upon 
 English song in the Restoration, Dryden Jfor his own 
 paitwAsinclined to welcome swift, simple, straight-on 
 rhythms, and he was destined to become master of 
 the lyric field solely by virtue of his speed. His 
 range of vowels was narrow; his voice was seldom 
 round or deep, limiting itself somewhat monotonously 
 to thin soprano sounds. Nor was the scope of his 
 sympathies wide; a number of contemporaries sang 
 more human songs. Rochester's drinking-pieces, 
 like that which begins, 
 
 Vulcan, contrive me such a cup 
 As Nestor used of old,
 
 226 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 Sedley's love-lines, 
 
 Not, Celia, that I juster am, 
 Or better than the rest, 
 
 And Dorset's playful flatteries, 
 
 To all you ladies now at land, 
 We men at sea indite, 
 
 are likely to touch nerves which Dryden leaves quiet. 
 Congreve's diamond-bright cynicism and Prior's 
 ultimate social grace exist in worlds farremoved from 
 his own. It was sheer lyrical gusto and momentum 
 that carried Dryden forward, that drew to him the 
 attention of the Playfords as they published their 
 new collections, that made the editor of the West- 
 minster Drolleries of 1671 and 1672 hasten to include 
 his six best songs to date in those "choice" volumes. 
 Dryden 's first song had something of the older 
 Caroline manner in that its stanzas were inclined ..ta 
 be tangled and reflective. It was sung in the Indian 
 Emperor, and began : 
 
 Ah fading joy, how quickly art thou past! 
 
 Yet we thy ruin haste. 
 As if the cares of human life were few, 
 
 We seek out new: 
 And follow fate that does too fast pursue. 
 
 Dryden passed swiftly from this to a more modern, 
 more breathless world of song, a world where he fell 
 at once, in An Evening's Love, into the dactylic swing 
 that was to win him his way into the irrepressible 
 Drolleries'.
 
 THE LYRIC POET 
 
 After the pangs of a desperate lover, 
 
 When day and night I have sighed all in vain, 
 
 Ah what a pleasure it is to discover, 
 
 In her eyes pity, who causes my pain. 
 
 Another song in An Evening's Love ran more lightly 
 yet; it was marked by the anapestic lilt which on 
 the whole is Dryden's happiest discovery: 
 
 Calm was the even, and clear was the sky, \ ** 
 
 And the new-budding flowers did spring, \v 
 When all alone went Amyntas and I 
 
 To hear the sweet nightingale sing. 
 I sate, and he laid him down by me, 
 
 But scarcely his breath he could draw; 
 For when with a fear, he began to draw near, 
 
 He was dashed with "A ha ha ha ha!" 
 
 This lilt is heard in Dryden as many as fifteen times, 
 being at its best in Marriage a la Mode: 
 
 Why should a foolish marriage vow, 
 
 Which long ago was made, 
 Oblige us to each other now, 
 When passion is decayed? 
 We loved, and we loved, as long as we could, 
 
 Till our love was loved out in us both; 
 But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled; 
 'Twas pleasure first made it an oath. 
 
 If I have pleasures for a friend, 
 
 And farther love in store, 
 What wrong has he whose joys did end, 
 
 And who could give no more? 
 'Tis a madness that he should be jealous of me, 
 Or that I should bar him of another;
 
 228 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 For all we can gain is to give ourselves pain, 
 When neither can hinder the other; 
 
 in Amphitryon, where Dryden for once is very much 
 like Prior: 
 
 Fair Iris I love, and hourly I die, 
 But not for a lip nor a languishing eye: 
 She's fickle and false, and there we agree, 
 For I am as false and as fickle as she. 
 We neither believe what either can say; 
 And, neither believing, we neither betray. 
 
 'Tis civil to swear, and say things of course; 
 We mean not the taking for better or worse. 
 When present, we love; when absent, agree; 
 I think not of Iris, nor Iris of me. 
 The legend of love no couple can find, 
 So easy to part, or so equally joined; 
 
 and in The Lady's Song, a piece of Jacobite propa- 
 ganda which represents Dryden 's long, loping jin- 
 gle in its most gracious and mellow aspects: 
 
 I A choir of bright beauties in spring did appear, 
 To choose a May-lady to govern the year; 
 All the nymphs were in white, and the shepherds in 
 green; 
 
 The garland was given, and Phyllis was queen; 
 But Phyllis refused it, and sighing did say: 
 " I'll not wear a garland while Pan is away." 
 
 While Pan and fair Syrinx are fled from our shore, 
 The Graces are banished, and Love is no more; 
 The soft god of pleasure, that warmed our desires, 
 Has broken his bow, and extinguished his fires;
 
 THE LYRIC POET 229 
 
 And vows that himself and his mother will mourn, 
 Till Pan and fair Syrinx in triumph return. 
 
 Forbear your addresses, and court us no more, 
 For we will perform what the deity swore; 
 But if you dare think of deserving our charms, 
 Away with your sheephooks, and take to your arms: 
 Then laurels and myrtles your brows shall adorn, 
 When Pan, and his son, and fair Syrinx return. 
 
 The Lady V Song calls to mind two iambic pieces of a 
 graver sort. The song from the Maiden Queen is 
 subdued to a plane of elegy which Dryden seldom 
 visited: 
 
 I feed a flame within, which so torments me, 
 That it both pains my heart, and yet contents me; 
 'Tis such a pleasing smart, and I so love it, 
 That I had rather die than once remove it. 
 
 Yet he for whom I grieve shall never know it; 
 My tongue does not betray, nor my eyes show it: 
 Not a sigh, nor a tear, my pain discloses, 
 But they fall silently, like dew on roses. 
 
 Thus to prevent my love from being cruel, 
 My heart's the sacrifice, as 'tis the fuel; 
 And while I suffer this, to give him quiet, 
 My faith rewards my love, tho' he deny it. 
 
 On his eyes will I gaze, and there delight me; 
 Where I conceal my love, no frown can fright me; 
 To be more happy, I dare not aspire; 
 Nor can I fall more low, mounting no higher. 
 
 The "Zambra Dance" from the first part of the 
 Conquest of Granada begins with two stately stanzas 
 that shed a soft Pindaric splendor:
 
 230 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Beneath a myrtle shade, 
 Which love for none but happy lovers made, 
 I slept; and straight my love before me brought 
 Phyllis, the object of my waking thought. 
 Undressed she came my flames to meet, 
 While love strewed flowers beneath her feet; 
 Flowers which, so pressed by her, became more sweet. 
 
 From the bright vision's head 
 A careless veil of lawn was loosely spread: 
 From her white temples fell her shaded hair, 
 Like cloudy sunshine, not too brown nor fair; 
 Her hands, her lips, did love inspire; 
 Her every grace my heart did fire; 
 But most her eyes, which languished with desire. 
 
 Dryden has used the iambic measure only slightly 
 more often than the anapestic, but he has used it 
 more variously. The two poems just quoted are 
 far removed from the Cavalier conciseness of these 
 lines in An Evening* s Love: 
 
 You charmed me not with that fair face, 
 
 Tho' it was all divine: 
 To be another's is the grace 
 
 That makes me wish you mine; 
 
 or from the lively languor of these in the Spanish 
 Friar: 
 
 Farewell, ungrateful traitor! 
 
 Farewell, my perjured swain! 
 Let never injured creature 
 
 Believe a man again.
 
 THE LYRIC POET 231 
 
 The pleasure of possessing 
 Surpasses all expressing, 
 But 'tis too short a blessing, 
 And love too long a pain; 
 
 or from a pretty, rocking conceit like this in the 
 Song to a Fair Young Lady Going Out of Town in 
 the Spring: 
 
 Ask not the cause, why sullen Spring 
 So long delays her flowers to bear; 
 
 Why warbling birds forget to sing, 
 
 And winter storms invert the year. 
 
 Chloris is gone, and fate provides 
 
 To make it Spring where she resides. 
 
 The trochaic pieces, such as that in Tyrannic Love, 
 
 Ah how sweet it is to love! 
 Ah how gay is young desire! 
 
 and that in King Arthur, sung in honor of Britannia, 
 
 Fairest isle, all isles excelling, 
 Seat of pleasures and of loves; 
 
 Venus here will choose her dwelling, 
 And forsake her Cyprian groves, 
 
 attack the ear with characteristic spirit. 
 
 The songs of Dryden never go deeper than the 
 painted fires of conventional Petrarchan love, but 
 in. a few cases they go wider. The "Sea-Fight" 
 from Amboyna, the incantation of Tiresias in the 
 third act of (Edipus, the Song of Triumph of the 
 Britons and the Harvest Song from King Arthur 
 are robust departures in theme from the pains and 
 desires of Alexis and Damon. The incantation from
 
 232 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 (Edipus brings substantial relief, promising cool re- 
 treats : 
 
 Choose the darkest part o' the grove, 
 Such as ghosts at noon-day love. 
 Dig a trench, and dig it nigh 
 Where the bones of Laius lie. 
 
 The one hymn known to be Dryden's, the trans- 
 lation of Veni, Creator Spiritus which appeared under 
 his name in the third Miscellany of 1693, is in a cer- 
 tain sense a rounder and deeper utterance than any 
 of the songs. The vowels are more varied and the 
 melody has a more solid core to it; the bass of a ca- 
 thedral organ rushes and rumbles under the rhythms. 
 Scott printed two other hymns as Dryden's, the Te 
 Deum and what he incorrectly called the Hymn 
 for St. John's Eve; and it cannot be positively 
 denied that most or all of the hundrec[jmdjwenty 
 hymns which made up the Catholic Primer of. 1.706 
 had been translated from the Latin by the great 
 convert sometime between 1685 and 1700. The 
 question of authorship is of no importance to poetry 
 in connection with such of the doubtful pieces as 
 are commonplace, like the vast majority of English 
 hymns; but it is an important fact that real Dryden- 
 ian overtones can frequently be distinguished, as 
 here at the beginning of the Te Deum: 
 
 Thee, Sovereign God, our grateful accents praise; 
 We own thee Lord, and bless thy wondrous ways; 
 To thee, Eternal Father, earth 's whole frame, 
 With loudest trumpets, sounds immortal fame.
 
 THE LYRIC POET 233 
 
 Lord God of Hosts ! for thee the heavenly powers 
 With sounding anthems fill the vaulted towers. 
 Thy cherubims thrice, Holy, Holy, Holy cry; 
 Thrice, Holy, all the Seraphims reply, 
 And thrice returning echoes endless songs supply. 
 
 Dryden was a born writer of hymns, though the 
 hymns he wrote were seldom labelled as such. 
 Praise with him was as instintcive as satire; he de- 
 lighted as much in glorious openings and surging, 
 upgathered invocations as in contemptuous "charac- 
 ters." The King's prayer in Annus Mirabilis, Achit- 
 ophel's first words to Absalom, the beginning of the 
 Lucretius, the beginning of the Georgics, and the 
 prayers in Palamon and Arcite are his most godlike 
 pleas. "Landor once said to me," wrote Henry 
 Crabb Robinson in his Diary for January 6, 1842, 
 "Nothing was ever written in hymn equal to the 
 beginning of Dryden 's Religio Laid, the first 
 eleven lines." 
 
 Dim as the borrowed beams of moon and stars 
 
 To lonely, weary, wandering travellers, 
 
 Is Reason to the soul; and, as on high 
 
 Those rolling fires discover but the sky, 
 
 Not light us here, so Reason's glimmering ray 
 
 Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way, 
 
 But guide us upward to a better day. 
 
 And as those nightly tapers disappear 
 
 When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere; 
 
 So pale grows Reason at Religion's sight; 
 
 So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light. 
 
 Dryden's operas, as poetry, are unfortunate. Here 
 for once, partly from apathy towards a form of
 
 234 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 writing which the prologues and epilogues show did 
 not command his respect, partly from a sense of 
 obligation or dependence, he capitulated to the com- 
 poser; thinking to produce new musical effects with 
 his pen, he succeeded in bringing forth what was 
 neither poetry nor music. The result in each of 
 two cases, at least, was what St. Evremond defined 
 any opera to be, "an odd medley of poetry and 
 music wherein the poet and the musician, equally 
 confined one by the other, take a world of pain to 
 compose a wretched performance." The State of In- 
 nocence, which was never performed but which was 
 first published as "an opera" probably in 1677, is 
 not one of the two cases. It is an independent poem 
 of some originality and splendor. Albion and Al- 
 banius (1685), however, and its sequel King Arthur 
 (1691) deserve a fair share of St. Evremond's dis- 
 dain. Dryden has taken the trouble in connection 
 with them to describe his labors as a poet-musician. 
 In the preface to Albion and Albanius he says he 
 has been at pains to "make words so smooth, and 
 numbers so harmonious, that they shall almost set 
 themselves." In writing an opera a poet must have 
 so sensitive an ear "that the discord of sounds in 
 words shall as much offend him as a seventh in 
 music would a good composer." "The chief secret 
 is the choice of words"; the words are "to be varied 
 according to the nature of the subject." The "song- 
 ish part" and the chorus call for "harmonious sweet- 
 ness," with "softness and variety of numbers," but 
 the recitative demands "a more masculine beauty." 
 The superiority of Italian over French or English
 
 THE LYRIC POET 235 
 
 as a musical language is heavily stressed; and it is 
 plain that throughout the opera Dryden has aimed 
 at an Italian "softness" through the use of feminine 
 rhymes and disyllabic coinages similar to those which 
 were to mark the firgil. The work as a whole is 
 inane, and often it is doggerel; it is at best a welter 
 of jingling trimeters and tetrameters, tail-rhyme 
 stanzas, heroic couplets, and tawdry Pindaric pas- 
 sages. One song by the Nereids in Act III begins 
 better than it ends: 
 
 From the low palace of old father Ocean, 
 Come we in pity your cares to deplore; 
 Sea-racing dolphins are trained for our motion, 
 Moony tides swelling to roll us ashore. 
 
 Every nymph of the flood, her tresses rending, 
 Throws off her armlet of pearl in the main; 
 Neptune in anguish his charge unattending, 
 Vessels are foundering, and vows are in vain. 
 
 King Arthur is in blank verse, with many departures 
 into song and dance. The dedication praises Pur- 
 cell and admits that the verse has in certain cases 
 been allowed to suffer for the composer's sake. "My 
 art on this occasion," says Dryden, "ought to be 
 subservient to his." "A judicious audience will 
 easily distinguish betwixt the songs wherein I have 
 complied with him, and those in which I have fol- 
 lowed the rules of poetry, in the sound and cadence 
 of the words." The "freezing scene" in the third 
 act does neither the poet nor the composer any 
 credit; the effect of shivering, even if legitimate, is 
 not exactly happy. The best songs are those in
 
 236 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 which, as Dryden says, he has "followed the rules 
 of poetry": those like "Fairest isle, all isles excel- 
 ling," the "Harvest Home," and the song of the 
 nymphs before Arthur: 
 
 In vain are our graces, 
 
 In vain are our eyes, 
 
 If love you despise; 
 When age furrows faces, 
 
 'Tis time to be wise. 
 Then use the short blessing, 
 That flies in possessing: 
 No joys are above 
 
 The pleasures of love. 
 
 The short "Secular Masque" which Dryden wrote 
 for a revival of Fletcher's Pilgrim in 1700 is the least 
 objectionable of the pieces which he designed to ac- 
 company stage music. The masque celebrates the 
 opening of a new century. Janus, Chronos, and 
 Momus hold a sprightly review of the century just 
 past and come to the conclusion that the times 
 have been bad. Diana, representing the court of 
 James I, is the first to pass in review, singing as she 
 goes a hunting song which long remained popular: 
 
 With horns and with hounds I waken the day, 
 
 And hie to my woodland walks away; 
 
 I tuck up my robe, and am buskined soon, 
 
 And tie to my forehead a wexing moon. 
 
 I course the fleet stag, unkennel the fox, 
 
 And chase the wild goats o'er summits of rocks; 
 
 With shouting and hooting we pierce thro' the sky, 
 
 And Echo turns hunter, and doubles the cry.
 
 THE LYRIC POET 237 
 
 The three gods agree with her of the silver bow that 
 
 Then our age was in its prime, 
 Free from rage, and free from crime; 
 A very merry, dancing, drinking, 
 Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking time. 
 
 Mars next thunders in and recalls the wars of 
 Charles I. But Momus is a pacifist: 
 
 Thy sword within the scabbard keep, 
 
 And let mankind agree; 
 Better the world were fast asleep, 
 
 Than kept awake by thee. 
 The fools are only thinner, 
 
 With all our cost and care; 
 But neither side a winner, 
 
 For things are as they were. 
 
 Venus now appears to celebrate the softer conquests 
 of Charles II and James II. But she also is found 
 wanting, and so Dryden's poem ends with a sweep- 
 ing dismissal of three Stuart generations: 
 
 All, all of a piece throughout; 
 Thy chase had a beast in view; 
 Thy wars brought nothing about; 
 Thy lovers were all untrue. 
 'Tis well an old age is out, 
 And time to begin a new. 
 
 The force which drove Dryden forward through the 
 somewhat foreign waters of song plunged him into a 
 native ocean in the ode. His greatest lyrics are odes. 
 He was constitutionally adapted to a form of exalted 
 utterance which progressed by the alternate accumu-
 
 238 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 lating and discharging of metrical energy. The study 
 of his utterances in this kind begins not with his 
 first formal ode, but with the first appearance of 
 swells in the stream of his heroic verse. That first ap- 
 pearance, as has been suggested before, is in the heroic 
 plays, where the thump and rattle of the couplets 
 is relieved from time to time by towering speeches 
 like that of Almanzor to Lyndaraxa. 1 The State of 
 Innocence is virtually one protracted ode. Partly 
 in consequence of a new and close acquaintance with 
 Milton's blank verse, partly as the fruit of his ex- 
 perience among rhythms, Dryden here has swollen 
 his stream and learned to compose with a powerful, 
 steady pulse. Milton's paragraphing, whether or 
 not it has been an important inspiration, is after all 
 Dryden's greatest example in this instance, though 
 Milton's metrical progression is little like that of his 
 junior. Milton relies chiefly upon enjambement to 
 give roll to his verse; as can best be seen for the 
 present purpose in the Vacation Exercise of 1628, 
 which is in heroic couplets. The bond of the couplets 
 is broken only once, and then by drawing the sense 
 variously from one line into another. The poet is 
 addressing his native language: 
 
 Yet I had rather, if I were to choose, 
 Thy service in some graver subject use, 
 Such as may make thee search thy coffers round, 
 Before thou clothe my fancy in fit sound. 
 Such where the deep transported mind may soar 
 Above the wheeling poles, and at Heaven's door 
 Look in, and see each blissful Deity 
 1 See page 113.
 
 THE LYRIC POET 239 
 
 How he before the thunderous throne doth lie, 
 
 Listening to what unshorn Apollo sings 
 
 To the touch of golden wires, while Hebe brings 
 
 Immortal nectar to her kingly sire; 
 
 Then, passing through the spheres of watchful fire, 
 
 And misty regions of wide air next under, 
 
 And hills of snow and lofts of piled thunder, 
 
 May tell at length how green-eyed Neptune raves, 
 
 In heaven's defiance mustering all his waves; 
 
 Then sing of secret things that came to pass 
 
 When beldam Nature in her cradle was; 
 
 And last of Kings and Queens and Heroes old, 
 
 Such as the wise Demodocus once told 
 
 In solemn songs at King Alcinous' feast, 
 
 While sad Ulysses' soul and all the rest 
 
 Are held, with his melodious harmony 
 
 In willing chains and sweet captivity. 
 
 Dryden relies less on enjambement, though occasion- 
 ally he relies on that too, than on sheer rhythmical 
 enthusiasm, an enthusiasm that expresses itself first 
 through a series of rapidly advancing couplets and 
 last in a flourish of triplets or Alexandrines. One 
 example has been given from the State of Innocence. 1 
 Another is the speech of Lucifer at the end of the 
 first scene: 
 
 On this foundation I erect my throne; 
 Through brazen gates, vast chaos, and old night, 
 I'll force my way, and upwards steer my flight; 
 Discover this new world, and newer Man; 
 Make him my footstep to mount heaven again: 
 Then in the clemency of upward air, 
 We'll scour our spots, and the dire thunder scar, 
 1 See page 113.
 
 240 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 With all the remnants of the unlucky war, 
 
 And once again grow bright, and once again grow fair. 
 
 Eve's account of Paradise in the third act is more 
 elaborately heaped: 
 
 Above our shady bowers 
 
 The creeping jessamin thrusts her fragrant flowers; 
 The myrtle, orange, and the blushing rose, 
 With bending heaps so nigh their blooms disclose, 
 Each seems to swell the flavor which the other blows; 
 By these the peach, the guava and the pine, 
 And, creeping 'twixt them all, the mantling vine 
 Does round their trunks her purple clusters twine. 
 
 The State of Innocence was only a beginning. Dry- 
 den's proclivity towards the ode grew stronger each 
 year. His addresses, his invocations, his hymns were 
 only odes imbedded in heroic verse. Even a pro- 
 logue might end with a lyrical rush, as for instance 
 that "To the Duchess on Her Return from Scot- 
 land" (1682): 
 
 Distempered Zeal, Sedition, cankered Hate, 
 
 No more shall vex the Church, and tear the State: 
 
 No more shall Faction civil discords move, 
 
 Or only discords of too tender love; 
 
 Discord like that of Music's various parts; 
 
 Discord that makes the harmony of hearts; 
 
 Discord that only this dispute shall bring, 
 
 Who best shall love the Duke and serve the King. 
 
 It is perhaps a question whether the poem on Oldham 
 is an elegy or is an ode. The "epiphonema" of the 
 Eleonora is surely an ode of a kind; and the Virgil 
 is one long Pindaric narrative.
 
 THE LYRIC POET 241 
 
 Dryden's habit of dilating his heroic verse with 
 Alexandrines not only grew upon him so that he in- 
 dulged in flourishes when flourishes were not re- 
 quired, but it became contagious. Poetasters like 
 John Hughes who lacked the impetus of Dryden 
 learned his tricks and abused his liberties. There 
 was something tawdry, in fact, about all but the 
 very best of even Dryden's enthusiastic rhythms. 
 It seemed necessary at least to Edward Bysshe in 
 1702, when he was compiling some "Rules for mak- 
 ing English Verse" for his Art of English Poetry, to 
 warn against license and to place restrictions on the 
 use of long lines, allowing them only in the following 
 cases: 
 
 1. "When they conclude an episode in an Heroic 
 
 poem." 
 
 2. "When they conclude a triplet and full sense 
 
 together." 
 
 3. "When they conclude the stanzas of Lyrick or 
 
 Pindaric odes; Examples of which are fre- 
 quently seen in Dryden and others." 
 
 Regardless of form, there always have been two 
 distinct modes of utterance in the ode, two prevailing 
 tempers. Xhe Horatian temper is Attic, choice, per- 
 haps didactic, and is stimulated by observation of 
 human nature. The Pindaric temper is impassioned 
 and superlative, and is inspired by the spectacle of 
 human glory. In English poetry the Horatians 
 have been Ben Jonson, Thomas Randolph, Marvell, 
 Collins, Akenside, Cowper, Landor, and Wordsworth 
 in the Ode to Duty; the Pindars have been Spenser,
 
 242 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Milton, Cowley, Dryden, Gray, Wordsworth in the 
 Intimations, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Ten- 
 nyson, and Swinburne. Cowley is included among 
 Pindaric writers of odes more by courtesy than from 
 desert, for he was mortally deficient in afflatus; his 
 importance is that of a preceptor and experimental- 
 ist, not that of a creator. His Pindaric Odes of 1656, 
 with the preface and the explanatory notes that ac- 
 companied them, constituted a kind of charter for 
 a whole century of English vers librists who sought 
 in the name of Pindar to become grand and free. 
 A parallel movement in France involved a gradual 
 departure from the rigors of Malherbe and impli- 
 cated such men as Corneille, La Fontaine, Moliere, 
 and Racine; Boileau making himself the spokesman 
 in 1693 when in his Discours sur UOde he defended 
 Pindar against the current charges of extravagance 
 and declared for the principle of enthusiasm in lyric 
 poetry. Cowley considered that he was restoring 
 one of the "lost inventions of antiquity," restoring, 
 that is, what he believed was Pindar's art of infinitely 
 varying his meter to correspond to the involutions 
 of his theme. It was his notion that Pindar had been 
 lawless in his splendor, or at the most only a law to 
 himself; that he had proceeded without a method, 
 now swelling, now subsiding according as his verse 
 was moved to embrace great things or small. Cow- 
 ley's Praise of Pindar began : 
 
 Pindar is imitable by none, 
 
 The Phoenix Pindar is a vast species alone; 
 Whoe'er but Daedalus with waxen wings could fly 
 And neither sink too low, nor soar too high?
 
 THE LYRIC POET 243 
 
 What could he who followed claim, 
 But of vain boldness the unhappy fame, 
 
 And by his fall a sea to name? 
 Pindar's unnavigable song 
 Like a swoln flood from some steep mountain pours 
 
 along; 
 
 The ocean meets with such a voice 
 From his enlarged mouth, as drowns the ocean's noise. 
 
 So Pindar does new words and figures roll 
 Down his impetuous dithyrambic tide, 
 Which in no channel deigns to abide, 
 Which neither banks nor dykes control; 
 Whether the immortal gods he sings 
 In a no less immortal strain, 
 Or the great acts of God-descended kings, 
 Who in his numbers still survive and reign; 
 
 Each rich embroidered line 
 Which their triumphant brows around 
 
 By his sacred hand is bound, 
 Does all their starry diadems outshine. 
 
 Cowley had an interesting theory that the Hebrew 
 poets were sharers with Pindar of the great secret. 
 In his preface he remarked: "The Psalms of David 
 (which I believe to have been in their original, to 
 the Hebrews of his time . . . the most exalted pieces 
 of poesy) are a great example of what I have said." 
 And one of his Pindaric Odes was a version of 
 Isaiah xxxiv. "The manner of the Prophets' writ- 
 ing," he observed in a note, "especially of Isaiah, 
 seems to me very like that of Pindar; they pass from 
 one thing to another with almost Invisible con-
 
 244 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 nections, and are full of words and expressions of 
 the highest and boldest flights of Poetry." Gildon 
 followed Cowley in his Laws of Poetry (1721) when 
 he cited among the great odes of the world the psalm 
 that begins, "By the waters of Babylon we sat 
 down and wept, when we remembered thee, O Sion." 
 Congreve wrote a Discourse on the Pindarique 
 Ode in 1706 to prove that Cowley had violated the 
 first law of Pindar when he discarded shape; he ex- 
 plained the rigid strophic structure of the Greek 
 ode and deplored the "rumbling and grating" papers 
 of verses with which Cowley 's loose example had 
 loaded the England of the past half century. He was 
 not the first to make this point; Edward Phillips in 
 the preface to his Theatrum Poetarum (1675) had 
 observed that English Pindaric writers seemed ig- 
 norant of the strophe, antistrophe, and epode, and 
 that their work seemed rather on the order of the 
 choruses of ^Eschylus; while Ben Jonson had left 
 inJiis ode on Cary and Morison a perfect specimen 
 of Pindar's form. But Congreve was the first con- 
 spicuous critic of Cowleian vers libre, and it was not 
 until after him that Akenside and Gray and Gilbert 
 West demonstrated on a fairly extensive scale what 
 could be done with strophe and antistrophe in a Nor- 
 thern tongue. Yet the difference between Cowley 
 and Gray was far more than the difference between 
 lawless verse and strophic verse. Cowley 's crime 
 had been not so much against Pindar as against 
 poetry; he jiad, writt.rL_and_taught others to write 
 what^netrjcally was nonsense.^ The alternation of 
 long with short lines in itself does not of necessity
 
 THE LYRIC POET 245 
 
 make for grandeur; often, as Scott suggests, the effect 
 of a Restoration ode was no different rhythmically 
 from that of the inscription on a tombstone. Cowley 
 was out of his depth in the company of Pindar; he was 
 constituted for wit, for "the familiar and the festive," 
 as Dr. Johnson said, but not for magnificence. The 
 passage which has been quoted from the Praise of 
 Pindar is not equalled by him elsewhere; most of 
 the time he is writing like this, at the conclusion of 
 The Muse: 
 
 And sure we may 
 The same too of the present say, 
 If past and future times do thee obey. 
 
 Thou stop'st this current, and does make 
 This running river settle like a lake; 
 Thy certain hand holds fast this slippery snake; 
 . The fruit which does so quickly waste, 
 Man scarce can see it, much less taste, 
 Thou comfitest in sweets to make it last. 
 
 This shining piece of ice, 
 Which melts so soon away 
 
 With the sun's ray, 
 
 Thy verse does solidate and crystallize, 
 Till it a lasting mirror be! 
 Nay, thy immortal rhyme 
 Makes this one short point of time 
 To fill up half the orb of round eternity. 
 
 The trouble here is simply that there are no "num- 
 bers"; the stanza is not organic metrically; there are 
 no involutions which the ear follows with the kind of 
 suspense with which it follows, for instance, an intri- 
 cate passage in music. Cowley has thought to fore-
 
 246 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 stall such an objection in the general preface to his 
 folio of 1656. "The numbers are various and irregu- 
 lar," he says, "and sometimes (especially some of 
 the long ones) seem harsh and uncouth, if the just 
 measures and cadences be not observed in the pro- 
 nunciation. So that almost all their sweetness and 
 numerosity (which is to be found, if I mistake not, 
 in the roughest, if rightly repeated) lies in a manner 
 wholly at the mercy of the reader." But the most 
 merciful and best of readers must fail to make cer- 
 tain of the odes of Cowley sound like poetry. Cowley 
 had not a dependable ear. 
 
 It was Dryden's "excellent ear" which saved the 
 Pindaric ode for Gray. Dryden diagnosed the ills 
 of contemporary Pindarism with lofty precision in 
 the preface to Sylva in 1685. "Somewhat of the 
 purity of English, somewhat of more equal thoughts, 
 somewhat of sweetness in the numbers, in one word, 
 somewhat of a finer turn and more lyrical verse is 
 
 et wanting. ... In imitating [Pindar] our numbers 
 
 hould, for the most part, be lyrical . . . the ear must 
 
 ^reside, and direct the judgment to the choice of 
 
 numbers : without the nicety of this, the harmony of 
 
 indaric verse can never be complete; the cadency 
 of one line must be a rule to that of the next; and 
 the sound of the former must slide gently into that 
 which follows, without leaping from one extreme into 
 another. It must be done like the shadowings of a 
 picture, which fall by degrees into a darker colour." 
 This is by far his most significant statement on the 
 ode; it is not only an accurate analysis of the errors 
 of others; it is an intimation of his own ideal, and
 
 THE LYRIC POET 247 
 
 incidentally it embodied a forecast of his best ac- 
 complishment. For his peculiar contribution was 
 none other than the shading and the "finer turn" of 
 which he speaks here. He let his ear preside; he let 
 his cadences rule and determine one another in the 
 interests of an integral harmony. He placed his 
 words where they would neither jar nor remain inert, 
 but flow. His best Pindaric passages are streams 
 of words delicately and musically disposed. 
 
 earliest example of all, the "Zambra Dance" 1 
 from the Conquest of Granada, is fine but slight. The 
 first ambitious effort is the translation of the twenty- 
 ninth^ode of the third book of Horace in Sylvce. 
 "One ode," explains Dryden in the preface, "which 
 infinitely pleased me in the reading, I have attempted 
 to translate in Pindaric verse. ... I have taken , 
 some pains to make it my master-piece in English: ; 
 for which reason I took this kind of verse, which 
 allows more latitude than any other." The com- 
 bination of Horatian felicity with Pindaric latitude 
 is the happier for Dryden 's excellent understanding 
 of the bearings of each. Creech's Horace, published 
 the previous year with a dedication to Dryden, had 
 shown, as certain pieces from Horace in the first 
 Miscellany (1684) had shown, what might be done 
 in the way of running the Stoic odes into elaborate 
 stanzaic molds; but Creech was most of the time 
 perilously near prose. His version of the present 
 poem, not particularly spirited but solid and just, 
 may have suggested further possibilities to Dryden, 
 who indeed did appropriate his predecessor's best 
 
 1 See page 230.
 
 248 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 phrases. As for the language of Horace, says Dry- 
 den, "there is nothing so delicately turned in all the 
 Roman language. There appears in every part of 
 his diction ... a kind of noble and bold purity. . . . 
 There is a secret happiness which attends his choice, 
 which in Petronius is called curiosa felicitas." As 
 for his own versification, which of course is anarchy 
 compared with Horace, he hopes that it will help to 
 convey the Roman's "briskness, his jollity, and his 
 good humour." The result is as nice as anything in 
 Dryden. The ear has presided, and the shading is 
 almost without flaw. Only five lines disappoint; 
 four of these are Alexandrines (lines 33, 38, 59, 64) 
 afld one is a fourteener (line 39). Dryden has not 
 learned as yet in this least rigid of all forms to dis- 
 pose his long lines so well that none of them will halt 
 the movement and kill the stanza; in the present 
 instance it is significant that all of the five dead lines 
 are attempts at reproducing effects of Nature. The 
 first, second, third, fourth, sixth, eighth, ninth, and 
 tenth stanzas are unexceptionable. The poem begins 
 with a passage of remarkable carrying power; some- 
 thing somewhere seems to be beating excellent time: 
 
 Descended of an ancient line, 
 
 That long the Tuscan scepter swayed, 
 
 Make haste to meet the generous wine, 
 Whose piercing is for thee delayed: 
 
 The rosy wreath is ready made, 
 
 And artful hands prepare 
 The fragrant Syrian oil, that shall perfume thy hair. 
 
 The eighth stanza is in a way the most distinct and 
 final writing that Dryden did :
 
 THE LYRIC POET 249 
 
 Happy the man, and happy he alone, 
 He, who can call today his own; 
 He who, secure within, can say: 
 "Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today. 
 
 Be fair, or foul, or rain, or shine, 
 The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine. 
 
 Not Heav'n itself upon the past has power; 
 But what has been has been, and I have had my hour." 
 
 This is brisk yet liquid. The current of the stream 
 widens and accelerates swiftly, but there is no leap- 
 ing or foaming. The "cadency" of each line noise- 
 lessly transmits energy to the next. Alliteration 
 helps to preserve an equable flow, while varied vow- 
 els heighten the murmur. And the monosyllables 
 now have their revenge; for fifty-nine words of the 
 sixty-eight are monosyllables. The next Pindaric 
 ode of Dryden 's, the Threnodia Augustalis, is ram- 
 bling and arbitrary in its rhythms; there is little or 
 no momentum. A few passages, however, shine in 
 isolation. At the news that Charles had rallied and 
 might live, says Dryden, 
 
 Men met each other with erected look, 
 The steps were higher that they took, 
 Friends to congratulate their friends made haste, 
 And long-inveterate foes saluted as they passed. 
 
 There is a pride of pace in these lines that suits the 
 sense. When Charles was restored from France, 
 continues Dryden, 
 
 The officious Muses came along, 
 
 A gay harmonious choir, like angels ever young; 
 
 (The Muse that mourns him now his happy triumph sung.)
 
 250 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Even they could thrive in his auspicious reign; 
 
 And such a plenteous crop they bore 
 Of purest and well-winnowed grain 
 
 As Britain never knew before. 
 Though little was their hire, and light their gain, 
 Yet somewhat to their share he threw; 
 Fed from his hand, they sung and flew, 
 Like birds of Paradise, that lived on morning dew. 
 
 The ode T.o the Pious Memory of the Accomplished 
 Young Lady, Mrs. Anne Killigrezv, written in the 
 same year with the Horace and the Threnodia, while 
 it is sadly uneven is yet the most triumphant of the 
 three. For although its second, third, fifth, sixth, 
 seventh, eighth, and ninth stanzas are equal at the 
 most only to Cowley and are indeed a good deal 
 like him, the first, fourth, and tenth are emancipated 
 and impetuous. The first stanza, which Dr. Johnson 
 considered the highest point in English lyric poetry, 
 rolls its majestic length without discord or hitch; 
 its music is the profoundest and longest-sustained 
 in Dryden, and its grammar is regal. The fourth 
 stanza hurls itself with violent alliteration down the 
 steep channel which it describes : 
 
 O gracious God! how far have we 
 Profaned thy heavenly gift of poesy! 
 Made prostitute and profligate the Muse, 
 Debased to each obscene and impious use, 
 Whose harmony was first ordained above 
 For tongues of angels and for hymns of love! 
 O wretched we! why were we hurried down 
 
 This lubric and adulterate age,
 
 THE LYRIC POET 251 
 
 (Nay, added fat pollutions of our own,) 
 
 To increase the steaming ordures of the stage? 
 What can we say to excuse our second fall? 
 Let this thy vestal, Heaven, atone for all. 
 Her Arethusian stream remains unsoiled, 
 Unmixed with foreign filth, and undefiled; 
 Her wit was more than man, her innocence a child! 
 
 The triplet in the middle of it is something of an 
 obstruction, and three near-conceits give the effect 
 of a melody scraped thin. The Ode on the Death oj 
 Mr. Henry Pur cell (1696) also suffers from conceits, 
 being nowhere remarkable save perhaps in the first 
 stanza, which aims at prettiness: 
 
 Mark how the lark and linnet sing; 
 
 With rival notes 
 
 They strain their warbling throats 
 To welcome in the spring. 
 But in the close of night, 
 When Philomel begins her heavenly lay, 
 They cease their mutual spite, 
 Drink in her music with delight, 
 
 And listening and silent, and silent and listening, and 
 listening and silent obey. 
 
 It seems now to have been almost inevitable that 
 there should grow up at the end of the seventeenth 
 century a custom of celebrating St. Cecilia's Day 
 with poems set to music; so close were poets and 
 musicians together, and so worshipful of music in 
 that age were men as different from one another as 
 Milton, Cowley, Waller, Marvell, and Dryden. Dur-
 
 252 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 ing half a century before 1683, when the first Feast 
 was celebrated, Orpheus and Amphion had been 
 among the mythological personages most affection- 
 ately cultivated in English verse; and a whole splendid 
 language had been constructed for the praise of the 
 powers of harmony. Dryden's Song for St. Cecilia* j 
 Day in 1687 and his Alexander's Feast in 1697 were 
 the most distinguished performances of the century, 
 each making fashionable a new and sensational 
 method. There was something sensational and mon- 
 strous, it must be admitted, about the whole series 
 of music odes from Fishburn, Tate, Fletcher, and 
 Oldham before Dryden to Bonnell Thornton in the 
 eighteenth century, whose burlesque ode called into 
 service of sound and fury such implements as salt- 
 boxes, marrow-bones, and hurdy-gurdies. There was 
 very little excellent poetry on the whole laid at the 
 feet of St. Cecilia, and there was a deal of cheap 
 program-music offered to her ears, even by Purcell 
 and Handel. But the music had always a saving 
 vigor; sixty voices and twenty-five instruments, in- 
 cluding violins, trumpets, drums, hautboys, flutes, 
 and bassoons, could make amends of a kind for the 
 paltriest verse. Dryden's odes, if artificial and 
 sensational, were the last thing from paltry; they are 
 among the most amazing tours de force in English 
 poetry. 
 
 The Song of 1687 established a new kind of imita- 
 tive^harmony in which verse became"~foT~practi^l 
 purposes an orchestra, the poet drawing upon his 
 vowels and his cadences as a conductor draws upon 
 his players. Dryden had toyed with somewhat
 
 THE LYRIC POET 253 
 
 similar devices before. The song from the Indian 
 Emperor had ended with the noise, he thought, of 
 gently falling water: 
 
 Hark, hark, the waters fall, fall, fall 
 And with a murmuring sound 
 Dash, dash upon the ground, 
 
 To gentle slumbers call. 
 
 Oldham in his Cecilia Ode of 1684 had employed 
 some such scheme as Dryden was soon to make 
 famous. And of course it had been almost a century 
 since Spenser had performed his miracles of sound 
 with verse. But Dryden now was the first to declare 
 a wholly orchestral purpose and to rely upon a purely 
 instrumental technique. The first stanza is a rapid 
 overture which by a deft, tumbling kind of rep- 
 etition summons and subdues to the poet's hand all 
 the wide powers of harmony. The second stanza 
 slips through liquid cadences and dissolves among 
 the sweet sounds of a harp: 
 
 What passion cannot Music raise and quell! 
 When Jubal struck the corded shell, 
 
 His listening brethern stood around, 
 
 And, wondering, on their faces fell 
 
 To worship that celestial sound. 
 Less than a god they thought there could not dwell 
 
 Within the hollow of that shell 
 
 That spoke so sweetly and so well. 
 What passion cannot Music raise and quell! 
 
 A suggestion for this may have come from MarvelPs 
 Music's Empire:
 
 254 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Jubal first made the wilder notes agree 
 And Jubal tuned Music's Jubilee; 
 He called the echoes from their sullen cell, 
 And built the organ's city, where they dwell; 
 
 although Marvell has only hinted of the possibili- 
 ties that lie in the figure of Jubal and in the "-ell" 
 rhymes; while Dryden has extracted the utmost, 
 whether of drama or of sound, from both. The third, 
 fourth, and fifth stanzas secure by obvious but ad- 
 mirable means the effects of trumpets, drums, 
 flutes, and violins. From the sixth there ascend the 
 smooth, softly rushing notes of the organ. The 
 "Grantl'CKorus^ which closes the poem is cosmically 
 pitched : 
 
 As from the power of sacred lays 
 
 The spheres began to move 
 And sung the great Creator's praise 
 
 To all the blest above; 
 So, when the last and dreadful hour 
 This crumbling pageant shall devour, 
 The Trumpet shall be heard on high, 
 The dead shall live, the living die, 
 And Music shall untune the sky. 
 
 Dryden seems always to have been moved by the 
 idea of universal dissolution. The Hebrew notion 
 of the Day of Judgment had reached him through 
 the Bible and Joshua Sylvester. The Lucretian 
 theory of disintegration had fascinated him when he 
 was at the university if not before. He must have 
 long been acquainted with Lucan's rehearsal of the 
 final crumbling in the first book of the Pharsatia.
 
 THE LYRIC POET 255 
 
 His concern was with the physics rather than the 
 metaphysics of a disappearing world. Milton's 
 Solemn Musick and Comus spoke of a mortal mould 
 which original sin had cursed with discord but which 
 on the last day would melt into the great harmony 
 of the invisible spheres. Dryden is not theological ; 
 his finale is the blare of a trumpet, and his last 
 glimpse is of painted scenery crashing down on a 
 darkened stage. His ode on Anne Killigrew and his 
 Song of 1687 end hugely and picturesquely, like 
 Cowley's ode on The Resurrection, where Dryden 
 had read: 
 
 Till all gentle Notes be drowned 
 In the last Trumpet's dreadful sound 
 
 That to the spheres themselves shall silence bring, 
 Untune the universal string. . . . 
 
 Then shall the scattered atoms crowding come 
 Back to their ancient Home. 
 
 On the third of September, 1697, Dryden informed 
 his sons at Rome: "I am writing a song for St. 
 Cecilia's Feast, who, you know, is the patroness of 
 music. This is troublesome, and no way beneficial; 
 but I could not deny the stewards of the feast, who 
 came in a body to me to desire that kindness." There 
 is a tradition that he became agitated during the 
 composition of this song, which was to be the Alex- 
 ander's Feast, and that Henry St. John, afterwards 
 Lord Bolingbroke, found him one morning in a 
 great tremble over it. It is likely that he worked 
 coolly enough at all times; yet he may well have 
 exulted when the idea for this most famous of his
 
 256 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 lyrics first took shape in his mind. The idea of 
 casting a music ode into narrative or dramatic form 
 was itself a new and happy one. The materials for 
 the story of Alexander probably came harder and 
 were only gradually pieced together in Dryden's 
 imagination. It had been a commonplace among 
 classical, post-classical, and Renaissance writers that 
 ancient Greek music, especially "the lost sympho- 
 nies," had strangely affected the spirits of men; Py- 
 thagoras had cured distempers and passions by the 
 application of appropriate harmonies. Longinus 
 had written (xxxiv): "Do not we observe that 
 the sound of wind-instruments moves the souls of 
 those that hear them, throws them into an ecstasy, 
 and hurries them sometimes into a kind of fury?" 
 Athenaeus had cited Clitarchus as authority for the 
 statement that Thais was the cause of the burning 
 of the palace in Persepolis. Suidas, quoted by John 
 Playford in his Skill of Musick, had related that 
 Timotheus moved Alexander to arms. "But the 
 story of Ericus musician," added Playford, "passes 
 all, who had given forth, that by his musick he could 
 drive men into what affections he listed; being re- 
 quired by Bonus King of Denmark to put his skill 
 in practice, he with his harp or polycord lyra ex- 
 pressed such effectual melody and harmony in the 
 variety of changes in several keyes, and in such ex- 
 cellent Fugg's and sprightly ayres, that his auditors 
 began first to be moved with some strange passions, 
 but ending his excellent voluntary with some choice 
 fancy upon this Phrygian mood, the king's passions 
 were altered, and excited to that height, that he fell
 
 THE LYRIC POET 257 
 
 upon his most trusty friends which were near him, 
 and slew some of them with his fist for lack of an- 
 other weapon; which our musician perceiving, ended 
 with the sober Dorick; the King came to himself, 
 and much lamented what he had done." Burton, 
 after Cardan the mathematician, had said in the 
 Anatomy of Melancholy that "Timotheus the musi- 
 cian compelled Alexander to skip up and down and 
 leave his dinner." Cowley's thirty-second note to 
 the first book of the Davideis, a veritable discourse 
 on the powers of harmony, had contained the remark: 
 "Timotheus by Musick enflamed and appeased Alex- 
 ander to what degrees he pleased." Tom D'Urfey's 
 ode for St. Cecilia's Day in 1691 had run merrily 
 on through change after change of tempo, somewhat 
 in the manner which Dry den was to employ: 
 
 And first the trumpet's part 
 
 Inflames the hero's heart; . . . 
 
 And now he thinks he's in the field, 
 
 And now he makes the foe to yield, . . . 
 
 The battle done, all loud alarms do cease, 
 
 Hark, how the charming flutes conclude the peace . . . 
 
 Excesses of pleasure now crowd on apace. 
 
 How sweetly the violins sound to each bass, 
 
 The ravishing trebles delight every ear, 
 
 And mirth in a scene of true joy does appear. . . . 
 
 Now beauty's power inflames my breast again, 
 
 I sigh and languish with a pleasing pain. 
 
 The notes so soft, so sweet the air, 
 The soul of love must sure be there, 
 
 That mine in rapture charms, and drives away despair. 
 
 In Motteux's Gentleman's Journal for January,
 
 258 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 1691-2 was written: "That admirable musician, who 
 could raise a noble fury in Alexander, and lay it as 
 easily, and make him put on the Hero, or the Lover, 
 when he pleased, is too great an Instance of the 
 power of Music to be forgotten." And only three 
 months before Dryden was writing to his sons at 
 Rome, Jeremy Collier, who is seldom thought to 
 have been a benefactor of Restoration poets, had 
 published in the second part of his Essays upon 
 Several Moral Subjects an essay Of Musick wherein 
 it was told how "Timotheus, a Grecian, was so great 
 a Master, that he could make a man storm and 
 swagger like a Tempest, and then, by altering the 
 Notes, and the Time, he would take him down again, 
 and sweeten his humour in a trice. One time, when 
 Alexander was at Dinner, this Man played him a 
 Phrygian Air: the Prince immediately rises, snatches 
 up his Lance, and puts himself into a Posture of 
 Fighting. And the Retreat was no sooner sounded 
 by the Change of Harmony, but his Arms were 
 , Grounded, and his Fire extinct; and he sate down 
 ' as orderly as if he had come from one of Aristotle's 
 Lectures." Such were the scraps that lay at Dry- 
 den's hand in September of 1697. 
 
 "I am glad to hear from all hands," he wrote to 
 Tonson in December, "that my Ode is esteemed the 
 fcest of all my poetry, by all the town: I thought so 
 myself when I writ it; but being old I mistrusted my 
 own judgment." It is a question whether Absalom 
 and Achitophel and the Oldham are not better poetry 
 than Alexander's Feast, which perhaps is only im- 
 mortal ragtime. Some of the cadences are disap-
 
 THE LYRIC POET 259 
 
 pointing; lines 128, 139, 140, and 145 puzzle and 
 lower the voice of the reader. Yet few poems of 
 equal length anywhere have been brought to a finish 
 on so consistently proud a level and in such bounding 
 spirits. Here is brilliant panorama; here are re- 
 sponsive, ringing cadences; here is good-nature on 
 the grand scale. 
 
 And thrice he routed all his foes, and thrice he 
 slew the slain. 
 
 The enormous vitality of this ode not only has in- 
 sured its own long life; for a century it inspired am- 
 bitious imitators and nameless parodists. John 
 Wilkes in 1774 * and the Prince of Wales in 1795 z 
 found themselves hoisted in mockery to the highest 
 throne that pamphleteers could conceive, the im- 
 perial throne of Philip's warlike son. 
 
 i \y s's Feast, or Dryden Travesti: A Mock Pindaric Inscribed to 
 
 His Most Incorruptible Highness Prince Patriotism. London. 1774. 
 * Marriage Ode Royal After the Manner of Dryden. 1795.
 
 VII 
 THE NARRATIVE POET 
 
 That the greatest of all poems have been narrative 
 does not prove that the highest function of poetry 
 is to tell a story. It may merely have happened to 
 be in connection with accounts of human actions 
 that poets could perform to the best advantage. 
 The conquest which prose fiction has made in the 
 world of story since the day of Dryden may or may 
 not signify that poetry is beaten; whether the with- 
 drawal by poets into special corners where they cul- 
 tivate fine static temperaments rather than copious 
 narrative sympathies denotes that the poetry of the 
 future will not be important like the poetry of the 
 past, only time will tell. Certain it is that the idea 
 of narration in verse is often now discredited. At 
 any time in the seventeenth century this would have 
 been heresy. Among theorists at least, occasional, 
 journalistic, or lyrical verse was seldom if ever taken 
 seriously; the epic was undisputed king. Yet out 
 of the quantities of narrative verse which that age 
 produced little had much or any meaning. The de- 
 cay of the heroic tradition was already well-nigh 
 complete. Even Milton's triumph, to modern secu- 
 lar minds, is one chiefly of style and mood; his su- 
 preme moments are moments of gorgeous reminis- 
 cence, when in his imagination the regions and the
 
 THE NARRATIVE POET 261 
 
 deeds made famous centuries before illustrium 
 poetarum fabulis come sweeping by. 
 
 There is no reason noffeelf sorry with Scott that 
 Dryden never got|round|to^writing his projected epic 
 on Arthur or the^Black Prince. It would most likely 
 have been a disappointment; much as Dryden re- 
 vered the institution of the heroic poem, he had not 
 the power to illuminate and interpret heroic mo- 
 tives. His contribution was critical. His Essay of 
 Heroic Plays, his Apology for Heroic Poetry, his Dis- 
 course of Satire and the dedication of his JEneis 
 summed up contemporary tastes and theories in this 
 department as no other group of essays did; he was 
 the sponsor but not the chief performer. His trib- 
 utes to the epic, "the most noble, the most pleasant, 
 and the most instructive way of writing in verse," 
 as well as "the greatest work of human nature," 
 were many and resounding. His requirements for 
 the writer of an epic, as set forth in the Discourse of 
 Satire, were many and rigorous; a heroic poet, he 
 said, is one "who, to his natural endowments, of a 
 large invention, a ripe judgment, and a strong mem- 
 ory, has joined the knowledge of the liberal arts and 
 sciences, and particularly moral philosophy, the 
 mathematics, geography, and history, and with all 
 these qualifications is born a poet; knows, and can 
 practice the variety of numbers, and is master of 
 the language in which he writes." Dryden's narra- 
 tive sphere was a slighter one than this; it was the 
 sphere of the episode or the tale. He is even said 
 to have been capable of being intrigued by humble 
 ballads. Addison wrote in the eighty-fifth Spectator,
 
 262 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 "I have heard that the late Lord Dorset . . . had 
 a numerous collection of old English ballads, and 
 took a particular pleasure in the reading of them. 
 I can affirm the same of Mr. Dryden;" and Gildon, 
 in A New Rehearsal (1714), declared his victim Rowe 
 another Mr. Bayes in "his admiration of some odd 
 books, as 'Reynard the Fox,' and the old ballads of 
 'Jane Shore. " : Dryden's specialty was the short 
 story; he belongs in the company not of Homer, 
 Virgil, Dante, Spenser, and Milton, but of Ovid, 
 Chaucer, Crabbe, Scott, Macaulay, Byron, Keats, 
 Tennyson, Longfellow, Arnold, Morris, and Mase- 
 field. 
 
 Dryden was neither an original nor a skilful weaver 
 of plots. He did not tell a story particularly well. 
 Yet he always had the air of telling a story well; he 
 was master of a swift, plausible manner. He was 
 not adept in psychological research, or refined, or 
 especially true; he was often slovenly and gross; but 
 he was never limp or lame. His verse was as strong 
 as the English mastiff and as fleet as the Frenchman's 
 greyhound; and like a good hound it never tired. 
 "I must confess," said Daniel in his Defense of Rime, 
 "that to mine own ear those continual cadences of 
 couplets used in long and continued poems are very 
 tiresome and unpleasing, by reason that still me- 
 thinks they run on with a sound of one nature, and 
 a kind of certainty which stuffs the delight rather 
 than entertains it." Dryden was not without monot- 
 ony and stiffness; yet the last analysis must find him 
 fresh and various as few other poets have been. 
 Spiritually, there was always his capacious cynicism
 
 THE NARRATIVE POET 263 
 
 to keep him sensible; technically, there was always 
 his speed to dissolve his blemishes and lend a vivid- 
 ness to his materials good and bad. "The wheels 
 take fire from the mere rapidity of their motion," ob- 
 served Coleridge in the Biographia Litteraria. Dry- 
 den paused only to gather momentum. There was 
 pulse in his narrative medium as there had been pulse 
 in his occasional, satirical, and lyrical mediums; his 
 settings, his addresses, his descriptions of persons, 
 his expositions of emotional cause and effect, were 
 never dead; they were magazines of narrative energy. 
 There can hardly be said to exist in English a per- 
 fect verse instrument for narrative; continuous coup- 
 lets give too little pause, while stanzas halt too often. 
 Dryden has come as near as any poet to a durable 
 compromise. He can run straight on as far as he 
 likes; then when he likes he can bring himself up 
 sharply, and go on by leisurely stages. He can hesi- 
 tate and exclaim, he can stop and wonder, he can 
 meditate and meander. 
 
 Dryden's first narrative poem was not a tale but 
 a chronicle. The Annus Mirabilis was almost the 
 last echo of Lucan in English. Warner, Daniel, and 
 Drayton had been the Elizabethan "historians in 
 verse"; Dryden in 1666 constituted himself the 
 chronicler of Charles's war with the Dutch and of 
 the Great Fire of London. He was hardly geared, 
 like old Nestor in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, 
 for walking hand in hand with Time; his gait was 
 better suited to breathless, bizarre romance. His 
 heroic stanzas stalk along with a quaint, spectral 
 dignity, while no great amount of history gets told,
 
 264 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 though more perhaps than got told in the elaborately 
 embroidered stanzas of the Elizabethans. The 
 couplet, not the quatrain, was to be his vehicle. 
 
 The writing of plays gave Dryden's hand valuable 
 practice in the quick sketching of action. There was 
 an audience in this case which needed to know briefly 
 what had happened off the stage. The necessity 
 was for being straightforward, not for wandering 
 among rare similes and precious allusions. A fair 
 example is the speech of the Duke of Arcos to King 
 Ferdinand in the second part of the Conquest of 
 Granada, recounting the death of the master of Al- 
 cantara : 
 
 Our soldiers marched together on the plain; 
 
 We two rode on, and left them far behind, 
 
 Till coming where we found the valley wind, 
 
 We saw these Moors; who, swiftly as they could, 
 
 Ran on to gain the covert of a wood. 
 
 This we observed ; and, having crossed their way, 
 
 The lady, out of breath, was forced to stay; 
 
 The man then stood, and straight his faulchion drew; 
 
 Then told us, we in vain did those pursue, 
 
 Whom their ill fortune to despair did drive, 
 
 And yet, whom we should never take alive. 
 
 Neglecting this, the master straight spurred on; 
 
 But the active Moor his horse's shock did shun, 
 
 And, ere his rider from his reach could go, 
 
 Finished the combat with one deadly blow. 
 
 I, to revenge my friend, prepared to fight; 
 
 But now our foremost men were come in sight, 
 
 Who soon would have dispatched him on the place, 
 
 Had I not saved him from a death so base, 
 
 And brought him to attend your royal doom.
 
 THE NARRATIVE POET 265 
 
 This is far from Dryden's maturest narrative writ- 
 ing; the inversions are stilted, and the movement in 
 general is somewhat mechanical. Its only signifi- 
 cance lies in its directness and its clarity. The 
 rhymes are less relied on to accentuate the movement 
 than is usually to be the case hereafter. Dryden at 
 his best did not smother his rhymes, but propelled 
 himself by them and by the steady forward stroke 
 of the end-stopped couplet. 
 
 Three of the satires gained by being cast in a nar- 
 rative mould. Absalom and Achitophel, which took 
 its tone from Paradise Lost and Cowley's Davideis, 
 was an epic situation overlaid with humor and huge 
 scorn. Mac Flecknoe was a full-blown mock-heroic 
 incident. The Hind and the Panther began and 
 ended on a note that was neither heroic nor familiar, 
 but was well adjusted to Dryden's complicated mo- 
 tive. Near the close of the second part there is a 
 passage that positively invites: 
 
 By this the Hind had reached her lonely cell, 
 And vapours rose, and dews unwholesome fell. 
 When she, by frequent observation wise, 
 As one who long on Heaven had fixed her eyes, 
 Discerned a change of weather in the skies. 
 The western borders were with crimson spread, 
 The moon descending looked all flaming red; 
 She thought good manners bound her to invite 
 The stranger dame to be her guest that night. 
 'Tis true, coarse diet, and a short repast, 
 (She said,) were weak inducements to the taste 
 Of one so nicely bred, and so unused to fast; 
 But what plain fare her cottage could afford,
 
 266 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 A hearty welcome at a homely board, 
 Was freely hers; and, to supply the rest, 
 An honest meaning, and an open breast. 
 
 No portion of the poem is more charged with irony; 
 almost every line here fires a political shot. At the 
 same time Dryden has capitulated to the genius of 
 story-telling. He has fallen into his most engaging 
 narrative style purely for the pleasure of doing so. 
 The two fables of the swallows and the doves in the 
 third part are justly famous. The emphasis there 
 is on situation rather than on action, as befits the 
 poet's satiric and didactic purpose; yet flourishes are 
 added from time to time that evince real relish in 
 the tale that is being told. In the fable of the swal- 
 lows, for instance, there is a triplet that Dryden re- 
 membered twelve years later when he was giving his 
 account of Iphigenia asleep: 
 
 Night came, but unattended with repose; 
 Alone she came, no sleep their eyes to close; 
 Alone and black she came; no friendly stars arose. 
 
 The great bulk of Dryden's narrative verse con- 
 sists of episodes translated or adapted from other 
 poets. The habit of versifying events out of Ovid 
 and Virgil was an old one at the Restoration, but it 
 grew upon English poets rather more rapidly after 
 1660, leaving its deepest mark on the Miscellanies 
 which Dryden himself began to edit in 1684. Dry- 
 den's first examples are the Nisus and Euryalus and 
 the Mezentius and Lausus which he brought over 
 from Virgil for the second Miscellany in 1685 and 
 which he incorporated with slight changes in the
 
 THE NARRATIVE POET 267 
 
 folio of 1 697.* He was particularly fond of the Nisus 
 stories, as the poem on Oldham shows and as is even 
 more clearly seen in a letter to Tonson concerning 
 the make-up of the volume in which they first ap- 
 peared: "I care not who translates them besides 
 me, for let him be friend or foe, I will please myself, 
 and not give off in consideration of any man." The 
 poems, both as they were then printed and as they 
 now stand, are marred by hasty lines and Latinisms, 
 but taken as wholes they are manly narratives, rich, 
 passionate, flushed with friendly warmth and rein- 
 forced by strong intelligence. They are profusely 
 colored throughout and in places they are highly 
 spiced with alliteration. They glorify a reckless 
 personal loyalty and a shouting defiance of fate, the 
 qualities which Dryden in his less critical moments 
 delighted most to treat, the qualities which moved 
 Byron at nineteen to try his own hand with Nisus 
 and Euryalus. The deaths of Nisus and his friend 
 in Dryden are brutish but effective. Enjambement 
 is used to smooth transitions, as here: 
 
 Thus armed they went. The noble Trojans wait 
 Their issuing forth, and follow to the gate 
 With prayers and vows. Above the rest appears 
 Ascanius, manly far beyond his years. 
 
 But at the more critical stages of the action and in 
 the speeches the couplets are conventionally de- 
 finitive. Mezentius addresses his horse before he 
 mounts to ride to his death: 
 
 1 See his jEneis,, V, 373-475 and IX, 221-600, for the first episode, 
 and X, 1071-1313 for the second.
 
 268 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 O Rhoebus, we have lived too long for me, 
 
 (If life and long were terms that could agree). 
 
 This day thou either shalt bring back the head 
 
 And bloody trophies of the Trojan dead; 
 
 This day thou either shalt revenge my woe, 
 
 For murdered Lausus, on his cruel foe; 
 
 Or, if inexorable fate deny 
 
 Our conquest, with thy conquered master die. 
 
 For, after such a lord, I rest secure, 
 
 Thou wilt no foreign reins, or Trojan load endure. 
 
 The episodes from Ovid and Homer in the third 
 Miscellany of 1693 are not remarkable, in spite of 
 Dryden's statement in the preface that those from 
 Ovid "appear to me the best of all my endeavours 
 in this kind. Perhaps this poet is more easy to be 
 translated than some others whom I have lately at- 
 tempted; perhaps, too, he was more according to my 
 genius. ... I have attempted to restore Ovid to 
 his native sweetness, easiness, and smoothness; and 
 to give my poetry a kind of cadence, and, as we call 
 it, a run of verse, as like the original, as the English 
 can come up to the Latin." The first book of the 
 Metamorphoses as here given is swift and smooth, 
 and the other pieces are picturesque and copious, 
 but it must always be clear to anyone that Dryden 
 was more at home among the warriors of the JEneid. 
 Ovid was attractive mainly because of his enamelled 
 extra vagrance; he wrote with license yet with ele- 
 gance; poetically he was a finished rogue. 
 
 Dryden's career ended as it began, in a triumph 
 of the spirit. His resolution at twenty-three to pro- 
 ceed to London and become a poet is matched only
 
 THE NARRATIVE POET 269 
 
 by the fire and the perseverance which drove him 
 at the end of his life through pain and sickness to 
 the conclusion of his Fables. An old man divorced 
 from the Court and vilely lampooned by Whigs each 
 year that he lived, he might have raged or snarled 
 or complained or degenerated. He settled down 
 instead to the telling of excellent stories. "The 
 tattling quality of age," he had written in the Dis- 
 course oj Satire, "as Sir William Davenant says, is 
 always narrative." He kept his gracious grand- 
 niece, Mrs. Steward of Cotterstock Hall, well in- 
 formed concerning the progress of his volume. "Be- 
 tween my intervals of physic," he wrote to her on 
 Candlemas-Day, 1698, "I am still drudging on: al- 
 ways a poet, and never a good one. I pass my time 
 sometimes with Ovid, and sometimes with our old 
 English poet Chaucer; translating such stories as 
 best please my fancy; and intend besides them to add 
 somewhat of my own; so that it is not impossible, 
 but ere the summer be passed, I may come down 
 to you with a volume in my hand, like a dog out of 
 the water, with a duck in his mouth." On the fourth 
 of March he continued: "I am still drudging at a 
 book of Miscellanies, which I hope will be well 
 enough; if otherwise, threescore and seven may be 
 pardoned." Twenty days before his death, on the 
 eleventh of April, 1700, he could write her with some 
 pride: "The ladies of the town . . . are all of your 
 opinion, and like my last book of Poems better than 
 anything they have formerly seen of mine." The 
 work was certainly drudgery, and it was done as 
 rapidly as possible for money; but it is clear that
 
 270 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Dryden grew fonder of his occupation as he pro- 
 ceeded. The golden Preface describes his delighted 
 progress from Homer to Ovid, from Ovid to Chaucer, 
 and from Chaucer to Boccaccio, the volume con- 
 stantly swelling in his hands; "I have built a house," 
 he concludes, "where I intended but a lodge." If he 
 had thought of the lodge as a green retreat for a 
 fading muse, he found the house a bustling hall 
 built for the entertainment of his ripest powers; 
 there had been no fading. At no time after the 
 Revolution did he need to say like Virgil's Mceris: 
 
 Cares and time 
 
 Change all things, and untune my soul to rhyme. 
 I could have once sung down a summer's sun, 
 But now the chime of poetry is done. 
 My voice grows hoarse. 
 
 The chime of Dryden 's verse was never done. 
 
 There is no fine bloom of romance about the 
 Fables. The generation for which they were pro- 
 duced was not possessed of tender ideals; Spenser's 
 vision of the virtues of man was as remote as Words- 
 worth's vision of the quiet powers of Nature. "Dry- 
 den had neither a tender heart, nor a lofty sense of 
 moral dignity," wrote Wordsworth to Scott in 1805. 
 "Whenever his language is poetically impassioned, 
 it is mostly upon unpleasing subjects, such as the 
 follies, vices, and crimes of classes of men, or of 
 individuals." The Fables, with certain notable ex- 
 ceptions, catered to a jaded taste that craved the 
 strong meat of romance, incest, murder, flowing 
 blood, cruel and sensual unrealities, or else the biting
 
 THE NARRATIVE POET 271 
 
 acid of satire. Dryden's search for materials was 
 far and wide. He did not confine himself to what 
 Cowley in 1656 had contemptuously dismissed as 
 "the obsolete threadbare tales of Thebes and Troy." 
 He plundered medieval as well as ancient story; he 
 went to the greatest tellers of tales wherever they 
 were, whether they were Greek, Roman, Italian, or 
 English. In a different sense from Walt Whitman's 
 he decided : 
 
 Come, Muse, migrate from Greece and Ionia. 
 
 Cross out, please, those immensely overpaid accounts; 
 
 That matter of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and ./Eneas', 
 
 Odysseus' wanderings. . . . 
 For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wider, untried 
 
 domain awaits and demands you. 
 
 Whatever the reason, Homer and Ovid do not 
 show quite so well in the Fables as do Chaucer and 
 Boccaccio. "That matter of Troy" and those "con- 
 fused antiquated dreams of senseless . . . Meta- 
 morphoses," to quote Cowley once again, only 
 occasionally here ring familiar and true. The First 
 Book of Homer's I lias, in translating which Dryden 
 did not use the original Greek, is striking only in 
 its passages of invocation and abuse. The closing 
 scene with Vulcan is grandiosely convivial: 
 
 At Vulcan's homely mirth his mother smiled, 
 And smiling took the cup the clown had filled. 
 The reconciler bowl went round the board, 
 Which, emptied, the rude skinker still restored. 
 Loud fits of laughter seized the guests, to see 
 The limping god so deft at his new ministry.
 
 272 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 The feast continued till declining light; 
 
 They drank, they laughed, they loved, and then 
 
 'twas night. 
 
 Nor wanted tuneful harp, nor vocal choir; 
 The muses sung; Apollo touched the lyre. 
 Drunken at last, and drowsy they depart, 
 Each to his house, adorned with labored art 
 Of the lame architect. 
 
 Pope's rendering of the same scene is not half so 
 lively; the laughter of his gods is imitation laughter, 
 this is real. It is thinkable that a complete Iliad 
 by the author of these lines would be, even now, 
 the most Homeric thing in English. From Homer, 
 says Dryden, "I proceeded to the translation of the 
 Twelfth Book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, because it 
 contains, among other things, the causes, the begin- 
 ning, and ending, of the Trojan war. Here I ought 
 in reason to have stopped." But he went on, so that 
 almost a third of the Fables derives from the Meta- 
 morphoses. The Meleager and Atalanta from the 
 eighth book is a hectic recital of a bloody boar-hunt 
 and a triple murder. Ovid has been lavish and 
 audacious enough, but Dryden goes him one better; 
 he is facetious when Ovid is sober, and he plays with 
 words when Ovid speaks plainly. Ovid's Althea, 
 when the corpses of her brothers are brought in, 
 cries out merely and goes into mourning. In Dryden 
 it is written : 
 
 Pale at the sudden sight, she changed her cheer, 
 And with her cheer her robes. 
 
 Ovid's Meleager, as soon as his image has been
 
 THE NARRATIVE POET 273 
 
 thrown to the fire by his mother, writhes and laments 
 the bloodless death that he must die. Dryden says: 
 
 Just then the hero cast a doleful cry, 
 And in those absent flames began to fry; 
 The blind contagion raged within his veins, 
 But he with manly patience bore his pains; 
 He feared not fate, but only grieved to die 
 Without an honest wound, and by a death so dry. 
 
 Dryden has a pretty "turn" where Ovid has none; 
 it occurs in the account of the grief of the sisters of 
 the Calydonian hero : 
 
 Had I a hundred tongues, a wit so large 
 
 As could their hundred offices discharge; 
 
 Had Phoebus all his Helicon bestowed, 
 
 In all the streams inspiring all the god; 
 
 Those tongues, that wit, those streams, that god in vain 
 
 Would offer to describe his sisters' pain. 
 
 The Baucis and Philemon from the eighth book is 
 by far the best of the Ovidian pieces. Dryden 
 praises this "good-natured story" in the Preface. 
 "I see Baucis and Philemon as perfectly before me," 
 he declares, "as if some ancient painter had drawn 
 them." It had always pleased him to write of homely 
 hospitality and rustic honesty. In the prologue to 
 All for Love he had remarked how those in high 
 places liked at times to descend among the low and 
 
 Drink hearty draughts of ale from plain brown bowls, 
 And snatch the homely rasher from the coals. 
 
 The household cheer of his Hind had been of this
 
 274 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 sort, as has been seen. Some of his most genial 
 letters were those he wrote in old age to Mrs. Steward 
 thanking her for gifts of venison and marrow pud- 
 ding. "As for the rarities you promise," he protested 
 on one occasion, "if beggars might be choosers, a 
 part of a chine of honest bacon would please my 
 appetite more than all the marrow puddings; for 
 I like them better plain; having a very vulgar 
 stomach." He revelled among Ovid's details and 
 added others of his own, stirring all in to make his 
 poem rich. Jove and Hermes fared like this: 
 
 High o'er the hearth a chine of bacon hung; 
 
 Good old Philemon seized it with a prong, 
 
 And from the sooty rafter drew it down; 
 
 Then cut a slice, but scarce enough for one; 
 
 Yet a large portion of a little store, 
 
 Which for their sakes alone he wished were more; 
 
 This in the pot he plunged without delay, 
 
 To tame the flesh and drain the salt away. 
 
 The time between, before the fire they sat, 
 
 And shortened the delay with pleasing chat. . . . 
 
 Pallas began the feast, where first were seen 
 
 The party-colored olive, black and green; 
 
 Autumnal cornels next in order served, 
 
 In lees of wine well pickled and preserved; 
 
 A garden salad was the third supply, 
 
 Of endive, radishes, and succory; 
 
 Then curds and cream, the flower of country fare, 
 
 And new-laid eggs, which Baucis' busy care 
 
 Turned by a gentle fire and roasted rare. . . . 
 
 The wine itself was suiting to the rest, 
 
 Still working in the must, and lately pressed. 
 
 The second course succeeds like that before;
 
 THE NARRATIVE POET 275 
 
 Plums, apples, nuts, and, of their wintry store, 
 Dry figs and grapes, and wrinkled dates were set 
 In canisters. 
 
 There is no padding here, no clutter of circumlocu- 
 tions. Dryden feels at home, which means that he 
 is rapid, vivid, and concrete, and therefore for once 
 a good story-teller. Pygmalion and the^ Statue, from 
 the tenth book, had a good Restoration theme which 
 lent itself to vulgarization; it was so treated by 
 Dryden, who could rarely be trusted with lovers. 
 The Cinyras and Myrrha, from the same book, a 
 tale of incest, was likewise handled without restraint. 
 The Ceyx and Alcyone, from the eleventh book, the 
 history of a shipwreck, a drowning, and a body 
 washed ashore, is extremely fantastic in Ovid; in 
 Dryden, who now is plainly tired, it is grotesque and 
 literal. Ovid's two lines on King Ceyx in the water, 
 
 Dum natet, absentem, quotiens sinit hiscere fluctus, 
 Nominat Alcyonen ipsisque inmurmurat undis, 
 
 become four in the Fables: 
 
 As oft as he can catch a gulp of air, 
 And peep above the seas, he names the fair; 
 And even when plunged beneath, on her he raves, 
 Murmuring Alcyone below the waves. 
 
 The twelfth book, which is "wholly translated," re- 
 counts the famous fight in the cave, Dryden being 
 fully as graphic and gory as the original. The 
 Speeches of Ajax and Ulysses, from the thirteenth 
 book, find him once more in his element. A forensic 
 contest is on between brain and brawn, and the
 
 276 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 translator of Lucretius is in his best argumentative 
 trim. The verse is strong, intelligent and swift. 
 Ulysses concludes, speaking to Ajax: 
 
 Brawn without brain is thine; my prudent care 
 Foresees, provides, administers the war. 
 Thy province is to fight; but when shall be 
 The time to fight, the king consults with me. 
 No dram of judgment with thy force is joined. 
 Thy body is of profit, and my mind. 
 By how much more the ship her safety owes 
 To him who steers, than him that only rows; 
 By how much more the captain merits praise 
 Than he who fights, and fighting but obeys; 
 By so much greater is my worth than thine, 
 Who canst but execute what I design. 
 
 When Dryden in the preface to his Fables elabo- 
 rately declared the superiority of Chaucer to Ovid 
 in sanity and truth to nature he revived the sunken 
 reputation of one of the greatest of English poets 
 much as in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy he had es- 
 tablished for all Augustan generations the tone of 
 evaluation of the greatest, and he reared himself 
 head and shoulders above contemporary levels of 
 criticism. Perhaps the most saving thing about him 
 as a poet is the fact that he championed and gave 
 vogue to the Canterbury Tales. The reputation of 
 Chaucer was lower in the seventeenth century than 
 it had been before or has been since. No edition 
 of his works was issued between the two reprints of 
 Speght in 1602 and 1687. He was seldom read, 
 though he was often mentioned as a difficult old 
 author who had a remarkable but obscure vein of
 
 THE NARRATIVE POET 277 
 
 gayety. Spenser's tribute was forgotten, and Mil- 
 ton's went unobserved. "Mr. Cowley despised 
 him," according to Dryden, and Addison, in the 
 Account of the Best Known English Poets which he 
 contributed to the fourth Miscellany in 1694, pro- 
 nounced what seemed a final benediction over the 
 skeleton of his fame: 
 
 In vain he jests in his unpolished strain 
 And tries to make his readers laugh in vain. . . . 
 But now the mystic tale that pleased of yore 
 Can charm an understanding age no more. 
 
 Now Dryden, in an age when "nature" was more 
 talked about than explored, took pains to deny that 
 Chaucer was "a dry, old-fashioned wit, not worth 
 reviving," proving rather that he had "followed 
 Nature everywhere," and had written for all time. 
 "We have our forefathers and great-grand-dames all 
 before us, as they were in Chaucer's days; their gen- 
 eral characters are still remaining in mankind, and 
 even in England, though they are called by other 
 names ... for mankind is ever the same, and noth- 
 ing lost out of Nature, though everything is altered." 
 The humanity of Chaucer had its effect on the 
 Fables, where The Cock and the Fox, for instance, is 
 bubbling and droll like nothing else in Dryden. It 
 is keenly a pleasure to behold the old poet who has 
 dealt so exclusively throughout his career in the 
 styles and accidents of utterance expand and ripen 
 under the influence of a richly human personality. 
 "In sum, I seriously protest," he concluded, "that 
 no man ever had, or can have, a greater veneration
 
 278 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 for Chaucer than myself. I have translated some 
 part of his works, only that I might perpetuate his 
 memory, or at least refresh it, amongst my country- 
 men." 
 
 In modernizing Chaucer Dryden had to overcome 
 two current prejudices concerning his language. On 
 the one hand there was a majority who considered 
 that language too stale to be worth restoring; on 
 the other there was a minority consisting of certain 
 "old Saxon friends" like the late Earl of Leicester 
 who supposed, according to Dryden, "that it is little 
 less than profanation and sacrilege to alter it. They 
 are farther of opinion, that somewhat of his good 
 sense will suffer in this transfusion, and much of the 
 beauty of his thoughts will infallibly be lost, which 
 appear with more grace in the old habit." His an- 
 swer to the first was that now they might see for 
 themselves whether Chaucer was worth knowing, 
 and his answer to the second was that he worked in 
 the interest not of scholars but of those "who under- 
 stand sense and poetry as well as they, when that 
 poetry and sense is put into words which they under- 
 stand." A more serious problem that had to be met 
 in the process of modernization was the problem of 
 versification. Dryden's dilemma at this point has 
 not been sufficiently appreciated. He has been 
 smiled at, to begin with, for his ignorance of Chau- 
 cer's metrical scheme; and by those who do not mind 
 that, he has been condemned for his obliteration of 
 Chaucer's exquisite metrical personality. His ig- 
 norance, which was real, he shared with most of his 
 contemporaries; and he cannot be altogether blamed
 
 THE NARRATIVE POET 279 
 
 when it is considered that the text which he used was 
 so wretchedly mangled that no uniform meter 
 emerged. It was literally true for him that not all 
 lines had the full ten syllables; Speght had not 
 guarded his final ^'s as must a modern editor. The 
 passage in which Dryden surveys the field is too im- 
 portant not to be quoted: "The verse of Chaucer, I 
 confess, is not harmonious to us; . . . they who 
 lived with him, and some time after him, thought it 
 musical; and it continues so, even in our judgment, 
 if compared with the numbers of Lidgate and Gower, 
 his contemporaries: there is the rude sweetness of a 
 Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, 
 though not perfect. 'Tis true, I cannot go so far 
 as he who published the last edition of him; for he 
 would make us believe the fault is in our ears, and 
 that there were really ten syllables in a verse where 
 we find but nine : but this opinion is not worth con- 
 futing; 'tis so gross and obvious an error, that com- 
 mon sense (which is a rule in everything but matters 
 of Faith and Revelation) must convince the reader, 
 that equality of numbers, in every verse which we 
 call heroic, was either not known, or not always 
 practiced, in Chaucer's age. It were an easy matter 
 to produce some thousands of his verses, which are 
 lame for want of half a foot, and sometimes a whole 
 one, and which no pronunciation can make other- 
 wise." But even if Dryden had known all that was 
 to be known about the verse of Chaucer, it still 
 would have been impossible for him, as it must be 
 always for anyone, to modernize that verse and pre- 
 serve its flavor. To use Dryden's own word, its
 
 280 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 most precious qualities "evaporate" when exposed 
 to another air. The crux is in the weak final sylla- 
 bles, which have a caressing sound never heard in 
 the necessarily brisker poetry of modern times. 
 Since it seemed especially important in Dryden's 
 day to throw the full weight of each line into the 
 last syllable or the last word, and since Dryden 
 himself had a dislike for feminine rhymes and in- 
 decisive endings, it is not to be wondered that he 
 sharpened and hardened his fourteenth-century 
 master. 
 
 "I have not tied myself to a literal translation," 
 he says in the Preface: "but have often omitted what 
 I judged unnecessary, or not of dignity enough to 
 appear in the company of better thoughts. I have 
 presumed further, in some places, and added some- 
 what of my own where I thought my author was 
 deficient, and had not given his thoughts their true 
 lustre, for want of words in the beginning of our 
 language." That is to say, his aim has been to 
 round out Chaucer and give him an even, enamelled 
 surface; he has wished to remove all traces of the 
 Gothic. He has had in mind a kind of fourth "unity," 
 the unity of effect, to secure which it has been nec- 
 essary to employ different means in different poems. 
 
 In Palamon and Arcite he has applied the seven- 
 teenth-century heroic formulas to Chaucer's Knight's 
 Tale, which he says he prefers "far above all his 
 other stories" because of its epic possibilities. The 
 result is a sometimes stilted poem, one of the least 
 interesting for its length in the Fables. Surrendering 
 to the Restoration heroic tradition, Dryden has drawn
 
 THE NARRATIVE POET 281 
 
 the sting of Chaucer's tender colloquialism and in- 
 jected with a blunt needle the false dignity of Al- 
 manzor and Aureng-Zebe. Neither the jovial satire 
 nor the purple melodrama of the other tales is here. 
 Epithets, circumlocutions, Latinisms, grave con- 
 ceits, and standard allusions are run profusely in to 
 thicken but not ennoble the original texture. The 
 verse is uniform and handsome, but the psychology 
 is almost everywhere gross. For Chaucer's lines, 
 
 The quene anon, for verray wommanhede, 
 Gan for to wepe, and so did Emeleye, 
 And alle the ladies in the companye, 
 
 Dryden has substituted: 
 
 The queen, above the rest, by nature good, 
 (The pattern formed of perfect womanhood,) 
 For tender pity wept: when she began, 
 Through the bright choir the infectious virtue ran. 
 All dropped their tears, even the contended maid. 
 
 And Chaucer's simile, 
 
 As wilde bores gonne they to smyte, 
 That frothen whyte as foom for ire wood, 
 
 becomes : 
 
 Or, as two boars whom love to battle draws, 
 With rising bristles, and with frothy jaws, 
 Their adverse breasts with tusks oblique they wound; 
 With grunts and groans the forest rings around. 
 
 The poem is partially redeemed on one side by the 
 regal "characters" of Lycurgus and Emetrius, the 
 prayers of Palamon, Emily, and Arcite to Venus,
 
 282 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Cynthia, and Mars, the splendid settings which are 
 given for martial actions, and on the other side by 
 occasional couplets in which Dryden's mind has 
 slashed with a shining malice through the tissue of 
 knightly palaver. As usual, his cynicism is not ugly, 
 not smart. He never looks greedily out of the corner 
 of his eye to see how you take it; it is too native with 
 him for him to be concerned about that, and he him- 
 self is too humane. At the end of ^geus' consola- 
 tory speech on the death of Arcite, Dryden, not 
 Chaucer, observes somewhat enigmatically: 
 
 With words like these the crowd was satisfied, 
 And so they would have been, had Theseus died. 
 
 Both poets like to describe groups of men conversing; 
 but when Chaucer was only amused, Dryden be- 
 came contemptuous. Chaucer's delicious account 
 in the Squire's tale of the loquacious courtiers who 
 gathered around the steed of brass that stood before 
 the throne of Cambinskan and speculated upon its 
 origin is perhaps matched here in the Knight's Tale 
 by a few lines hitting off the throng that forecast 
 the outcome of to-morrow's tournament: 
 
 The paleys ful of peples up and doun, 
 Heer three, ther ten, holding hir questioun, 
 Divyninge of thise Theban knightes two. 
 Somme seyden thus, somme seyde it shal be so; 
 Somme helden with him with the blake berd, 
 Somme with the balled, somme with the thikke-berd; 
 Somme seyde, he looked grim and he wolde fighte; 
 He hath a sparth of twenty pound of wighte.
 
 THE NARRATIVE POET 283 
 
 Thus was the halle ful of divyninge, 
 Longe after that the sonne gan to springe. 
 
 Dryden is more graphic in this case, and more 
 caustic: 
 
 In knots they stand, or in a rank they walk, 
 Serious in aspect, earnest in their talk; 
 Factious, and favoring this or t'other side, 
 As their strong fancies and weak reason guide. 
 Their wagers back their wishes; numbers hold 
 With the fair freckled king, and beard of gold; 
 So vigorous are his eyes, such rays they cast, 
 So prominent his eagle's beak is placed. 
 But most their looks on the black monarch bend, 
 His rising muscles and his brawn commend; 
 His double-biting ax, and beamy spear, 
 Each asking a gigantic force to rear. 
 All spoke as partial favor moved the mind; 
 And, safe themselves, at others' cost divined. 
 
 The Cock and the Fox is another story; it is one of 
 the best and most original of the Fables. It must be 
 sheer affectation to insist that Chaucer's Nun 
 Priest's Tale has greatly suffered in the hands of 
 Dryden. Chaucer's poem is surpassingly human, 
 concrete, and sly; but Dryden 's is no less so, though 
 its pitch is somewhat altered. The opening account 
 of the poor old widow in her cottage and of the 
 amorous Chanticleer among his dames is superior 
 comedy; Dryden has tactfully elaborated such 
 facetious hints as are given from time to time by the 
 original. The disputation between Dane Partlet and 
 the Cock on the subject of dreams offers an opportu-
 
 284 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 nity which is both welcome and improved. Parte- 
 lote 's simple gibe, 
 
 I sette not a straw by thy dreminges, 
 For swevenes been but vanitees and japes. 
 Men dreme al-day of owles or of apes, 
 And eke of many a mase therewithal; 
 Men dreme of thing that nevere was ne shal, 
 
 becomes in Partlet's mouth a piece of Lucretian 
 exposition : 
 
 Dreams are but interludes which fancy makes; 
 When monarch Reason sleeps, this mimic wakes; 
 Compounds a medley of disjointed things, 
 A court of cobblers, and a mob of kings. 
 Light fumes are merry, grosser fumes are sad; 
 Both are the reasonable soul run mad: 
 And many monstrous forms in sleep we see, 
 That neither were, nor are, nor e'er can be. 
 Sometimes forgotten things long cast behind 
 Rush forward in the brain, and come to mind. 
 The muse's legends are for truth received, 
 And the man dreams but what the boy believed. 
 Sometimes we but rehearse a former play; 
 The night restores our actions done by day, 
 As hounds in sleep will open for their prey. 
 In short the farce of dreams is of a piece, 
 Chimeras all. 
 
 The episode of the brother murdered at the inn is 
 excellently and swiftly told. The digression on 
 freewill gives Diyden a ratiocinative cue which he 
 takes half in the spirit of Religio Laid and half in 
 the spirit of the Nun Priest's Tale itself.
 
 THE NARRATIVE POET 285 
 
 The Flower and the Leaf and The Wife of Bath, 
 her Tale are extraordinary in Dryden for their 
 luxuriant, spirited representation of fairy worlds. 
 The Flower and the Leaf, a poem not by Chaucer, 
 is a singularly pure and magical piece of pageantry 
 in rhyme-royal. Dryden has flushed and accelerated 
 it; its wheels have caught fire, and glowing masses 
 of fresh detail are swept into the race. The splendor 
 is mostly genuine; few of Dryden 's descriptions are 
 less prolix. The genius of Spenser has rushed to 
 reinforce the old Augustan in this couplet on the 
 nightingale: 
 
 So sweet, so shrill, so variously she sung, 
 That the grove echoed, and the valleys rung. 
 
 And in the passage on the jousting knights Dryden 
 has remembered the metrical pattern which he used 
 some years before to describe the Trojan boys as 
 they wheeled and met in warlike play on the plains 
 of Sicily: l 
 
 Thus marching to the trumpets' lofty sound, 
 Drawn in two lines adverse they wheeled around, 
 And in the middle meadow took their ground. 
 Among themselves the turney they divide, 
 In equal squadrons ranged on either side; 
 Then turned their horses' heads, and man to man, 
 And steed to steed opposed, the justs began, 
 They lightly set their lances in the rest, 
 And, at the sign, against each other pressed; 
 They met; I sitting at my ease beheld 
 The mixed events, and fortunes of the field. 
 1 See page 83 .
 
 286 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Some broke their spears, some tumbled horse and man, 
 And round the field the lightened coursers ran. 
 An hour and more, like tides, in equal sway 
 They rushed, and won by turns and lost the day. 
 
 The twenty-five lines with which Chaucer began 
 the story of the Wife of Bath have grown into forty- 
 five in the Fables. Dryden has drawn upon Shake- 
 speare's Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night's 
 Dream, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Milton's 
 L y Allegro to enrich the text of the Canterbury Tales: 
 
 I speak of ancient times, for now the swain 
 
 Returning late may pass the woods in vain, 
 
 And never hope to see the nightly train; 
 
 In vain the dairy now with mints is dressed, 
 
 The dairymaid expects no fairy guest, 
 
 To skim the bowls, and after pay the feast. 
 
 She sighs, and shakes her empty shoes in vain, 
 
 No silver penny to reward her pain; 
 
 For priests with prayers, and other godly gear, 
 
 Have made the merry goblins disappear; 
 
 And where they played their merry pranks before, 
 
 Have sprinkled holy water on the floor. . . . 
 
 The maids and women need no danger fear 
 
 To walk by night, and sanctity so near; 
 
 For by some haycock, or some shady thorn, 
 
 He bids his beads both even song and morn. 
 
 It so befell in this King Arthur's reign, 
 
 A lusty knight was pricking o'er the plain. . . . 
 
 An open attack on the court follows soon after, com- 
 mencing: 
 
 Then courts of kings were held in high renown, 
 Ere made the common brothels of the town.
 
 THE NARRATIVE POET 287 
 
 The tale proceeds without especial distinction; the 
 long speech at the end by the loathly lady is expanded 
 from Chaucer with the aid of Lucretius. 
 
 "I think his translations from Boccaccio are the 
 best, at least the most poetical, of his poems," wrote 
 Wordsworth to Scott. They are among the best 
 known of the Fables; and they are the most successful 
 of all Dryden's poems as narratives. It must be 
 admitted that in general his stories in verse are 
 interesting not so much for their action as for some- 
 thing by the way: the meter, the speeches, the set- 
 tings, the "characters," the satiric interpolations, 
 the semblance of action. With the exception per- 
 haps of Palamon and Arcite^ none of the pieces from 
 Chaucer or Ovid is remembered wholly for what 
 happens in it; as the outer dome of St. Paul's cathe- 
 dral is beautiful but not necessary, so Dryden's 
 narrative surface is animated but not moving. But 
 in those from Boccaccio the story is everything; 
 these poems burn with narrative energy. It was 
 not for nothing that Dryden turned at last to the 
 prince of story tellers and went in frankly for melo- 
 drama. Sigismonda and Guiscardo is a blazing tale 
 of lovers' lust and murder. We see a secret bride 
 and groom somewhat brutally enjoy each other until 
 the father discovers them and orders the husband 
 put to death. Wordsworth's criticism can hardly 
 be improved upon. "It is many years since I saw 
 Boccaccio," he said, "but I remember that Sigis- 
 munda is not married by him to Guiscard. ... I 
 think Dryden has much injured the story by the 
 marriage, and degraded Sigismunda's character by
 
 288 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 it. He has also, to the best of my remembrance, 
 degraded her still more, by making her love absolute 
 sensuality and appetite; Dryden had no other notion 
 of the passion. With all these defects, and they are 
 very gross ones, it is a noble poem." The poem on 
 the whole is swift, though there are some wide 
 wastes of verbiage. Sigismonda's address to Tan- 
 cred defending Guiscardo and vindicating virtuous 
 poverty is sound oratory but it is too long and too 
 formal. Dryden in the Preface invites comparison 
 between it and the speech of the hag at the end of 
 The Wife of Bath. Neither speech as it is written 
 belongs exactly where it is placed. Theodore and 
 Honoria is a haunting tale of terror, long popular 
 and the only one of Dryden 's narratives with an 
 atmosphere that is organic and sustained. The 
 forests of old Ravenna cast a deep romantic shade 
 over the knights and ladies, real and visionary, who 
 play their grisly parts. Dryden has opened both 
 eyes wide upon a dark fantastic world; and his ear 
 was never fitter. The poem makes a rousing 
 start: 
 
 Of all the cities in Romanian lands, 
 The chief, and most renowned, Ravenna stands, 
 Adorned in ancient times with arms and arts, 
 And rich inhabitants, with generous hearts. 
 But Theodore the brave, above the rest, 
 With gifts of fortune and of nature blest, 
 The foremost place for wealth and honour held, 
 And all in feats of chivalry excelled. 
 
 This noble youth to madness loved a dame, 
 Of high degree, Honoria was her name;
 
 THE NARRATIVE POET 289 
 
 Fair as the fairest, but of haughty mind, 
 And fiercer than became so soft a kind. 
 
 The setting for the apparition of the hunted maid 
 owes its success to a group of ominous cadences 
 which reproduce the terror and suspense of Nature 
 herself: 
 
 It happed one morning, as his fancy led, 
 
 Before his usual hour he left his bed, 
 
 To walk within a lonely lawn, that stood 
 
 On every side surrounded by the wood. 
 
 Alone he walked, to please his pensive mind, 
 
 And sought the deepest solitude to find. . . . 
 
 While listening to the murmuring leaves he stood, 
 
 More than a mile immersed within the wood, 
 
 At once the wind was laid; the whispering sound 
 
 Was dumb; a rising earthquake rocked the ground; 
 
 With deeper brown the grove was overspread: 
 
 A sudden horror seized his giddy head, 
 
 And his ears tinkled, and his color fled. 
 
 Nature was in alarm; some danger nigh 
 
 Seemed threatened, though unseen to mortal eye. 
 
 Unused to fear, he summoned all his soul, 
 
 And stood collected in himself, and whole; 
 
 Not long: for soon a whirlwind rose around, 
 
 And from afar he heard a screaming sound, 
 
 As of a dame distressed, who cried for aid, 
 
 And filled with loud laments the secret shade. 
 
 The story whirls on without an interruption or a 
 couplet out of place. The effect is single; Dryden 
 nowhere stops merely to heap up words or to paint 
 an impossible, unnecessary scene. Cymon and Iphi- 
 genia, the last of all the Fables, is less of a piece
 
 290 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 than the Theodore. It is famous not for its plot 
 but for its by-play. No one remembers the last 
 two-thirds of the poem; but the first hundred and 
 fifty-seven lines are classic. Dryden has conceived 
 simple Cymon and the most desirable Iphigenia with 
 infinite zest. The hero is removed by his father to the 
 farm: 
 
 Thus to the wilds the sturdy Cymon went, 
 
 A squire among the swains, and pleased with banishment. 
 
 His corn and cattle were his only care, 
 
 And his supreme delight a country fair. 
 
 It happened on a summer's holiday, 
 That to the greenwood shade he took his way; 
 For Cymon shunned the church, and used not much to 
 
 pray. 
 
 His quarterstaff, which he could ne'er forsake, 
 Hung half before, and half behind his back. 
 He trudged along, unknowing what he sought, 
 And whistled as he went, for want of thought. 
 
 He comes upon Iphigenia asleep much as Thomson 's 
 Damon in Summer comes upon Musidora, and after 
 a spell of staring he is inspired to analyze his first 
 love 's charms : 
 
 Thus our man-beast, advancing by degrees, 
 First likes the whole, then separates by degrees, 
 On several parts a several praise bestows, 
 The ruby lips, the well-proportioned nose, 
 The snowy skin, the raven-glossy hair, 
 The dimpled cheek, the forehead rising fair, 
 And even in sleep itself a smiling air. 
 
 This is romance, but romance sunned and dried
 
 THE NARRATIVE POET 291 
 
 in the smiling mind of a massive old satirist. Here 
 in this legend of two preposterous lovers and after- 
 wards in the "character" of the raw militia swarm- 
 ing on the fields of Rhodes are exhibited most of 
 the traits of Dryden. One will observe the absence 
 of wonder, and the powerful presence of hard, sub- 
 stantial laughter.
 
 VIII 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 
 
 The reputation of Dryden as a poet has not been 
 international. Where English is not spoken his name 
 is likely to be respected, but his poetry seldom is 
 read. A man who has had so little to say to his 
 countrymen has had no claim at all on the ears of 
 foreigners. It is only a few poets who can be or 
 need be translated. Dryden, in whom style was 
 paramount, and whose manner proved generally in- 
 communicable even to native successors, can hardly 
 have expected to appear to advantage in other lan- 
 guages. Thackeray asserted in his essay on Con- 
 greve and Addison that Dryden died "the marked 
 man of all Europe," but that is an exaggeration. 
 Naturally enough, he was heard more of in France 
 than elsewhere on the continent; yet he was never 
 famous there. At no time before 1700 were the 
 French much interested in England's belles lettres; 
 it did not much matter to Boileau whether Dryden 
 or Blackmore was best among the poets across the 
 Channel. Boileau, indeed, when told of Dryden's 
 death is said to have affected never to have heard 
 his name. Rapin, on the other hand, may have 
 learned English merely to read him. At all events, 
 it was not until the next century, when everything 
 English suddenly became of enormous concern to
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 293 
 
 Frenchmen, that Voltaire celebrated and gave some 
 little vogue to "1'inegal et impetueux Dryden," 
 "un tres-grand genie," as he called him in the dedi- 
 cation of Zaire in 1736. He had introduced the 
 author of Aureng-Zebe to the French public in 1734, 
 in his letter on English tragedy: "C'est Dryden 
 Poete du terns de Charles second, Auteur plus fecond 
 que judicieux, qui aurait une reputation sans me- 
 lange, s'il n'avait fait que la dixieme partie de ses 
 Ouvrages, et dont le grand deffaut est d'avoir voulu 
 etre universel." In 1752, in the thirty-fourth chap- 
 ter of his Siecle de Louis XI V, he announced of 
 Dryden's works that they were "pleins de details 
 naturels a la fois et brillants, animes, vigoureux, 
 hardis, passiones, merite qu'aucun ancien n'a sur- 
 passe." He drew upon The Wife of Bath in 1764 for 
 the idea of his tale in verse, Ce Que Plait Aux Dames. 
 Alexander's Feast was always for him a point de re- 
 pere in English poetry. In his article on Enthusiasm 
 in the Dictionary he showed an excellent under- 
 standing of the conventional English judgments upon 
 it: "De toutes les odes modernes, celle ou il regne 
 le plus grand enthousiasme qui ne s'affaiblit jamais, 
 et qui ne tombe ni dans le faux ni dans 1'ampule, 
 est le Timothee, ou la fete d'Alexandre, par Dryden; 
 elle est encore regardee en Angleterre comme un chef- 
 d'oeuvre inimitable, dont Pope n'a pu approcher 
 quand il a voulu s'exercer dans le meme genre. 
 Cette ode fut chantee; et si on avait eu un musicien 
 digne du poe'te, ce serait le chef-d'oeuvre de la poesie 
 lyrique." To M. de Chabanon, who had just pub- 
 lished a translation of Pindar with an essay on the
 
 294 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Pindaric genre^ he wrote from Ferney on the gth of 
 March, 1772: "Vous appelez Cowley le Pindare 
 anglais . . . c'etait un poete sans harmonic. . . . 
 Le vrai Pindare est Dryden, auteur de cette belle ode 
 intitulee la Fete d'Alexandre, ou Alexandre et Tim- 
 othee. Cette ode . . . passe en Angleterre pour le 
 chef-d'oeuvre de la poesie la plus sublime et la plus 
 variee; et je vous avoue que, comme je sais meux 
 1'anglais que le grec, j'aime cent fois mieux cette ode 
 que tout Pindare." Boswell told Johnson "that Vol- 
 taire, in a conversation with me, had distinguished 
 Pope and Dryden thus: 'Pope drives a handsome 
 chariot, with a couple of neat trim nags; Dryden a 
 coach, and six stately horses." 1 It will be seen that 
 Voltaire had not listened for nothing to the wits 
 and savants of London. And he must have known 
 that he was safer in extolling Alexander's Feast than 
 he would have been on any other ground. Dryden's 
 last ode has penetrated where none of the other 
 poems will ever go. Handel's music kept it long 
 familiar to Germans who had no taste for the other 
 lyrics. Henry Crabb Robinson wrote in his diary 
 in 1803, after a visit to Voss, the German translator 
 of Homer: "I was quite unable to make him see the 
 beauty of Dryden's translations from Horace, such 
 as the 'Ode on Fortune." 1 A. W. Schlegel was at 
 a loss to understand what he considered the inflated 
 reputation at home of the plays, the translations, and 
 the "political allegories." It is in England, and inci- 
 dentally in America, that one must remain if he would 
 find what fame the name of Dryden has enjoyed. 
 "I loved Mr. Dryden," said Congreve with a sim-
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 295 
 
 plicity that was rare with him and his generation. 
 The stout old poet with his cherry cheeks, his heavy 
 eyes, his long grey hair, and his snuff-soiled waistcoat 
 was not in want of affectionate as well as valuable 
 friends after the Revolution. He kept company not 
 only with poets, but with important laymen. He 
 was a believer in conversation, though he may not 
 have been an adept himself. "Great contemporaries 
 whet and cultivate each other," he wrote in 1693 in 
 the Discourse of Satire. Back in the time of Charles 
 he had been intimate with the wits and poets of the 
 court. "We have . . . our genial nights," he re- 
 minded Sedley in the dedication of The Assignation 
 in 1673, "where our discourse is neither too serious 
 nor too light, but always pleasant, and, for the most 
 part, instructive; the raillery neither too sharp upon 
 the present, nor too censorious on the absent; and 
 the cups only such as will raise the conversation of 
 the night, without disturbing the business of the 
 morrow." In his last decade he was welcome in the 
 houses of his relations, Mrs. Steward of Cotterstock 
 Hall, near Oundle, Northamptonshire, and John 
 Driden of Chesterton, in Huntingdonshire, and in 
 that of the really noble Duke of Ormonde. Thomas 
 Carte, who wrote a life of the Duke in 1736, said 
 that "once in a quarter of a year he used to have the 
 Marquis of Halifax, the earls of Mulgrave, Dorset, 
 and Danby, Mr. Dryden, and others of that set of 
 men at supper, and then they were merry and drank 
 hard." * 
 
 J John Caryll of Lady Holt, Sussex, who formed the amiable habit 
 late in the century of inviting celebrities to his house and accompanying
 
 296 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 His position among the poets of that decade is too 
 well known to require an elaborate account. Pope 
 told Spence that "Dryden employed his mornings 
 in writing; dined, enfamille; and then went to Will's." 
 His coffee-house dictatorship has long been prover- 
 bial in English literary history; "the great patriarch 
 of Parnassus" who ruled by the fire in winter and 
 out on the balcony in summer is the most striking 
 figure between the blind Milton and the rolling Dr. 
 Johnson. His prologues and epilogues, and later his 
 satires, made him respected, feared, and sought as 
 a judge of verse. There has come down from about 
 1682 a decision which he wrote for an unknown com- 
 pany concerning a disputed passage in Creech's 
 Lucretius. The dispute was as to whether the pas- 
 sage made sense. Dryden reported: "I have con- 
 
 his invitations with gifts of venison, transcribed for Pope or himself 
 about 1729 a letter from Dryden, dated July 21, 1698, sent in answer 
 to one of his hospitable notes. The copy may be found among the 
 Additional MSS. at the British Museum (28, 618, f. 84). It runs as 
 follows: 
 
 Sir 
 
 T is the part of an honest Man to be as good as his Word, butt you 
 have been better: I expected but halfe of what I had, and that halfe, 
 not halfe so Good. Your Vaneson had three of the best Qualities, for 
 it was both fatt, large & sweet. To add to this you have been pleased to 
 invite me to Ladyholt, and if I could promise myself a year's Life, I 
 might hope to be happy in so sweet a Place, & in the Enjoyment of your 
 good Company. How God will dispose of me, I know not: but I am apt 
 to flatter myself with the thoughts of itt, because I very much desire itt, 
 and am Sr with all manner of Acknowledgement, 
 
 Yr most Obliged and most 
 
 faith full Servant 
 July 21, 1698. John Dryden.
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 297 
 
 sidered the verses, and find the author of them to 
 have notoriously bungled; that he has placed the 
 words as confusedly as if he had studied to do so." 
 He proceeded to analyze the error and to suggest an 
 amendment of it, concluding: "The company having 
 done me so great an honour as to make me their 
 judge, I desire . . . the favour of making my ac- 
 knowledgments to them; and should be proud to 
 hear . . . whether they rest satisfied in my opin- 
 ion." By 1685 his authority at Will's already was 
 established, if Spence's story of how young Lockier 
 won his approbation there may be trusted. Robert 
 Wolseley the same year, in his preface to Roches- 
 ter's play Falentinian, referred a quarrel with Mul- 
 grave in all confidence to "Mr. Dryden, . . . whose 
 judgment in anything that relates to Poetry, I sup- 
 pose, he will not dispute." There was little disposi- 
 tion among the younger followers of literature like 
 Walsh and Dennis to contest a definition or a pref- 
 erence of Mr. Dryden's. Nor was there serious doubt 
 in the minds of beginning poets as to what was the 
 best in matter, form, and style; Dryden had stamped 
 an image of himself on every world of verse, and 
 few could refrain from falling in some measure into 
 the cadences of his prologues, his epistles, his satires, 
 his discourses, his songs, his odes, his narratives. 
 Publicly also it was understood that Dryden repre- 
 sented the taste of the nation in poetry. The man 
 who once had subsisted by panegyrizing the Crown, 
 by propitiating the coxcombs of the theaters, and 
 later by being a partisan in verse, was now more 
 honorably engaged in selling his verses to the readers
 
 298 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 of England generally. The two folios of 1697 and 
 1700, the Virgil and the Fables, are memorials not 
 only of an aged poet's power but of an awakening 
 audience's temper. The book-seller with his sub- 
 scription editions was now in a position to guarantee 
 a kind of independence and professional prosperity 
 to men of gifts; there Was coming into existence a 
 reading public. Long before the first of the two 
 folios appeared it was a prevailing wish that Dryden 
 might build an English monument in meter. "We 
 hope that Mr. Dryden will undertake to give us a 
 Translation of Virgil," wrote Motteux in his "News 
 of Learning from Several Parts" in the Gentleman's 
 Journal for March, 1694; "'tis indeed a most diffi- 
 cult work, but if anyone can assure himself of suc- 
 cess in attempting so bold a task, 'tis doubtless the 
 Virgil of our age, for whose noble Pen that best of 
 Latin Poets seems reserved." The Virgil and the 
 Fables seem today to stand astride of the interval 
 between Paradise Lost and Pope's Homer. For a 
 generation at least anyone who pretended to be a 
 reader read them, as one who expected to be a poet 
 studied them. Dryden himself, complacently enough, 
 was the first to admit his own supremacy; knowing 
 that no man wrote better poetry, he said as much, 
 and so infuriated for a new reason such rivals in 
 trade as grudged him his eminence, such enemies in 
 politics as still remembered his ill-timed conversion 
 to Roman Catholicism, and such desperate wits as 
 subsisted at the fringe of literary society by making 
 sport of the famous. "More libels have been written 
 against me, than almost any man now living," he
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 299 
 
 could say in 1693. He suffered both the advantages 
 and the disadvantages of having no real rival to 
 draw a portion of the fire. 
 
 An investigator of the reputation of a poet seeks 
 to answer three questions. As for his vogue, what 
 poems have continued to be read ? As for his stand- 
 ing, how has he been criticised and where has he 
 been ranked? And as for his influence, what poets 
 have been governed or at any rate touched by his 
 technique and personality? It seems advisable in 
 the case of Dryden to pursue each of these inquiries 
 through three periods since his death: the eighteenth 
 century, or such portions of it as preserved fairly 
 uniform Augustan standards; the late eighteenth and 
 early nineteenth centuries, when there was a more 
 or less abrupt break with those standards; and all 
 subsequent time. 
 
 Dryden 's vogue as a poet in any one period can- 
 not be determined with exactness on the basis of 
 collected editions. Taken in proportion to the whole 
 of the literary public the readers of Dryden 's poems 
 i,n the nineteenth century were scarcely one-fourth 
 as numerous as they had been in the eighteenth; 
 yet the nineteenth century saw four times as many 
 editons. Tonson printed a very imperfect folio in 
 1701 consisting chiefly of Poems on Various Occasions 
 and Translations from Several Authors extracted 
 from the Miscellanies, binding it with two volumes 
 of the plays and the 1700 issue of the Fables. No 
 other collection appeared until forty-two years 
 later, when the house of Tonson and the Rev. 
 Thomas Broughton brought out in two compact
 
 300 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 volumes the "Occasional Poems and Translations;" 
 although Congreve's edition of the plays in six 
 volumes in 1717 was popular, furnishing the material 
 for new editions in 1725, 1735, 1760, and 1762. Two 
 volumes of Poems and Fables appeared in Dublin in 
 1741 and 1753, while Glasgow supported two vol- 
 umes of Original Poems in 1756, 1770, 1773, 1775, and 
 1776, the last time in company with the Fables. 
 Samuel Derrick in 1760 and 1767 produced for the 
 Tonsons again what he claimed was a complete set 
 of the miscellaneous poems and translations in four 
 beautiful octavo volumes, adding an ambitious 
 Life and some elaborate notes, the first of their kind 
 upon the subject. This work probably forestalled 
 a somewhat more bulky edition of both the prose 
 and the verse projected by James Ralph in 1758. 
 Two volumes of Original Poems and Translations 
 (1777) were followed in rapid succession during the 
 next three-quarters of a century by the famous series 
 of reprints of British poets, a series more bought than 
 read. The collections of Bell in 1777 and 1782, 
 those called Johnson's in 1779, 1790, and 1822, and 
 those of Anderson in 1793, Park in 1806 and 1808, 
 Chalmers in 1810, Sandford in 1819, the Aldine 
 Poets in 1832-33, 1834, 1843, 1844, 1852, 1854, 1865, 
 1866, 1871, and 1891, the Cabinet Poets in 1851, 
 Routledge in 1853, Robert Bell in 1854, 1862, and 
 1870, and Gilfillan in 1855, 1874, and 1894, to name 
 no others, did not succeed in bringing great bodies 
 of eager new readers to Dryden. Scott's exhaustive 
 edition of 1808, reissued in 1821 and revised by 
 Professor Saintbury in 1882-1893, was unfortunately
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 301 
 
 as well as fortunately a monument; it never has lent 
 itself to familiar handling. The four volumes edited 
 from the notes of the Wartons in 1811, intended 
 to complement Malone's four volumes of the prose 
 (1800), were printed again in 1851 and 1861. W. D. 
 Christie's Globe Dry den of 1870, since republished 
 many times, has furnished the model for editions 
 of the poems in a single volume. Its successors have 
 made the poet easily accessible and in matters of 
 textual accuracy and bibliography have done him 
 justice. The Cambridge Dry den is an American 
 masterpiece. Most of these many editions have in- 
 dicated little more than that the English-reading 
 world has expanded and that new libraries have 
 called for new sets of standard works. It is else- 
 where that one must go to find what poems of Dry- 
 den in particular and in truth have lived to please. 
 The eighteenth century, being interested mostly 
 in Dryden 's style, was much devoted to his trans- 
 lations, in which it was considered, not very ac- 
 curately, that his style showed fullest and best. The 
 Virgil was reprinted in 1698, 1709, 1716, 1721, 1730, 
 1748, 1763, 1769, 1772, 1773, 1782, 1792, and 1793, the 
 exceptional interval between 1730 and 1763 being 
 partly explainable by the appearance of Christopher 
 Pitt's translation of the JEneid in 1740. Pitt was a 
 better scholar than Dryden, and for a time he stood 
 more in favor. But Dr. Johnson was of the opinion 
 "that Pitt pleases the critic, and Dryden the people; 
 that Pitt is quoted, and Dryden read." Neither 
 is read often or carefully now, but it is plain that if 
 Dryden lost by departing from Virgil, Pitt gained
 
 302 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 nothing by staying close. The Juvenal and Persius 
 were published in 1697, 1702, 1711, 1713, 1726, 1732, 
 and 1735. Various portions of the Ovid appeared 
 in 1701, 1705, 1709, and 1712. Sir Samuel Garth's 
 composite Metamorphoses gave due prominence to 
 Dry den's pieces both in the first edition of 1717 
 and in the later editions of 1751 and 1794; but these 
 came out separately again in 1719, 1720, 1725, 1729, 
 1735, 1761, 1776, 1782, 1791, and 1795. The Fables 
 were well known to the writers of the Spectator and 
 Tatler, and even Swift permitted himself to quote 
 them. They were freshly issued in 1713, 1721, 
 
 1734, 1737, 1741, 1742, 1745, 1755, 1771, 1773, 1774, 
 and with sumptuous engravings in 1797. "It is to 
 his Fables," predicted Joseph Warton in the Essay 
 on Pope, "that Dryden will owe his immortality." 
 The most famous single poem of Dryden 's through- 
 out the century seems to have been the Alexander's 
 Feast. Performed by musicians, quoted by aestheti- 
 cians and essayists, printed in anthologies, trans- 
 lated into Greek and Latin, and parodied, it had 
 every reason to be known; published for the second 
 time by Tonson in the Fables of 1700, it was re- 
 published in other forms in 1738, 1740, 1743, 1751, 
 1756, 1758, 1760, 1773, 1778, 1779, and 1780. The 
 Song for St. Ceclia's Day (1687) was less in vogue, 
 but it found its way into type in 1754, 1760, 1764, 
 and 1778. The ode on Anne Killigrew seems never 
 to have commanded serious attention until Dr. 
 Johnson's bold praise of it in the Life, praise which 
 shocked certain readers of the Gentleman's Magazine 
 into sober protest. In general the miscellaneous
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 303 
 
 non-dramatic verse had to live by anthologies 
 and pirations. As has been observed before, Ton- 
 son's imperfect edition of 1701 had no successor until 
 1743; and neither Broughton's volumes then nor 
 those of Derrick later were notably popular. Yet 
 during the interval between Tonson and Broughton 
 it was never difficult to become acquainted with 
 Dryden the occasional and lyric poet. The earlier 
 editions of Poems on Affairs of State virtually exclu- 
 ded him on the ground of his politics, but into the 
 later volumes of that series and into most other 
 repositories he had easy entry. From the West- 
 minster Drolleries in 1671-2 to Tom Durfey's Pills 
 to Purge Melancholy in 1719-20, and longer, no 
 collection of English songs omitted the most rous- 
 ing of those from Dryden 's plays, while broadsides 
 flung them into rougher company. Handbooks like 
 those of Bysshe and Gildon drew heavily upon him 
 for examples of good verse. More than half of 
 Bysshe 's "Collection of the most Natural, Agree- 
 able and Noble Thoughts . . . that are to be found 
 in the best English Poets" hails from Dryden. But 
 Dryden's Miscellany itself gave him the most cur- 
 rency. The four Miscellany volumes which he had 
 engineered for Tonson in 1684, 1685, 1693, and 1694, 
 and which had been by no means the least sign of 
 his leadership while he lived, were followed after 
 his death by a fifth part in 1704 and a sixth part in 
 1709. In 1716 and again in 1727 all six were col- 
 lected and reissued with new material, Dryden 
 being honored by the inclusion of ninety-six of his 
 pieces. The first volume opened with Mac Flecknoe,
 
 304 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 as it had at the beginning of the series, in 1684; and 
 here or there all the public poems found place: that 
 is to say, the two parts of Absalom and Achitophel, 
 the Heroic Stanzas, Astraa Redux, To His Sacred 
 Majesty, To My Lord Chancellor, The Medal, Annus 
 Mirabilis, Threnodia Augustalis, The Hind and the 
 Panther, Britannia Rediviva, and Religio Laid. The 
 occasional verse was represented by nineteen of the 
 prologues and eleven of the epilogues, by the epistles 
 to Etherege, Kneller, Howard, Lady Castlemaine, 
 Charleton, Higden, the Duchess of York, Congreve 
 and Roscommon and by the elegies, epitaphs and 
 epigrams on Hastings, "Amyntas," "A Very Young 
 Gentleman," Dundee, "Young Mr. Rogers," Lady 
 Whitmore, Sir Palmes Fairborne, "Eleonora," Anne 
 Killigrew, and Milton. There were six songs and the 
 Feni Creator; there was the Art of Poetry; and there 
 were the translations from Theocritus, Lucretius, 
 and Horace, with the Hector and Andromache from 
 Homer, and the fourth and ninth Eclogues together 
 with the episodes of Nisus, Mezentius, and Vulcan 
 from Virgil. Here was the body, certainly, of Dry- 
 den's verse. Yet it is a question whether he gained 
 by being shuffled so recklessly between Tonson's 
 covers among dozens of other poets living and dead, 
 good and indifferent, like and unlike him. It was 
 Broughton's aim, at least, in 1743, to separate him 
 from the mass and give him the dignity of two 
 pleasant duodecimo volumes that could be set 
 alongside the small editions already current of the 
 Fables, the Virgil, the Juvenal, and the dramatic 
 works. The collectors throughout the century of
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 305 
 
 fugitive and minor poetry, like Dodsley, Pearch, 
 and Nichols, were inclined to pass Diyden by as al- 
 ready standard. A. F. Griffith's Collection . . . of 
 English Prologues and Epilogues Commencing with 
 Shakespeare and Concluding with Garrick, in four vol- 
 umes, 1779, the completest thing of its kind in the 
 language, gave him the first place with eighty pro- 
 logues and epilogues. It may safely be concluded 
 of Dryden in the eighteenth century that although 
 he was never contagious except as a songster, or 
 much on the lips of society, he yet was respectably 
 current. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu carried his 
 best couplets in her mind to Constantinople. Upon 
 the occasion of ThornhilPs first visit to the Vicar 
 of Wakefield's daughters, music was proposed and 
 "a favourite song of Dryden V was sung. For the 
 most part Dryden continued to keep the company 
 of literary men. The Spectator and Taller made fre- 
 quent use of the translations and of the "characters" 
 from the satires; Dr. Johnson, virtually every page 
 of whose Dictionary gleamed with lines from Dryden 
 as well as with lines from Pope and Shakespeare, was 
 fond of quoting him in his own letters; Gibbon, 
 who said he had grown up on the Virgil and Pope's 
 Homer ', knew the Fables and the satires particularly 
 well; and Burke and Charles James Fox were deeply 
 indebted to the prose. 
 
 As the eighteenth century wore away it was in- 
 creasingly difficult to be interested in much of Dry- 
 den's political and occasional verse or in many of his 
 translations from the classics. Editions of the Ju- 
 venal and Persius in 1810, 1813, and 1822, of the
 
 306 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Firgil in 1802, 1803, 1806, 1807, 1811, 1812, 1813, 
 1819, 1820, 1822, 1823, 1824, 1825, and 1830, and of 
 the Ovid in 1804, 1807, 1812, 1815, 1824, 1826, 1833, 
 and 1850, to come no further down, signified ambi- 
 tion in publishers or the survival of old-fashioned 
 tastes in readers, rather than any real vogue. Scott's 
 efforts in behalf of a Dryden tradition included an 
 attractive picture of "Glorious John" in the four- 
 teenth chapter of The Pirate, a picture which ap- 
 pealed at least to antiquarian and tory minds. "I 
 wish I could believe," wrote Lockhart in the Life, 
 "that Scott's labours had been sufficient to recall 
 Dryden to his rightful station, not in the opinion of 
 those who make literature the business or chief 
 solace of their lives for with them he had never 
 forfeited it but in the general favour of the intelli- 
 gent public. That such has been the case, however, 
 the not rapid sale of two editions, aided as they were 
 by the greatest of living names, can be no proof; nor 
 have I observed among the numberless recent pub- 
 lication of the English booksellers a single reprint 
 of even those tales, satires and critical essays, not 
 to be familiar with which would, in the last age, have 
 been considered as disgraceful in any one making 
 the least pretension to letters." Lockhart was per- 
 haps too pessimistic. The Fables had found pub- 
 lishers in 1806 and 1822; the anthologists of the time 
 were paying due attention both to them and to the 
 satires, the best of the occasional poems, and the 
 odes. Campbell's Specimens of the British Poets 
 (1819) included the "characters" of Achitophel, 
 Zimri, Og, and Doeg, the Killigrew, the descriptions
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 307 
 
 of Lycurgus and Emetrius and of the preparation 
 for the tournament in Palamon and Arctic, all of 
 Cymon and Iphigenia, and The Flower and the Leaf. 
 Hazlitt's Select British Poets (1824) offered Absalom 
 and Achitophel, Mac Flecknoe, Religio Laid, and The 
 Hind and the Panther, the epistles to Congreve, 
 Kneller, and Driden of Chesterton, the elegy on 
 Oldham, Alexander's Feast and the Secular Masque, 
 The Cock and the Fox, Sigismonda and Guiscardo, 
 Theodore and Honoria, Cymon and Iphigenia, and 
 Baucis and Philemon. 
 
 The trend of the nineteenth century away from 
 Dryden aroused a number of genuine but ineffectual 
 protests from professional literary men. The editor 
 of a volume of Selections in 1852 began his preface 
 thus: "The merits of Dryden are not sufficiently ac- 
 knowledged at present. Our zeal for the poets who 
 preceded the civil wars, like most reactions, is be- 
 come too exclusive." The reviewer of Bell's edition 
 of 1854 in the Edinburgh for July, 1855, enumerated 
 four reasons for "the oblivion into which the works 
 of Dryden have so singularly fallen": inability to 
 distinguish between Dryden and his unworthy imi- 
 tators; failure to see that Dryden himself was not 
 another Pope; "monstrous" ignorance on the part 
 of Wordsworth, Keats, and the new schools; and a 
 heretical notion generally that Dryden and Pope 
 were not poets. There were other and better rea- 
 sons. But whatever the whole cause, it was and is 
 true regarding the bulk of Dryden's work that, as 
 Lowell declared, "few writers are more thoroughly 
 buried in that great cemetery of the 'British Poets." 1
 
 3 o8 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 He has not become absorbed into English speech 
 like Pope, nor are his longer poems read with en- 
 thusiasm as wholes. He lies about in splendid frag- 
 ments: the four "characters" of Shaftesbury, Buck- 
 ingham, Burnet, and Settle, and the two of Shadwell; 
 the beginning of Religio Laid and the passage there 
 on tradition; the first eighty lines of The Hind and 
 the Panther and the eulogy of the Roman Catholic 
 Church in the second part; the translations of Lu- 
 cretius on death and Horace on contempt of Fortune; 
 the epigram on Milton; the elegy on Oldham; the 
 prologues at Oxford and before Aureng-Zebe; the 
 epistles to Congreve and John Driden; the odes on 
 Anne Killigrew and St. Cecilia's Day; and half a 
 dozen of the songs. Alexander's Feast has probably 
 neyer been rivalled in popularity by another of the 
 poems. The two Cecilia Odes were all of Dryden 
 that Palgrave printed in his Golden Treasury, and 
 no anthologist since has neglected them. On the 
 whole it may be said that Dryden's odes, "those 
 surprising masterpieces," Robert Louis Stevenson 
 wrote to Mr. Edmund Gosse on the sixth of Decem- 
 ber, 1880, "where there is more sustained eloquence 
 and harmony of English numbers than in all that 
 has been written since," seem the most indestructible 
 portions of his verse. 
 
 No important detailed criticism of Dryden ap- 
 peared in the eighteenth century outside of Dr. John- 
 son's Life, which in itself covered all the ground then 
 visible. Remarks were made, eulogies were deliv- 
 ered, commonplaces were handed along, but little 
 was said that penetrated. Swift was always con-
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 309 
 
 temptuous, though never long or elaborately so. 
 Spence quotes Tonson as saying: "Addison was so 
 eager to be the first name, that he and his friend 
 Sir Richard Steele used to run down even Dryden's 
 character as far as they could. Pope and Congreve 
 used to support it." A publisher of a man's works 
 may be pardoned some jealousy of his reputation, 
 but it is probable that Tonson exaggerated the feuds 
 that were waged even in the Augustan temple of 
 fame. Addison showed himself early and late to be 
 closely acquainted with Dryden's poetry, and usually 
 he was judicious in his observations upon it. In his 
 poem To Mr. Dry den (1693) and his Account of the 
 Greatest English Poets (1694) he gave the old poet 
 warm if vague praise. In the Tatler, the Spectator, 
 and the Guardian he discounted Dryden's tragic 
 style as bombastic, revised his definition of wit, 
 praised his satires at the same time that he predicted 
 short life for them because of the temporary char- 
 acter of their allusions, and pointed out defects in 
 his otherwise admirable translations. Whatever 
 may have been Addison's attempts to injure Dryden 
 in conversation, in writing he was a fair and indeed 
 a salutary critic. At one time it was believed of 
 Pope that, far from coming to Dryden's aid, he was 
 conspiring against his remains. John Dennis, who 
 had been born in 1657 and who consequently had 
 been brought up on Dryden in another generation 
 than Pope's, was moved in 1715 to defend the great 
 poet of his choice against what he understood to be 
 a determined conspiracy. A letter to Tonson on the 
 fourth of June expressed his sentiments: "When I
 
 310 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 had the good fortune to meet you in the city, it was 
 with concern that I heard from you of the attempt 
 to lessen the reputation of Mr. Dryden; and 'tis 
 with indignation that I have since learnt that that 
 attempt has chiefly been carried on by small 
 poets. . . . But when I heard that this . . . was 
 done in favour of little Pope, that diminutive of 
 Parnassus and of humanity, 'tis impossible to 
 express to what a height my indignation and dis- 
 dain were raised. Good God!" And he goes on to 
 justify his "zeal for the Reputation of my departed 
 Friend, whom I infinitely esteemed when living for 
 the Solidity of his Thought, for the Spring, the 
 Warmth, and the beautiful Turn of it; for the Power, 
 and Variety, and Fullness of his Harmony; for the 
 Purity, the Perspicuity, the Energy of his Expres- 
 sion; and (whenever the following great Qualities 
 were required) for the Pomp and Solemnity, and 
 Majesty of his Style." As a matter of fact, nothing 
 is more familiar than the veneration of little Pope 
 for Dennis's hero. Congreve's preface to Tonson's 
 edition of the dramatic works in 1717 pursued a 
 lofty vein of eulogy, as did a passage in Garth's pref- 
 ace to the Metamorphoses the same year. There- 
 after, Dryden was discussed almost exclusively as 
 a man with a style. John Oldmixon blamed Pope 
 for this turn of affairs. "Mr. Dryden's genius," he 
 observed in his Essay on Criticism (1728), "did not 
 appear [according to Pope] in anything more than 
 his Versification; and whether the critics will have 
 it ennobled for that versification only, is a question. 
 The Translator [of Homer] seems to make a good
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 311 
 
 genius and a good ear to be the same thing. Dryden 
 himself was more sensible of the difference between 
 them, and when it was in debate at Will's Coffee- 
 house, what character he would have with posterity, 
 he said, with a sullen modesty, 'I believe they will 
 allow me to be a good versifier.' " But the process of 
 ennobling Dryden for his versification only went on. 
 It has been seen that Dennis drew or implied a dis- 
 tinction between Dryden and Pope on the score of 
 wealth and fire of expression. This survived and 
 became hackneyed; men repeated it who had no 
 other notion of it than that it justified a noble neg- 
 ligence in the older poet. Dryden's name seems to 
 have been destined to come down jointly with 
 Pope's; if not to support a distinction, as in the 
 eighteenth century, at least to imply an identity, 
 as in the nineteenth. Pope himself, convinced as 
 he was that Dryden had wanted "the greatest art 
 the art to blot," struck the note that was to rever- 
 berate through all the criticism of his master for a 
 century: 
 
 Waller was smooth; but Dryden taught to join 
 The varying verse, the full resounding line, 
 The long majestic march, and energy divine. 
 
 It occurred to some to couple Dryden with Milton 
 rather than with Pope. Gildon did so, on the score 
 of harmony in versification, in his Laws of Poetry 
 (1721). Gray seemed at least to do so when in The 
 Progress of Poesy he followed praise of Milton's epic 
 with praise of Dryden's odes, but did not go on to 
 Pope:
 
 312 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Behold, where Dryden's less presumptuous car, 
 
 Wide o'er the fields of glory bear 
 
 Two Coursers of ethereal race, 
 
 With necks in thunder clothed, and long-resounding pace. 
 
 James Beattie, in a long footnote to his Essay on 
 Poetry and Music as they Affect the Mind (1776), ob- 
 jected to any identification of Pope with Dryden: 
 "Critics have often stated a comparison between 
 Dryden and Pope, as poets of the same order, and 
 who differed only in degree of merit. But, in my 
 opinion, the merit of the one differs considerably in 
 kind from that of the other;" that is to say, Dryden 
 is more original, various, and harmonious though 
 less correct. Dr. Johnson in the Life of Pope gave 
 the palm for genius "with some hesitation" to Dry- 
 den. His answer to Boswell when Boswell quoted 
 Voltaire's mot concerning Pope's "neat nags" and 
 Dryden's "stately horses" was characteristic: "Why, 
 Sir, the truth is, they both drive coaches and six: 
 but Dryden's horses are either galloping or stum- 
 bling: Pope's go at a steady even trot." A passage 
 in the Life of Pope again is perhaps the classical state- 
 ment of the contrast: "Dryden's page is a natural 
 field, rising into inequalities, and diversified by the 
 varied exuberance of abundant vegetation; Pope's 
 is a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe, and levelled 
 by the roller." The distinction thrived long after 
 it ceased to be of critical value. In 1788 Joseph 
 Weston translated a Latin poem on archery, Philo- 
 toxi Ardence, by John Morfitt, into couplets "at- 
 tempted in the manner of Dryden," and wrote an 
 enthusiastic preface to demonstrate "the Superiority
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 313 
 
 of Dryden's Versification over that of Pope and of 
 the Moderns." "I cannot help thinking," he con- 
 fessed, "that English Rhyme was brought by that 
 Wonderful Man to the Acme of Perfection; and that 
 it has been, for many years, gradually declining from 
 good to indifferent and from indifferent to bad." 
 He anticipated Wordsworth's attack on "Poetic 
 Diction," appealing in Dryden to vague, romantic 
 powers of speech and music. Anna Seward, defend- 
 ing Pope, debated with Weston at great length in 
 the Gentleman's Magazine during 1789 and 1790. 
 Half a dozen others were drawn into the contro- 
 versy, which ended only when a neutral reader pro- 
 tested to the editor against so many stale irrelevan- 
 cies. The subject was never completely dismissed. 
 When Mrs. Barbauld edited Collins in 1797 she 
 could still speak of "Dryden, who had a musical 
 ear, and Pope who had none." The insistence by 
 amateur critics upon a comparison of the two poets 
 had even furnished material for burlesque. Dick 
 Minim had said all that needed to be said in the 
 sixtieth Idler in 1759. George Canning's critique of 
 "The Knave of Hearts" in the Microcosm for Febru- 
 ary 12, 1787, did not lack a sober pronouncement that 
 "Ovid had more genius but less judgment than Virgil; 
 Dryden more imagination but less correctness than 
 Pope." 
 
 In whatever relation he was kept to Pope, Dry- 
 den's position on the scale of English poets at the 
 end of the eighteenth century was very different 
 from that which he had enjoyed in 1700. During 
 the first half of the eighteenth century, roughly
 
 314 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 speaking, it was customary to mention him without 
 shame among the most famous of all poets, to set 
 him a little lower perhaps than Shakespeare and 
 Milton and Spenser but at least to leave him secure 
 in their company. The "poetical scale " which Gold- 
 smith drew up for the Literary Magazine in January, 
 1758, was standard mid-century criticism: 
 
 Genius Judgment Learning Versification 
 
 Chaucer 16 12 10 14 
 
 Spenser 18 12 14 18 
 
 Shakespeare 19 14 14 19 
 
 Jonson 1 6 18 17 8 
 
 Cowley 17 17 15 17 
 
 Waller 12 12 10 16 
 
 Milton 18 16 17 18 
 
 Dryden 18 16 17 18 
 
 Addison 16 18 17 17 
 
 Prior 16 16 15 17 
 
 Pope 18 18 15 19 
 
 Men like Joseph Warton changed all that. His sen- 
 timental but potent essay on Pope in 1756 placed the 
 Elizabethans on another level from the Augustans, 
 and refused Dryden and Pope admittance on any 
 poetical basis to the society of Shakespeare and 
 Spenser and Milton. Among what he called "the 
 second class" of poets, the panegyrical, occasional, 
 and didactic poets, he found the author of Windsor 
 Forest, The Rape of the Lock, and Eloisa to Abelard 
 first because of his perfection; but the author of 
 Alexander's Feast crowded a close second by virtue 
 of the "genius" he had shown in that "divine"
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 315 
 
 poem. Dryden's ode was called on more than once 
 to save the face of Augustan verse. "Goldsmith 
 asserted, that there was no poetry produced in this 
 age," wrote Boswell, referring to a conversation in 
 1776. "Dodsley appealed to his own Collection, and 
 maintained, that though you could not find a palace 
 like Dryden's Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, you had 
 villages composed of very pretty houses. . . . John- 
 son . . . 'You may find wit and humour in verse, 
 and yet no poetry." 1 Warton's main thesis outlasted 
 any of its qualifications. Dryden and Pope were 
 buried by him where it seemed less and less important 
 each year to decide which had more or any genius. 
 The glance of the new century fell on the standard 
 poets of England from new and dizzy altitudes. 
 Even now, when "orders" and "classes" of poetry 
 mean nothing, Dryden is likely to be discounted 
 before he is read. 
 
 "He has not written one line that is pathetic, 
 and very few that can be considered as sublime," 
 decided Jeffreys in his review of Ford's plays for the 
 Edinburgh Review in 1811. Add of Dryden that it 
 was generally believed he had written little that was 
 ineffably beautiful, and the central position of early 
 nineteenth century Dryden criticism is established. 
 Criticism of poetry at that time usually meant the 
 invoking and imposing of categories rather than the 
 first-hand studying of men; the preoccupation of 
 critics was mostly with "kinds" of writing. There 
 were dogmas then as there had been dogmas at the 
 beginning of the last century. New conceptions 
 of the creative function of the imagination had led
 
 3i6 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 to a deep distrust of Hobbes's psychology and the 
 poetry of the "empirical school." Admiration of 
 Dryden had to be expressed in terms of opposition 
 to the new creeds or in terms of Pope. A few Tories 
 in taste fell back on the old-fashioned glories. To 
 the editor Scott, Dryden was "our immortal bard," 
 second only to Milton and Shakespeare; "Glorious 
 John," even when he had said nothing, had written 
 imperishably noble verse; Alexander's Feast was 
 the best of English lyrics. George Ellis, writing 
 to Scott about the edition he had fathered, admitted 
 that "I ought to have considered that whatever 
 Dryden wrote must, for some reason or other, be 
 worth reading;" and he professed himself in particu- 
 lar a passaionate admirer of the Fables ', "the noblest 
 specimen of versification . . . that is to be found in 
 any modern language;" Theodore and Honoria, he 
 said, should have "a place on the very top-most 
 shelf of English poetry." George Canning, writing 
 on July 26th, 1811, spoke to Scott of "the majestic 
 march of Dryden (to my ear the perfection of har- 
 mony)." Henry Hallam's review of the Dryden in 
 the Edinburgh deplored Scott's occupation with the 
 rubbish of the minor works, but agreed, while find- 
 ing fault with the Fables, that at the best Dryden 's 
 animation and variety were hardly surpassable. The 
 most important criticism of Dryden in this period, 
 however, ranged itself along the question whether 
 he and Pope had been poets. "It is the cant of our 
 day above all, of its poetasters," said Lockhart, 
 "that Johnson was no poet. To be sure, they say 
 the same of Pope and hint it occasionally even of
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 317 
 
 Dryden." It was more than "said" of Pope, and 
 it was more than "hinted" of Dryden; it was sol- 
 emnly asseverated of both, one of the results be- 
 ing an intermittent controversy between Bowles, 
 Wordsworth, Keats, Southey, Coleridge, and the like 
 on the one hand and Byron, Campbell, Crabbe, 
 Rogers, Gifford, and the like on the other. The con- 
 troversy started over Pope. Bowies' edition of Pope 
 in 1806 contained some strictures on his character 
 as a man and as a poet. Byron was careful to ridi- 
 cule Bowles for this, among other things, in his Eng- 
 lish Sards of 1809. To Campbell's championship 
 of Pope in the preface to his Specimens in 1819 
 Bowles replied in the same year with a paper on the 
 Invariable Principles of Poetry. In Wordsworth's 
 Essay Supplementary to the Preface (1815) had ap- 
 peared a few remarks derogating Dryden 's treatment 
 of Nature. Byron broke out in the third canto of 
 Don Juan: 
 
 "Pedlars" and "Boats" and "Waggons!" Oh! Ye shades 
 Of Pope and Dryden, are we come to this? 
 
 The "little boatman" and his Peter Bell 
 Can sneer at him who drew "Achitophel"! 
 
 And in 1821 he published a Letter ... on the Rev. 
 William L. Bowies' Strictures on the Life and Writ- 
 ings of Pope. A letter written from Ravenna on 
 March I5th, 1820, in reply to an article in Black- 
 wood's on Don Juan, was devoted in the second half 
 to a passionate defense of Pope. Byron attributed 
 what he found to be a decline in English poetry to 
 the fact that poets could no longer appreciate the
 
 3i8 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 little Queen Anne master. "Dilettanti lecturers" 
 and reviewers were following in the wake of the poet- 
 asters, and only a handful of men remained in Eng- 
 land Crabbe, Rogers, Gifford, Campbell, and him- 
 self with liberal perspectives. As for himself he 
 declared: "I have ever loved and honored Pope's 
 poetry with my whole soul, and hope to do so till 
 my dying day." Nothing was being produced now, 
 he swore, to match Pope's Essay on Man, Eloisa 
 to Abelard, The Rape of the Lock, and "Sporus," or 
 Dryden's Fables, odes, and Absalom. Bowles had 
 preferred Dryden to Pope on musical grounds. By- 
 ron himself had written in the English Sards, after 
 some lines on Pope : 
 
 Like him great Dryden poured the tide of song, 
 In stream less smooth, indeed, yet doubly strong. 
 
 But in general he was inclined to call Pope a better 
 because a more perfect poet. The tradition of Dry- 
 den's "genius" survived in one form or another 
 throughout the discussion. Coleridge decided that 
 "if Pope was a poet, as Lord Byron swears, then 
 Dryden . . . was a very great poet." Hazlitt, in his 
 essay on Dryden and Pope, was no more inclined 
 than Coleridge to credit either with essentially poetic 
 powers, though as he surveyed them within their 
 class he found Pope to be a more consummate artif- 
 icer; Dryden seemed largely tinsel, his odes wholly 
 mechanical and meretricious. Yet it mortified Haz- 
 litt, who knew that the Augustans, if they had not 
 been great poets, had been at least great writers of 
 some sort, to hear Wordsworth disparage Pope and
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 319 
 
 Dryden, "whom, because they have been supposed 
 to have all the possible excellences of poetry, he will 
 allow to have none." Wordsworth's position is well 
 known. His letter to Scott in 1805 contained all 
 the praise that he could honestly give, which was that 
 Dryden possessed "a certain ardour and impetuosity 
 of mind, with an excellent ear;" while his various 
 prefaces sternly denied both to Dryden and to Pope 
 the highest imaginative gifts. Henry Crabb Rob- 
 inson, in his diary for January 6th, 1842, recorded a 
 walk with Wordsworth : "Today he talked of poetry. 
 He held Pope to be a greater poet than Dryden; 
 but Dryden to have most talent, and the strongest 
 understanding." Landor was moderately an ad- 
 mirer of the great satirist of the Exclusion Bill. 
 
 None ever crost our mystic sea 
 
 More richly stored with thought than he; 
 
 Though never tender nor sublime, 
 
 He wrestles with and conquers Time, 
 
 he wrote to Wordsworth. In the second Imaginary 
 Conversation with Southey he confined his praise 
 to Dryden 's couplet-verse, dismissing the Pindarics 
 as vulgar. "Alexander's Feast smells of gin at 
 second-hand, with true Briton fiddlers full of native 
 talent in the orchestra." Its author, he answered 
 for Southey, must be content with credit for "a 
 facility rather than a fidelity of expression." 
 
 If Dryden's reputation left the romantic battle- 
 ground somewhat battered, it has pursued a fairly 
 smooth course down the nineteenth century highway. 
 Historians of English literature have been busy es-
 
 320 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 tablishing Dryden's importance as a representative 
 figure and giving him his due as an innovator; 
 aestheticians have contributed their notions of the 
 points wherein he is entitled to please; and great cos- 
 mopolitan critics have brought to him a learning and 
 a taste ripened through contact with many other 
 literatures. He emerges without his old glory, per- 
 haps, but with a respectable group of virtues which 
 seem to be his now for all time. Discussion of him 
 has inclined to be general, and writers, often casu- 
 istically, have tended to grant him vaguely defined 
 powers which they themselves have not always 
 understood; yet a limited body of readers has con- 
 tinued to know him intimately and soundly. A 
 steady succession of articles in the Tory periodicals, 
 notably in the Quarterly Review, perhaps the main- 
 stay of his reputation, has kept his personality rea- 
 sonably fresh, while from time to time new em- 
 phasis has been laid upon the obscurer portions of 
 his work. Robert Bell's Life in 1854, as well as 
 reviews of it in Fraser's Magazine and elsewhere, 
 singled out the prologues and the epilogues for ap- 
 plause. Tennyson, Fitzgerald, Professor Conington, 
 and others have insisted upon the original and en- 
 during qualities of the Virgil, which Wordsworth 
 gave up trying to surpass, and which still has more 
 vitality than any other translation. The Juvenal 
 and the Lucretius maintain a solid place among ver- 
 sions of the classics, both for their strength and for 
 their beauty. Latterly there has been a tendency 
 to emphasize the lyrics, especially the songs, those 
 from the plays having been reprinted in the last
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 321 
 
 two editions of the poems in a more complete form 
 than that in which the Warton volumes presented 
 them in 1811. Macaulay's brilliant but doctrinaire 
 essay of 1828 has made it seem necessary to most 
 subsequent critics to discuss the character of Dry- 
 den. While Dryden the turncoat, Dryden the 
 flatterer, Dryden the writer of indecent plays and 
 poems has been scrupulously damned by men like 
 Christie, numerous editors and reviewers have 
 stepped to his defense bringing elaborate excuses. 
 The better view seems latterly to be that there is 
 little reason to be sorrowful over the behavior of a 
 canny man of letters who never at any time pre- 
 tended to be equipped with principles worth dying 
 or becoming a pauper for. As a poet his personality 
 has often been sketched. Lowell, whose respect for 
 Dryden was permanent and wholesome, and whose 
 essay of 1868 contains what is still, except for that 
 of Dr. Johnson, the most conscientious criticism of 
 the poet in English, found, after making all the 
 necessary deductions from his character and his 
 fame, that something indefinably large yet re- 
 mained. "You feel," he said, "that the whole of 
 him is better than any random specimens, though 
 of his best, seem to prove." "There is a singular 
 unanimity in allowing him a certain claim to great- 
 ness which would be denied to men as famous and 
 more read, to Pope or Swift, for example." "He 
 is a curious example of what we often remark of the 
 living, but rarely of the dead, that they get credit 
 for what they might be as much as for what they 
 are, and posterity has applied to him one of his
 
 322 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 own rules of criticism, judging him by the best 
 rather than the average of his achievement, a thing 
 posterity is seldom wont to do." These were shrewd 
 remarks; yet they were not followed by an account 
 equally shrewd of Dryden's rhythmical genius and 
 intellectual gathering-power, it being there that his 
 largeness, indefinable or not, resides. Emerson, 
 blandly wild, threw all of Dryden overboard in the 
 essay on Poetry and Imagination which he cast into 
 final shape in 1872. "Turnpike is one thing and blue 
 sky another. Let the poet, of all men, stop with his 
 inspiration. The inexorable rule in the Muses' court, 
 either inspiration or silence, compels the bard to 
 report only his supreme moments. . . . Much that 
 we call poetry is but polite verse." "A little more or 
 less skill in whistling is of no account. See those 
 weary pentameter tales of Dryden and others." 
 Matthew Arnold, warring against provincialism in 
 the study of literature and bringing "touchstones" 
 from the ends of the earth wherewith to test the 
 poets of his own country, found, as he reported in 
 the Introduction to Ward's English Poets (1880), 
 that Dryden and Pope had been the inaugurators 
 of an immensely important "age of prose and rea- 
 son" but that they were insignificant as poets, per- 
 haps not poets at all. In the essay on Gray he ex- 
 plained his position in greater detail, saying, "The 
 difference between genuine poetry and the poetry 
 of Dryden, Pope and all their school, is briefly this: 
 their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, 
 genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the 
 soul." This proposition sounds at least broad
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 323 
 
 enough; yet in Arnold it was susceptible of and re- 
 ceived a somewhat narrow handling. "Soul" in 
 Arnold suggests stoicism; stoicism suggests philo- 
 sophic melancholy; philosophic melancholy suggests 
 sentiment; a poem "conceived in the soul" suggests 
 a poem conceived in spiritual pain. Arnold's touch- 
 stones, if not sentimental, did deal in pain, sad old 
 memories, and death, an atmosphere which Dryden 
 could hardly expect to survive. If there were to be 
 no touchstones ringing with malice, disdain, or merri- 
 ment, Dryden could lay no claim to a soul. He had 
 not written his verse to "console" or "sustain" a 
 bewildered generation of fin de siecle scholars. He 
 had written to please hard-headed men of the world; 
 he had labored to satisfy critics of poetry, not critics 
 of souls. He had written genuine poetry, but he 
 was not a Dante. In the Introduction again Arnold 
 thought he detected a truer note in a passage of 
 Dryden's prose which, if the truth be known, is the 
 least expressive possible of the indomitable Au- 
 gustan: "What Virgil wrote in the vigour of his age, 
 in plenty and at ease, I have undertaken to trans- 
 late in my declining years; struggling with wants, 
 oppressed with sickness, curbed in my genius, liable 
 to be misconstrued in all I wrote." Arnold felt ten- 
 derly towards this; Swift had simply roared. Arnold 
 was distinctly unjust to the odes. In the essay on 
 Gray he placed the most miserable stanza of the 
 Killigrew alongside of the best three lines in Pindar 
 and observed that Pindar killed Dryden. It may be 
 true that Pindar will kill Dryden under any circum- 
 stances; in the present instance Dryden died without
 
 324 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 even a fighting chance. Pater agreed with Arnold 
 that Dryden's prose was more beautiful than his 
 verse. "Dryden," he wrote in 1888 in Style, "with 
 the characteristic instinct of his age, loved to em- 
 phasize the distinction between poetry and prose, 
 the protest against their confusion coming with 
 somewhat diminished effect from one whose poetry 
 was so prosaic." The influence of Arnold has been 
 very great. In an age whose infinitely flexible prose 
 has captured the throne of the imagination and 
 promises to hold it while the language lasts, he has 
 taught nine readers out of ten that Dryden is a 
 prosaic poet. He is dogmatic and wrong; but pro- 
 tests are irrelevant till the whole wheel of fashion 
 turns another round. 
 
 Dryden is nothing if not a poets' poet, which 
 Lowell denied he was. He is not for philosophers, 
 plainly, or for laymen; he does not move the minds 
 of the few or the hearts of the many. He has tem- 
 pered not spirits but pens; Lowell notwithstanding, 
 he is as much as Spenser a poet for poets. Not only 
 in his own generation, or in the next, but in all that 
 have succeeded he has stood on the shelves of writers 
 and offered the stimulus of a style that is both 
 musical and stout. Poets of widely varying com- 
 plexions have made important use of him, never 
 exactly reproducing him, for that is impossible even 
 if desirable, but drawing from him the strength or 
 the beauty they have seemed to need. 
 
 In the eighteenth century he shared with Milton 
 and Pope the distinction, enviable or not, of inspir- 
 ing the "poetic diction" which Wordsworth later
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 325 
 
 on was to receive so coldly. Milton in blank verse 
 and Dryden and Pope in the heroic couplet were, 
 if Spenser and his stanza be for the moment disre- 
 garded, the great models of versification under Queen 
 Anne and the first two Georges. On the side of the 
 heroic couplet Dryden exercised two varieties of in- 
 fluence according as he was identified with Pope or 
 distinguished from him. In a certain sense he had 
 identified himself with Pope when he had created 
 him; for if Dryden had not written, it is a question 
 what Pope would be. "I learned versification wholly 
 from Dryden's works," Pope told Spence; he has 
 echoed Dryden everywhere, not only cadence for 
 cadence but sometimes word for word and line for 
 line. Zimri and Og begat Wharton and Sporus; 
 Mac Flecknoe begat the Dunciad; the Religio Laid 
 and The Hind and the Panther begat the Moral 
 Essays; the Cecilia of 1687 begat the Cecilia of 1708; 
 the Virgil begat the Homer; and the Fables begat the 
 Paraphrases from Chaucer. Yet in another sense 
 Pope derived not from Dryden at all, but from the 
 smooth, equable tradition of Sandys and Waller. 
 Poets who knew this, and who set Dryden's "genius" 
 over against Pope's correctness, thought to capture 
 the secret of that "genius." In the first place, they 
 remarked, Dryden, for an Augustan, was bewilder- 
 ing in his variety. A passage of only eight lines 
 from Tyrannic Love, for instance, combined three 
 styles as far apart from one another as those of 
 Shakespeare's Julius Casar, Pope's Pastorals, and 
 Beattie's Minstrel:
 
 326 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Him have I seen (on Ister's banks he stood, 
 Where last we wintered) bind the headlong flood 
 In sudden ice; and, where most swift it flows, 
 In crystal nets the wondering fishes close. 
 Then, with a moment's thaw, the streams enlarge, 
 And from the mesh the twinkling guests discharge. 
 In a deep vale or near some ruined wall, 
 He would the ghosts of slaughtered soldiers call. 
 
 In the second place he was impetuous, and when 
 need was, negligent. The negligence was easy to ap- 
 proximate, the impetuosity not so easy. Gildon in- 
 veighed against versifiers who aped Dryden's man- 
 nerisms without reviving his spirit, John Hughes 
 and Walter Harte being conspicuous among those 
 who affected triplets and Alexandrines so as to be- 
 come like the author of the State of Innocence. Harte 
 introduced his Vision of Death in 1767 with a tribute 
 which might have done for a contemporary Dryden 
 creed : 
 
 Who but thyself the mind and ear can please, 
 
 With strength and softness, energy and ease; 
 
 Various of numbers, new in every strain; 
 
 Diffused, yet terse, poetical, though plain; 
 
 Diversified midst unison of chime; 
 
 Freer than air, yet manacled with rhyme, 
 
 Thou mak'st each quarry which thou seek'st thy prize, 
 
 The reigning eagle of Parnassian skies. . . . 
 
 Thy thoughts and music change with every line; 
 
 No sameness of a prattling stream is thine. . . . 
 
 Infinite descant, sweetly wild and true. 
 
 Still shifting, still improving, and still new! . . . 
 
 To Spenser much, to Milton much is due; 
 
 But in great Dryden we preserve the two.
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 327 
 
 Dryden's essential energy went by no means unob- 
 served. Akenside's Epistle to Curio of 1744 was a 
 more powerful poem than it might have been if its 
 author had never studied Absalom and Achitophel. 
 Gray told James Beattie, according to Mason, that 
 he had learned all he knew about versification from 
 the long-resounding Dryden; "Remember Dryden," 
 he wrote to Beattie in 1765, "and be blind to all 
 his faults." "By him," concluded Dr. Johnson, 
 "we were taught sapere et fari, to think naturally 
 and express forcibly." More obstreperous disciples 
 rushed to him because they were tired of Pope and 
 thirsty for poetic license. Goldsmith, in the dedica- 
 tion of his Traveller in 1764, remarked without ten- 
 derness upon the "blank verse, and Pindaric Odes, 
 choruses, anapests and iambics, alliterative care 
 and happy negligence" with which poets were amus- 
 ing themselves though not their readers; a man like 
 Churchill the satirist, he intimated, was receiving 
 credit that scarcely was due him; "his turbulence is 
 said to be force, and his frenzy fire." Churchill fled 
 Pope for Dryden and Shakespeare. He complained 
 in the Apology that contemporary verse had degen- 
 erated into 
 
 A happy tuneful vacancy of sense. 
 
 He wished to restore "Great Dryden" to his own, 
 and to cultivate 
 
 The generous roughness of a nervous line. 
 He succeeded in striking up a fresh but not a lasting
 
 328 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 tune. Cowper reviewed his achievement in Table 
 Talk: 
 
 Churchill, himself unconscious of his powers, 
 In penury consumed his idle hours, 
 And, like a scattered seed at random sown, 
 Was left to spring by vigour of his own. . . . 
 Surly and slovenly, and bold and coarse, 
 Too proud for art, and trusting in mere force, 
 Spendthrift alike of money and of wit, 
 Always at speed, and never drawing bit, 
 He struck the lyre in such a careless mood, 
 And so disdained the rules he understood, 
 The laurel seemed to wait on his command, 
 He snatched it rudely from the Muse's hand. 
 
 Cowper himself had not been ignorant of Dryden. 
 The lines in the Task, 
 
 There is a pleasure in poetic pains 
 Which only poets know, 
 
 harked back to the Spanish Friar: 
 
 There is a pleasure sure 
 In being mad which none but madmen know. 
 
 And the "characters" in Conversation and other 
 poems recalled Dryden as much as Pope. But now 
 it was fairly rare that either Dryden or Pope was 
 called upon as tutor to an English poet. Cowper, 
 and later Crabbe, wrote for another world than either 
 of theirs had been; Gifford's Juvenal only echoed, 
 not recalled the past; the chime of Augustan verse 
 was done, and thenceforth 'one who went to Dryden
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 329 
 
 for aid went because he recognized an intrinsic gift, 
 not because Dryden was the mode. 
 
 Wordsworth, inhospitable to his predecessors as 
 he was, knew many thousand lines of Dryden and 
 Pope by heart, and was never insensible to the effects 
 that Dryden had gained by virtue of his "excellent 
 ear." Tom Moore, said Leigh Hunt in the Auto- 
 biography, "contemplated the fine, easy-playing, 
 muscular style of Dryden with a sort of perilous 
 pleasure. I remember his quoting with delight a 
 couplet of Dryden 's which came with a particular 
 grace from his lips : 
 
 Let honour and preferment go for gold; 
 But glorious beauty is not to be sold." 
 
 Hunt himself was one of the first of the Cockney 
 School to succumb to that "stream of sound" which 
 Hazlitt called the Fables. His Story of Rimini de- 
 rived from Dante in plot, in style from Dryden. As 
 he explains in the Autobiography, "Dryden, at that 
 time, in spite of my sense of Milton's superiority, 
 and my early love of Spenser, was the most delight- 
 ful name to me in English poetry. I had found in 
 him more vigour, and music too, than in Pope, who 
 had been my closest poetical acquaintance; and I 
 could not rest till I had played on his instrument. . . 
 My versification was far from being so vigorous as 
 his. There were many weak lines in it. It succeeded 
 best in catching the variety of his cadences; at least 
 so far as they broke up the monotony of Pope." 
 The Story of Rimini is liberally Alexandrined after 
 the manner of the Fables, but it signally fails to
 
 330 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 achieve much or any of Dryden's strong-backed 
 vigor. It has a Cockney limpness and pertness, but 
 there is nothing that is significant in its metrical 
 variety. What Hunt did not do Keats in some 
 measure did in his Lamia, which according to Charles 
 Armitage Brown he wrote "with great care after 
 much study of Dryden's versification." In "Sleep 
 and Poetry," in the Poems of 1817, he had taken 
 pains to address a most unscholarly rebuke to Dry- 
 den and Pope : 
 
 Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead 
 To things ye knew not of, were closely wed 
 To musty laws lined out with wretched rule 
 And compass vile; so that ye taught a school 
 Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit, 
 Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit, 
 Their verses tallied. 
 
 The Endymion had shown not even the slightest 
 acquaintance with the secrets of Dryden's meter. 
 But now in Lamia, Keats, 
 
 Whom Dryden's force and Spenser's fays 
 Have heart and soul possessed, 
 
 as Landor wrote to Joseph Ablett, not only stiffened 
 and brightened his verse, cleaned and sharpened his 
 pen, improved and simplified his narrative procedure; 
 but he indulged in all the tricks of Dryden, the Alex- 
 andrine, the triplet, the triplet-Alexandrine, the 
 antithesis, the inversion, the stopped couplet; and 
 he took to harmonizing his sentence-structure with 
 his verse form.
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 331 
 
 From vale to vale, from wood to wood, he flew, 
 
 Breathing upon the flowers his passion new, 
 
 And wound with many a river to its head, 
 
 To find where this sweet nymph prepared her secret bed. 
 
 She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue, 
 Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue; 
 Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, 
 Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barred. . . . 
 She seemed, at once, some penanced lady elf, 
 Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self. 
 
 He even ventured into graceful cynicism; his heroine 
 was canny in her behavior towards Lycius the lover, 
 
 So threw the goddess off, and won his heart 
 More pleasantly by playing woman's part, 
 With no more awe than what her beauty gave, 
 That, while it smote, still guaranteed to save. 
 
 He seldom caught the accent exactly, or caught it 
 for long at a time, nor did his new cloak always fit 
 him; to be caustic was hardly his role. It was as if 
 a gardener had suddenly called for a two-handed 
 sword to trim stray petals from his gentlest rose. 
 But his ambition to become another man than him- 
 self is everywhere apparent. Not that Keats wished 
 to be Dryden; he only wished to extend his metrical 
 bounds. Only once did he help himself to an idea 
 of Dryden 's for its own sake. The third stanza of 
 Annus Mirabilis y 
 
 For them alone the Heavens had kindly heat, 
 In Eastern Quarries ripening precious Dew; 
 For them the Idumsean Balm did sweat, 
 And in hot Ceilon spicy Forrests grew,
 
 332 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 became the fifteenth stanza of Isabella: 
 
 For them the Ceylon diver held his breath, 
 And went all naked to the hungry shark; 
 
 For them his ears gushed blood; for them in death 
 The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark 
 
 Lay full of darts; for them alone did seethe 
 A thousand men in troubles wide and dark; 
 
 Half-ignorant, they turned an easy wheel 
 
 That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel. 
 
 Byron's imagination seems to have been saturated 
 with the Fables, particularly with Theodore and 
 Honoria. Ravenna to him meant deep romantic 
 woods and a lady pursued by hounds, as it had meant 
 them to Gibbon before. His letters from that place 
 were full of Dryden's story, and in the third canto 
 of Don Juan he apostrophized the scene of Honoria 's 
 punishment: 
 
 Evergreen forest! which Boccaccio's lore 
 And Dryden's lay made haunted ground to me. 
 
 Later in the century poets as different from Dry- 
 den and from one another as Tennyson, Poe, and 
 Francis Thompson drew upon him for musical effects. 
 Tennyson studied his meters, both in the couplet- 
 poems and in the songs, admiring, even envying, the 
 force of both. "'What a difference,' he would add," 
 writes Hallam Tennyson, apropos of translating 
 Homer, "between Pope's little poisonous barbs, and 
 Dryden's strong invective! And how much more 
 real poetic force there is in Drydenl Look at Pope:
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 333 
 
 He said, observant of the blue-eyed maid, 
 Then in the sheath returned the shining blade, 
 
 then at Dryden : 
 
 He said; with surly faith believed her word, 
 And in the sheath, reluctant, plunged the sword." 
 
 It is difficult to believe that Poe did not have in 
 mind the superb second stanza of the Song for St. 
 Cecilia's Day (1687) l when he began his Israfel 
 thus: 
 
 In Heaven a spirit doth dwell 
 "Whose heart-strings are a lute"; 
 
 None sing so wildly well 
 
 As the angel Israfel, 
 
 And the giddy stars (so legends tell) 
 
 Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell 
 Of his voice, all mute. 
 
 Francis Thompson, a Roman Catholic mystic, a 
 writer of rapturous odes, a lover of strange cadences, 
 was intoxicated with Dryden 's verse, and proposed 
 an essay upon it. His ambition as a poet was that 
 he might endure as long as Dryden, Milton, and 
 Keats. His poem To My Godchild Francis M. W. M. 
 goes directly back to the world of Dryden and Con- 
 greve : 
 
 The Assisian, who kept plighted faith to three, 
 To Song, to Sanctitude, and Poverty, 
 (In two alone of whom most singers prove 
 A fatal faithfulness of during love!); 
 ^ee page 253.
 
 334 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 He the sweet Sales, of whom we scarcely ken 
 How God he could love more, he so loved men; 
 The crown and crowned of Laura and Italy; 
 And Fletcher's fellow from these, and not from me, 
 Take you your name, and take your legacy! 
 
 Or, if a right successive you declare 
 
 When worms, for ivies, intertwine my hair, 
 
 Take but this Poesy that now followeth 
 
 My clayey hest with sullen servile breath, 
 
 Made then your happy freedman by testating death. 
 
 My song I do but hold for you in trust, 
 
 I ask you but to blossom from my dust. 
 
 When you have compassed all weak I began, 
 
 Diviner poet, and ah! diviner man; 
 
 The man at feud with the perduring child 
 
 In you before song's altar nobly reconciled; 
 
 From the wise heavens I half shall smile to see 
 
 How little a world, which owned you, needed me. 
 
 If, while you keep the vigils of the night, 
 
 For your wild tears make darkness all too bright, 
 
 Some lone orb through your lonely window peeps, 
 
 As it played lover over your sweet sleeps, 
 
 Think it a golden crevice in the sky, 
 
 Which I have pierced but to behold you by! 
 
 And when, immortal mortal, droops your head, 
 And you, the child of deathless song, are dead, 
 Then, as you search with unaccustomed glance 
 The ranks of Paradise for my countenance, 
 Turn not your tread along the Uranian sod 
 Among the bearded counsellors of God; 
 For, if in Eden as on earth are we, 
 I sure shall keep a younger company: 
 Pass where beneath their ranged gonfalons
 
 REPUTATION: CONCLUSION 335 
 
 The starry cohorts shake their shielded suns, 
 
 The dreadful mass of their enridged spears; 
 
 Pass where majestical the eternal peers, 
 
 The stately choice of the great Saintdom, meet 
 
 A silvern segregation, globed complete 
 
 In sandalled shadow of the Triune feet; 
 
 Pass by where wait, young poet-wayfarer, 
 
 Your cousined clusters, emulous to share 
 
 With you the roseal lightnings burning 'mid their hair; 
 
 Pass the crystalline sea, the Lampads seven; 
 
 Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven. 
 
 In almost all respects, this still is very far from the 
 world of Dryden's Congreve. It is only an approach 
 along the avenue of meter. Thompson has returned 
 to the poet who spiritually is as little like him as 
 any past poet, to learn the secret of full and level 
 music, of generous but sober ratiocinative procedure 
 through couplets, triplets, antitheses, and needful 
 Alexandrines. Here is godfatherly tenderness on an 
 unearthly scale; the tenderness and the unearthliness 
 are Thompson's, the scale is Dryden's. Thomp- 
 son's Heard on the Mountain applies the license of 
 the triplet-Alexandrine to a basic meter of fourteen- 
 ers. And his hoarse choral odes break now and then, 
 though rarely, into the opening strains of the hymn 
 to Anne Killigrew. So the story goes on. Dryden 
 the satirist, the journalist, the celebrant, the reasoner 
 in verse will continue to show the way to those who 
 would deal in frost and iron; Dryden the manifold 
 metrician will continue to reveal new melodies to 
 those who would deal in bronze or in gold. 
 
 Good poets long dead have a way of defying
 
 336 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 changes in taste and of belying reasons why they 
 should not be read. It may be urged against Dry- 
 den that he was the too unctuous spokesman of a de- 
 caying order; that, clear as he may have seemed to a 
 smaller, more literary world, for the purposes of 
 modern life he is hard and opaque; that he handles 
 not images but facts, that by naming he destroys 
 and by failing to suggest he fails to create, that he 
 elaborates and disguises rather than foreshortens 
 and intensifies experience; that he is more journalist 
 than artist, more orator than seer. But even while 
 this is urged, warning may issue from other quarters 
 that foreshortening implies bad perspective and 
 intensification a heat that withers as well as in- 
 spirits. If there was something fatuous about the 
 opulence of the Augustans there is often something 
 desperate about the simplicity of the moderns. If 
 an aristocratic society fattens and sleeks the poets 
 of its choice, democracy grinds many of its sons to 
 powder. A man who composes verse too exclusively 
 out of his faculties can hardly be judged by men who 
 write too much with their nerves; the imagination, 
 the umpire of art, might acknowledge neither. Dry- 
 den lives not as one who went out to rear great 
 frames of thought and feeling, or as one who waited 
 within himself and caught fine, fugitive details of 
 sensation, but as one who elastically paced the limits 
 of a dry though well-packed mind. He braces those 
 who listen to his music; he will be found refreshing 
 if, answering his own invitation, 
 
 When tired with following nature, you think fit, 
 To seek repose in the cool shades of wit.
 
 APPENDIX
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 The Authorship of Mac Flecknoe 
 
 Recent investigations * having overcast Mac Flecknoe 
 with curious uncertainties concerning the authenticity 
 of its first publication, the date of its composition, and 
 the identity of its author, it becomes necessary to sum- 
 marize both what is known and what can be reason- 
 ably conjectured about a poem which it has not been un- 
 usual to consider Dryden's masterpiece. 
 
 There seems to be no doubt that the edition of 1682, rec- 
 ognized now as the first, was a pirated one. The publisher 
 was not Dryden's Jacob Tonson, as would be expected, 
 but D. Green, who not only was obscure but desired to 
 remain so, since he printed no address other than London 
 adjacent to his name on the title page. The publication 
 of the pamphlet could hardly have proceeded under the 
 supervision of its author. There was no preface, strangely 
 enough at least for Dryden, and the text was one of which 
 an intelligent man would have been permanently ashamed; 
 as witness line 82, 
 
 Amidst this monument of varnisht minds, 
 
 or line 92, 
 
 Humorists and Hypocrites his pen should produce, 
 
 1 Babington, Percy L. Dryden not the Author of Mac Flecknoe. 
 Modern Language Review. January, 1918. Thorn-Drury, G. Dryden's 
 Mac Flecknoe. A Vindication. Ibid. July, 1918. Belden, H. M. The 
 Authorship of Mac Flecknoe. Modern Language Notes. December, 
 1918.
 
 340 APPENDIX 
 
 metrically impossible, or lines 135-6, 
 
 And from his brows damps of oblivion shed, 
 Full of the filial dulness, 
 
 where the only conceivable point is lost, or line 167, 
 But write thy best, on th' top; and in each line 
 
 which means nothing. 
 
 Had the poem been brand new in 1682, as has been 
 supposed by those who have believed it an almost ex- 
 tempore reply to Shad well's Medal of John Bayes, it is diffi- 
 cult to see why it should have escaped so completely from 
 the author's hands; since surely he would lose no time him- 
 self in getting it to a printer. The fate of Mac Flecknoe 
 was a fate not uncommonly visited upon works for some 
 time existent and circulating in manuscript. That Mac 
 Flecknoe was such a work is far from impossible. It is 
 possible, for instance, that it had been composed upon the 
 occasion of Flecknoe 's death (1678?), an event somewhat 
 ambiguously referred to by Dryden in the dedication of 
 Limberham in 1680. As a satire on Shadwell it would 
 have been as timely in 1676 as it was in 1682. It alludes to 
 no play published by Shadwell later than 1676. It makes 
 no capital out of Shadwell 's politics, which were con- 
 spicuously Whiggish after the Popish Plot and which would 
 naturally draw Dryden 's fire after Absalom and Achitophel, 
 The Medal, and particularly The Medal of John Bayes. 
 The epithet applied to Shadwell on the title page, "True- 
 Blew-Protestant," may only have been D. Green's; it 
 was not repeated in later editions. The occupation of the 
 poem is wholly with personalities and literary principles; 
 chastisement is administered not to a Whig, or even to a 
 drunken treason-monger, as in the second part of Ab- 
 salom and Achitophel, but simply to a fat dull poet who 
 deals too much in "humours." Furthermore, there is in-
 
 APPENDIX 341 
 
 controvertible evidence that the verses were in existence, 
 either in manuscript or in pamphlet form, eight months 
 before the date traditionally assigned to them on the 
 strength of a note by Narcissus Luttrell and considerably 
 before ShadwelPs Medal of John Bayes. LuttrelPs date 
 was October 4, 1682. But the following passage has been 
 cited from an attack on Shadwell in The Loyal Protestant 
 and Domestic Intelligence for February 9, 1681-2: "he 
 would send him his Recantation next morning, with a 
 Mac Flecknoe, and a brace of Lobsters for his Breakfast." 
 That Mac Flecknoe was not the work of Dryden has 
 been argued from evidences of varying worth. D. Green's 
 attribution of the poem to "the author of Absalom and 
 Achitophel" has been dismissed on the grounds that that 
 gentleman, being a liar no less than a pirate, knew he 
 could sell ten times more copies under such auspices than 
 he could sell under any other. It cannot be shown that 
 Dryden was particularly at outs with Shadwell during the 
 later 'yo's. The two men had combined against Settle 
 in 1674, in the Remarks on the Empress of Morocco, and 
 in 1678 Dryden had furnished Shadwell a prologue to be 
 spoken before his True Widow. In Tonson's Miscellany 
 of 1684, a volume more or less edited by Dryden, Mac 
 Flecknoe occupied first place, being followed by Absalom 
 and Achitophel and The Medal; but it had no title page, and 
 it was not assigned, as The Medal was, to " the author of 
 Absalom and Achitophel." A legend dating from the 
 next year has been taken as proof that Dryden was 
 strangely unfamiliar with the general class of mock- 
 heroic material which the satire represents. One of 
 Spence's anecdotes relates that Dean Lockier went when 
 a boy to Will's Coffee-House and heard Dryden claiming 
 a complete originality for the poem. Upon the boy's 
 interposing that Boileau's Lutrin and Tassoni's Secchia
 
 342 APPENDIX 
 
 Rapita were obvious models, Dryden, the story goes, 
 turned and said, " 'Tis true, I had forgot them." Shadwell 
 insinuated a doubt as to Dryden 's right to the poem in 
 1687, in the dedication of his Tenth Juvenal: "It is 
 hard to believe that the supposed author of Mac Flecknoe 
 is the real one, because when I taxed him with it, he denyed 
 it with all the Execrations he could think of." Tom 
 Brown gleefully quoted this passage in the preface to his 
 Reasons for Mr. Bayes Changing his Religion in 1688. Dry- 
 den did not openly claim the poem until a year after Shad- 
 well 's death (1692), when in his Discourse of Satire (1693) 
 he spoke of "my own, the poems of Absalom and Mac 
 Flecknoe" He had omitted it altogether from a list of 
 his works which he appended to Amphitryon in 1690. 
 A more arresting piece of evidence against Dryden 's 
 authorship is a late seventeenth century manuscript vol- 
 ume in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (Rawlinson Po- 
 etry 123) containing most of John Oldham's works trans- 
 cribed by a single hand, as if for the printer, under the 
 title "Poems on Several Occasions" Three items in this 
 volume, A Satyr upon Man, A Letter from Artemisia in 
 the Town to Chloe in the Country, and Upon the Author 
 of a Play called Sodom, are generally believed to be the 
 work of Rochester, "that incomparable person," accord- 
 ing to Oldham in his Preface of 1681, "of whom nothing 
 can be said, or thought, so choice and curious, which his 
 Deserts do not surmount." They are entered without 
 comment; but more than half of the pieces are dated and 
 placed in this manner: "July, 1676, at Croydon;" "Oc- 
 tober 22-76, at Bedington;" "Written at Croydon Anno 
 i67 7 / 8 ;" "Writ Feb 1680 at Rygate;" "March i8th, 
 i67 7 / 8 ;" "Aug 5, 1677;" "Written in May 82;" "Wrote 
 the last day of the year 1675." In the three cases where 
 comparison is possible between these dates and those
 
 APPENDIX 343 
 
 printed under the titles of poems in Oldham's volumes of 
 1 68 1 and 1683, the agreement is perfect. On pages 232, 
 233, 234, 235, and 214 is found: 
 
 Anno 1678. Mac Fleckno 
 
 A Satyr. 
 
 Four pages, or lines 49-150, are missing; the rest is written 
 smoothly, without interlineations or erasures, but hastily, 
 with here a word omitted and there a word varied from 
 the accepted text. On no account may 1678 be taken 
 as the date of transcription, since it is plain that the vol- 
 ume as a whole was drawn up later than 1680, either by 
 Oldham himself during the last two years of his life or 
 by another person after his death. Whether 1678 stands 
 for the date of composition, and whether Oldham is the 
 author, are questions of a more perplexing sort. The 
 affirmative in each case is supported by certain coinci- 
 dences that cannot be ignored. 
 
 Oldham, no less than Dryden, though perhaps in com- 
 mon with all his contemporaries, understood the name 
 Flecknoe to be synonymous with the name of bad poet; 
 so that the idea for the satire which, as it happens, has 
 immortalizd that name, might more or less easily have 
 occurred to him. In his imitation of Horace's Art of 
 Poetry he opposed Flecknoe as the worst of poets to 
 Cowley as the best: 
 
 Who'er will please, must please us to the height. 
 He must a Cowley, or a Flecknoe be; 
 For there 's no second rate, in poetry. 
 
 The idea, furthermore, of giving bad poetry and Flecknoe 
 a mock-heroic send-off is one he is even more likely than 
 Dryden to have come readily by in 1678, the date, not 
 impossibly, of Flecknoe 's death. It will be remembered 
 that Dryden had forgotten by 1685, or had pretended to
 
 344 APPENDIX 
 
 forget, Mac Flecknoe 1 s debt to the mock-heroic tradition 
 in general and to Boileau's Lutrin in particular. Boil- 
 eau was certainly no stranger to Dryden in 1678 or 1679; 
 and it was in 1680 that he revised Soame's translation 
 of the Art Poetique. But Oldham was still more signifi- 
 cantly involved with the Frenchman. He "imitated" 
 the eighth Satire and "translated" the fifth; and if the 
 Bodleian Manuscript is to be believed, he translated the 
 entire first Canto of the Lutrin itself, "Anno 1678." It 
 would appear that he was trying out his mock-heroic 
 vein that year, at first as the disciple of a foreigner and 
 later as an independent artist with a native theme. Not 
 only that; there are specific parallels between passages 
 in works known to be his and passages in Mac Flecknoe. 
 In his Imitation of Horace, Book I, Satire IX, which does 
 not appear in the Bodleian Manuscript but which, accord- 
 ing to the Poems and Translations published by him in 
 1683, was "written in June, 1681," occurs a line, 
 
 St. Andre never moved with such a grace, 
 
 that is unmistakably akin to line 53 of Mac Flecknoe: 
 St. Andre's feet ne'er kept more equal time. 
 
 A Satyr against Poetry, dated in the manuscript 1678, 
 printed first in 1683 without remark, and reprinted as a 
 pamphlet in 1709 in company with Mac Flecknoe (whether 
 as the result of a resemblance only then observed between 
 the two poems or on the strength of authentic evidence 
 concerning their original relation is not known), is con- 
 siderably like Mac Flecknoe 10x3-103, which runs, 
 
 From dusty shops neglected authors come, 
 Martyrs of pies and relics of the bum. 
 Much Heywood, Shirley, Ogleby there lay, 
 But loads of Shadwell almost choked the way, 
 
 in the following passage:
 
 APPENDIX 345 
 
 How many poems writ in ancient time, 
 
 Which thy Fore-Fathers had in great esteem. . . . 
 
 Have grown contemptible, and slighted since, 
 
 As Pordage, Fleckno, or the British Prince ? 
 
 Quarles, Chapman, Heywood, Withers had applause, 
 
 And Wild, and Ogilby in former days. 
 
 But now are damned to wrapping drugs and wares, 
 
 And curst by all their broken stationers. 
 
 And so mayst thou perchance pass up and down, 
 
 And please a while th' admiring Court, and Town, 
 
 Who after shalt in Duck-Lane shops be thrown, 
 
 To mould with Sylvester and Shirley there, 
 
 And truck for pots of ale next Sturbridge Fair. 
 
 A number of deductions can be arrived at from these 
 parallels: (i) the coincidences are only coincidences; or 
 (2), if a manuscript Mac Flecknoe was circulating in 1678, 
 it was Dry den's, and Oldham drew upon it while writing 
 his Horace and his Satyr against Poetry, or (3) it was Old- 
 ham's, and Dryden knew nothing of it until it was pub- 
 lished as by him in 1682; (4) if a manuscript Mac Flecknoe 
 did not exist before 1682, neither did the Bodleian text of 
 Oldham 's poems. In support of (2), it will be remembered 
 that Oldham was borrowing from The Rival Ladies in 
 1678, 1 so that his interest in Dryden, no doubt always 
 great, can be supposed to have been especially keen that 
 year, even to the extent of his occupying himself with a 
 Dryden manuscript. If (3) is true, it must also be true 
 that Dryden, having Oldham 's manuscript by him in 
 1684, several months after the young satirist's death, 
 followed it scrupulously as he corrected the 1682 Mac 
 Flecknoe for Tonson's 1684 Miscellany, Tonson's text 
 contains 33 variants from D. Green's. The Bodleian 
 text differs considerably from both, but of its 15 variants 
 from either alone, only 3 are in favor of Green, while 
 
 1 See page 187.
 
 346 APPENDIX 
 
 12 are in favor of Tonson. l Now it is improbable that 
 the 1684 Mac Flecknoe derives from the Bodleian manu- 
 script or from any manuscript of Oldham's. It is more 
 probable that the Bodleian manuscript derives from the 
 1684 Mac Flecknoe, which would mean, what is more 
 probable still, that (4) is the safest deduction that the 
 whole of the volume at Oxford was transcribed after Old- 
 ham's death by an admirer, perhaps a literary executor, 
 who, having both of the editions of Mac Flecknoe at hand, 
 transcribed that poem too because he liked it, as Oldham 
 before him had liked it. 
 
 Whatever the date of Mac Flecknoe, and 1678 deserves 
 consideration, Dryden's right to the poem still is and must 
 be always, except as definite evidence to the contrary 
 come to light, undeniable. It is not true that he ever 
 seriously disclaimed responsibility for it. The edition of 
 1684 was equivalent to a full confession of authorship. 
 The execrations with which he reassured Shadwell could 
 have reassured only Shadwell, who seems to have been de- 
 void of humor in personal and controversial relations. He 
 omitted to list Mac Flecknoe with his other works in 1690; 
 but so did he omit to list the Heroic Stanzas, The Hind 
 and the Panther, and Britannia Rediviva. The Lockier 
 anecdote proves that Dryden carried affairs with a high 
 
 1 Another seventeenth century manuscript of Mac Flecknoe in the 
 Lambeth Palace Library (vol. 711, no. 8), palpably from the hand 
 of a copyist, contains, among many variants that are uninteresting, 
 6 that coincide with 6 otherwise unique readings in the Bodleian manu- 
 script: 
 
 line 1 1 : And pondering which of all his sons were fit. 
 line 12: To reign, and wage immortal wars with wit. 
 line 29: Heywood and Shirley were but types to thee. 
 line 178: Or rail at arts he did not understand, 
 line 185: But so transfuse as oils on waters flow, 
 line 196: But sure thou art a kilderkin of wit.
 
 APPENDIX 347 
 
 hand at Will's, and was not accustomed to interruption 
 or emendation by his juniors; but this has been a proverb 
 for two centuries. It is not difficult to believe him in- 
 capable of treating Oldham so badly as to steal from him 
 a poem worth five times all his others put together; "there 
 being nothing so base," according to his preface to the 
 Tempest (1670), where he was thinking of Davenant, "as 
 to rob the dead of his reputation." Oldham had ample 
 opportunity to reclaim Mac Flecknoe while he was yet 
 alive; one wonders why, if the poem were his, he failed 
 to include it in the volume of Poems and Translations 
 which he published in 1683. It is not known in the first 
 place that he had ever had an occasion for writing a satire 
 on Shadwell; he had had no quarrel with that indefati- 
 gable disciple of Ben Jonson. On the other hand, it is 
 well known of Dryden that from the beginning of his 
 career he was subject to irritation by Shadwell; and it is 
 to be supposed that the differences between the two were 
 personal as early as they were literary. His contempt 
 no doubt was intermittent, but it must have been easy 
 to excite; that he wrote a prologue for Shadwell early 
 in 1678 does not mean that Mac Flecknoe was impossible 
 for him the same year or the next. It has been remarked 
 that Mac Flecknoe was in large part an attack on Shad- 
 well's theory and practice of "humours" in comedy. It is 
 significant that Dryden had for an even decade before 
 1678 been ShadwelPs chief decrier on these points. The 
 Restoration battle between Wit and Humour during 
 those years had almost been fought by Dryden and Shad- 
 well alone. Dryden 's Essay of Dramatic Poesy and 
 Defense of the Essay (1668), his preface to An Evening's 
 Love (1671), his epilogue to the second part of the Con- 
 quest of Granada and his Defense of the Epilogue (1672) 
 had been answered by Shadwell 's prefaces to The Sullen
 
 348 THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 Lovers (1668), The Royal Shepherdess (1669) and The 
 Humourists (1671), and by the dedication of The Virtuoso 
 (1676). Dryden, then, rather than Oldham or anyone 
 else, was likely to be familiar enough with Shadwell's 
 critical utterances to hit upon a parody, in lines 189-192 
 of Mac Flecknoe, 
 
 This is that boasted bias of thy mind, 
 By which one way to dulness 'tis inclined, 
 Which makes thy writings lean on one side still, 
 And in all changes, that way bends thy will, 
 
 of these four lines in the epilogue to The Humourists: 
 
 A humour is the bias of the mind 
 By which with violence 'tis one way inclined. 
 It makes our actions lean on one side still, 
 And in all changes that way bend our will. 
 
 If there are passages in Oldham 's miscellaneous works 
 that suggest an interesting affinity between their author 
 and the author of Mac Flecknoe, there are passages in 
 Dryden that are more than interesting, that in fact are 
 convincing. There are coincidences that seem better than 
 coincidences. No one would have been readier, for ex- 
 ample, than Dryden, considering his close acquaintance 
 with Davenant's Gondibert, to borrow from that poem 
 the line (Canto V, stanza 36) 
 
 And called the monument of vanished minds 
 for Mac Flecknoe: 
 
 Amidst this monument of vanisht minds. 
 
 It has been pointed out * that Mac Flecknoe parodies a line 
 in Cowley's Davideis, 
 
 Where their vast courts the mother-waters keep, 
 
 a line that could not have been strange to Dryden in 1678, 
 
 1 See page 27.
 
 APPENDIX 349 
 
 since he had quoted it as recently as 1677 in his Apology 
 for Heroic Poetry. Nor was Flecknoe out of his mind 
 during these years. In the dedication of Limberham 
 (played 1678, printed 1680) he was writing: "You may 
 please to take notice how natural the connection of thought 
 is betwixt a bad poet and Flecknoe." He even was turn- 
 ing Flecknoe 's pages and reading them, though it may 
 have been somewhat later than this that he did so. One 
 of the happiest images in his "character" of Doeg, 
 
 He was too warm on picking-work to dwell, 
 
 But fagotted his notions as they fell, 
 
 And if they rhymed and rattled, all was well, 
 
 seems to be borrowed from Flecknoe 's Enigmatical Charac- 
 ter of a schoolboy: "For his learning, 'tis all capping verses, 
 and fagoting poets' loose lines, which fall from him as 
 disorderly as fagot-sticks, when the band is broke." The 
 poet who made merry with Shadwell's bulk in Mac 
 Flecknoe was at least very nearly related to the poet who 
 made merry with that same bulk in the second part of 
 Absalom and Achitophel. Whatever the relation, if it was 
 not identity, the creator of Og can be said to have had 
 Mac Flecknoe by heart. So had the author of The Medal 
 when he sketched 
 
 Whole droves of blockheads choking up his way 
 in remembrance of the line 
 
 But loads of Shadwell almost choked the way; 
 
 so had the author of the Vindication of the Duke of Guise 
 when he called Shadwell "the Northern Dedicator" in 
 remembrance of the line 
 
 And does thy Northern Dedications fill;
 
 350 APPENDIX 
 
 so perhaps had the author of the ode on Anne Killigrew 
 when he wrote of 
 
 A lambent flame which played about her breast 
 in remembrance of the line 
 
 And lambent dulness played around his face. 
 
 In addition to all this, there is the fact that no other 
 man living and writing in 1678 or 1680 or 1682 had the 
 genius for Mac Flecknoe. Every fresh reading either of 
 Dryden or of his contemporaries proves this fact yet more 
 a fact. Certain Persons of Honour were clever enough 
 to have conceived the poem and to have done a line of it, 
 or a paragraph; but in none of them was there energy 
 enough to carry him triumphantly through with it as 
 Dryden came through. Oldham had carrying power and 
 staying power, but he had not this much humor; his canto 
 of the Lutrin approaches the Satyrs upon the Jesuits as 
 a limit, not The Rape of the Lock. The verse also was 
 well and away beyond his reach. Professor Belden has 
 demonstrated that he never elsewhere wrote this many per- 
 fect rhymes in succession. A simple appeal to the ear 
 will convince an experienced reader of Augustan poetry 
 that here is meter twice happier than Oldham 's happiest. 
 The poem, in short, is almost better than Dryden him- 
 self. But that is for Dryden to explain.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Abingdon, Countess of, 160. 
 
 Ablett, Joseph, 330. 
 
 Absalom and Achitophel, 62, 85, 
 98, 119, 135, 160, 170, 179-186, 
 190, 202-3, 206, 233, 258, 265, 
 304, 306, 307, 318, 327, 340-2, 
 
 349- 
 Absalom and Achitophel, Part II., 
 
 207-9, 340, 349- 
 Achitophel, character of, 197-200, 
 
 202, 307. 
 Addison, Joseph, n, 13, 192, 277, 
 
 292, 309, 314. 
 ^Eschylus, 244. 
 Agathias, 155. 
 
 Akenside, Mark, 241, 244, 327. 
 Albion and Albanius, 81, 223, 234- 
 
 5- 
 Alexander's Feast, 252, 255-9, 
 
 293-4, 302, 307, 308, 314, 315, 
 
 316, 319. 
 
 Alexandrines, 99-102. 
 All for Love, 50, 55, 115, 129, 182. 
 Alliteration, 96-97. 
 Amboyna, 115, 231. 
 Amphitryon, 114, 115, 223, 228, 
 
 342. 
 Amynlas, On the Death of, 162, 
 
 304- 
 
 Annus Mirabilis, 3, 12, 19, 29, 
 39, 40, 42-6, 105-8, 132, 140, 
 143, 188, 205, 233, 263, 304, 
 
 Anthology, Greek, 154-5. 
 Antipater, 155. 
 
 Apology for Heroic Poetry and 
 Poetic License, 52, 117, 261, 
 
 349- 
 
 Aristophanes, 164. 
 Aristotle, 15, 17, 19, 23, 26, 52, 
 
 59, 66, 78, 147. 
 Arnold, Matthew, 262, 322-4. 
 Art of Painting, 67. 
 Art of Poetry, 28, 118, 304. 
 Ashmole, Elias, 18. 
 Assignation, The, 9, 115, 295. 
 Astreea Redux, 16, 22, 106, 142, 
 
 1 88, 304. 
 Athenaeus, 256. 
 Atterbury, Francis, 91-2. 
 Aubrey, John, 8, 184, 193, 221. 
 Aureng-7*be, 38, 48, 49, 114, 132, 
 
 178, 223, 293. 
 Awdeley, John, 191. 
 
 Babington, Percy L., 339. 
 Bacon, Francis, 15, 17, 19, 33, 154. 
 Barbauld, Mrs., 313. 
 Barclay, John, 191. 
 Barker, G. F. R., 7n. 
 Baucis and Philemon, 273-5, 37- 
 Beattie, James, 81, 312, 325, 327. 
 Beaumont, Sir John, 25, 76, 90. 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, 157, 165, 
 
 204. 
 
 Behn, Mrs. Aphra, 166. 
 Belden, H. M., 339, 350. 
 Bell, Robert, 320. 
 Bellarmine, Roberto, 16. 
 Benlowes, Edward, 3. 
 
 351
 
 352 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Betterton, Thomas, 168, 176. 
 
 Bion, 157. 
 
 Blackmore, Sir Richard, 292. 
 
 Blake, William, 34, 70. 
 
 Blank verse, 115-6. 
 
 Boccaccio, 51, 140, 270, 287-90, 
 
 332. 
 Boileau, n, 28, 52, 116, 117-8, 
 
 119, 141, 186, 242, 292, 341, 344. 
 Bolingbroke, Earl of, 214, 255. 
 Bossu, Rene Le, 116. 
 Bossuet, 181. 
 
 Boswell, James, 294, 312, 315. 
 Bowles, W. L., 317. 
 Boyle, Robert, 19. 
 Bracegirdle, Mrs., 168. 
 Breton, Nicholas, 192. 
 Britannia Rediviva, 8, 144, 304, 
 
 346. 
 Broughton, Thomas, 299, 303, 
 
 304. 
 
 Brown, Charles Armitage, 330. 
 Brown, Tom, 99, 167, 178, 214, 
 
 216, 342. 
 
 Browne, Sir Thomas, 182. 
 Buckingham, Duke of, 44, 118, 
 
 308. 
 Burnet, Bishop, 20, 181, 184, 
 
 193, 202, 211, 308. 
 Burke, Edmund, 305. 
 Burton, Robert, 5, 256. 
 Busby, Dr. Richard, 6-7. 
 Butler, Samuel, 19, 118, 150, 186, 
 
 192. 
 Byron, Lord, 135, 141, 242, 262, 
 
 267, 317, 3i8. 
 Bysshe, Edward, 241, 303. 
 
 Cambridge University, 8-23, 26, 
 
 35, 188. 
 
 Camden, William, 6, 95. 
 Campbell, Thomas, 306, 317, 318. 
 
 Campion, Thomas, 73, 219, 221. 
 Canning, George, 313, 316. 
 Cardan, 257. 
 Carew, Thomas, 2. 
 Carte, Thomas, 295. 
 Cartwright, William, 4, 30, 138. 
 Caryll, John, 295~6n. 
 Castlemaine, To the Lady, 29, 107, 
 
 147-8, 187, 304. 
 Censure of the Rota, The, 21, no. 
 Ceyx and Alcyone, 275. 
 Chapelain, Jean, 117. 
 Chapman, George, 99, 100. 
 Character, the, 189-214, 308. 
 Character of a Good Parson, 213. 
 Charleton, To Dr., 19, 21, 26, 147, 
 
 304- 
 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 3, 12, 63, 72, 
 
 88, 132, 191, 213, 262, 269, 270, 
 
 276-87, 314. 
 
 Christie, W. D., 301, 321. 
 Churchill, Charles, 185, 203, 327. 
 Gibber, Colley, 166. 
 Cicero, 7, 59, 61. 
 Cinyras and Myrrha, 275. 
 Clarendon, Earl of, 141, 143, 193. 
 Claudian, 5, 140. 
 
 Cleomenes, 50-1, 55, 114, 115, 223. 
 Cleveland, John, 92, 186, 196, 204. 
 Clitarchus, 256. 
 Cock and the Fox, The, 277, 283-4, 
 
 307- 
 Coleridge, S. T., 7, 61, 242, 263, 
 
 317, 3i8. 
 
 Collier, Jeremy, 152, 176, 258. 
 Collins, William, 241, 313. 
 Conceits, 24-25. 
 Congreve, William, 5, 65, 104, 166, 
 
 184, 215, 226, 244, 292, 294-5, 
 
 300, 309, 310, 333. 
 Epistle to, 102, 151-2, 304, 
 
 307, 308, 335.
 
 INDEX 
 
 353 
 
 Conington, John, 320. 
 
 Conquest of Granada, The, 21-2, 
 
 49. 54-5, "2-3, 229, 247, 264. 
 Corneille, Pierre, 109, 117, 242. 
 Correggio, 68. 
 Cowley, Abraham, 15, 24, 25, 
 
 26-7, 30-1, 66, 76-7, 80, 81, 84, 
 
 92, 99, 100, 128, 132, 146, 242-7, 
 
 250, 251, 255, 257, 271, 277, 294, 
 
 314, 343, 348. 
 Cowper, William, 24, 75, 185, 
 
 203, 214, 241, 328. 
 Crabbe, George, 262, 317, 318, 
 
 328. 
 
 Crashaw, Richard, 2. 
 Creech, Thomas, 95, 121, 219, 
 
 247, 296. 
 
 Crichton, Reverend Dr., 9-11. 
 Cymon and Iphigenia, IO2, 132, 
 
 213, 289-91, 37- 
 
 Danby, Earl of, 182, 295. 
 Daniel, Samuel, 3, 60, 144, 262, 
 
 263. 
 Dante, 140, 157, 191, 214, 262, 
 
 323, 329. 
 
 Davenant, Charles, 174. 
 Davenant, William, 24, 30-35, 
 
 41-43, 66, 73, 105, 109, 269, 
 
 347, 348. 
 David 'e is, 27, 80, 92, 132, 257, 265 
 
 348. 
 
 Davies, Sir John, 105, 214. 
 Davila, Enrico, 192. 
 Defense of the Epilogue, 347. 
 Defense of an Essay of Dramatic 
 
 Poesy, 67, 94, 347. 
 Defoe, Daniel, 196. 
 Dekker, Thomas, 165. 
 Denham, Sir John, 24, 25, 30, 76, 
 
 92, 103, 128, 186. 
 Dennis, John, 297, 309-10, 311. 
 
 DeQuincey, Thomas, 155, 217. 
 Derrick, Samuel, 300, 303. 
 Descartes, Rene, 10, 17, 18, 23, 
 
 91- 
 
 Desportes, Philippe, 76. 
 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 80. 
 Discourse Concerning Satire, 102, 
 
 125, 154, 185, 201, 261, 269, 
 
 29S, 342. 
 
 Dodsley, Robert, 305, 315. 
 Doeg, character of, 202, 207-8, 
 
 36, 349- 
 
 Don Sebastian, 37, 50, 55, 115, 
 179, 212. 
 
 Donne, John, 17, 19, 24, 86, 88, 
 92, 105, 144, 157, 191. 
 
 Dorset, Earl of, 226, 262, 295. 
 
 Dowland, John, 219, 221. 
 
 Drayton, Michael, 3, 90, 144, 263. 
 
 Driden, John, of Chesterton, To, 
 loo, 154, 295, 307, 308. 
 
 Dryden, Charles, 1 8. 
 
 Dryden, Honor, To, 105. 
 
 Dryden, John; reading, 235; 
 English poets, 2-4; learning, 
 4-5; Westminster School, 5-8; 
 Cambridge University, 8-23; 
 classics, 10-15; scholasticism, 
 15-17; "the new philosophy," 
 17-23; "the new poetry," 24-5; 
 Cowley, 26-7; Waller, 28-9; 
 Denham, 30; Davenant and 
 Hobbes, 30-5; goes to London, 
 35-7; personality, 37-8; false 
 materials, 40-56; the fancy, 
 41-6; the passions, 47-56; poetic 
 license, 51-6; false form, 56-85; 
 poetry as oratory, 58-65; 
 poetry as painting, 65-73; 
 poetic diction, 67-73; poetry 
 as music, 73-85; monotony of 
 numbers, 74~8o; imitative
 
 INDEX 
 
 harmony, 80-85; genuine ma- 
 terials, 86-88; genuine form, 
 88-136; heroic couplet, 88-93; 
 studies in versification, 93-4; 
 rhyme, 94; monosyllables, 94-6; 
 alliteration, 96-7; adaptation 
 of accent, 97-9; triplets and 
 alexandrines, 99-102; turns, 
 102-3; metrical evolution, 104- 
 36; early poems, 104-8; heroic 
 stanza, 105-8; dramas, 108-16; 
 heroic plays, 109-15; blank 
 verse, 115-6; France, 116-20; 
 translations from the classics, 
 120-30; Shakespeare, 130-1; 
 Spenser, 131-2; Milton, 132- 
 5; genius for grouping, 135- 
 6; occasional genius, 137-9; 
 panegyrics, 139-44; epistles 
 and addresses, 144-54; epi- 
 grams, 154-5; epitaphs, 155-7; 
 elegies, 157-62; prologues and 
 epilogues, 162-77; classifica- 
 tion, 171-7; deserts stage for 
 journalism, 178-80; prepara- 
 tion for journalism, 180-85; 
 principles, 181-3; tne satirist, 
 182-214; satirical temper, 183-6; 
 predecessors and contempora- 
 ries, 185-7; technique, 188-9; the 
 character, 189-214; ratiocina- 
 tive procedure, 214-8; songs, 
 219-32; hymns, 232-3; operas, 
 2 33~7> odes, 237-59; projected 
 epic, 261-2; equipment for 
 narrative, 262-3; incidental nar- 
 rative, 263-6; Homer, 271-2; 
 Ovid, 273-6; Chaucer, 276-87; 
 Boccaccio, 287-90; reputation 
 on the continent, 292-4; pres- 
 tige during last years, 294-9; 
 vogue, 299-308; eighteenth 
 
 century, 299-305; early nine- 
 teenth century, 305-07; later 
 nineteenth century, 307-8; 
 criticism, 308-24; eighteenth 
 century, 308-15; early nine- 
 teenth century, 315-9; later 
 nineteenth century, 319-24; in- 
 fluence, 324-36; eighteenth 
 century, 324-29; early nine- 
 teenth century, 329-32; later 
 nineteenth century, 332-5; 
 authorship of Mac Flecknoe, 
 
 339-5- 
 
 Dryden, John, Jr., 174. 
 Du Bos, Jean Baptiste, 66. 
 Du Fresnoy, Charles Alphonse, 67. 
 Duchess of Ormond, To The, 153. 
 Duchess of York, To The, 29, 107, 
 
 304- 
 
 Duke, Richard, 203. 
 Duke of Guise, 1 14. 
 Dundee, Viscount, epitaph on, 
 
 156, 304- 
 Duns Scotus, 16. 
 D'Urfey, Tom, 219, 257, 303. 
 
 Earle, John, 192. 
 
 Elegies, 157-62. 
 
 Eleonora, 16, 47, 160-1, 240, 304. 
 
 Ellis, George, 316. 
 
 Emerson, R. W., 322. 
 
 Empress of Morocco, Notes on the, 
 
 4. 34i- 
 
 Epicurus, 214. 
 Epigrams, 154-5. 
 Epilogues, 162-77. 
 Epistles and addresses, 144-54. 
 Epitaphs, 155-7. 
 Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 4, 19, 
 
 25, 62, 94, 97, 109, 117, 119, 
 
 130, 204, 276, 347. 
 Etherege, Sir George, 118, 165.
 
 INDEX 
 
 355 
 
 Etherege, Epistle to, 150, 304. 
 
 Euripides, 7, 134. 
 
 Evelyn, John, 20. 
 
 Evening's Love, An, 14, 115, 226-7, 
 
 230, 347- 
 Examen Poeticum, 122, 130, 187, 
 
 232, 268. 
 
 Fables, 26, 63, 68, 69, 93, 123, 130, 
 J 3 2 > J 53 213, 268-91, 298, 
 299, 300, 302, 304, 306, 316, 318, 
 325. 329, 332. 
 
 Fair Maiden Lady Who Died at 
 Bath, Epitaph on a, 157. 
 
 Fairborne, Sir Palmes, epitaph 
 on, 157, 304. 
 
 Fairfax, Edward, 3, 89-91. 
 
 Falkland, Lucius Gary, Viscount, 
 
 I44-5- 
 
 Fielding, Henry, 166, 192, 196. 
 Fitzgerald, Edward, 320. 
 Flecknoe, Richard, 154, 192, 340, 
 
 343, 349- 
 
 Fletcher, John, 55, no, 115, 176. 
 Fletcher, Thomas, 129, 252. 
 Flower and the Leaf, The, 72, 132, 
 
 285-6, 307. 
 Ford, John, 315. 
 Fox, Charles James, 305. 
 French criticism, 52, 116-20; 
 
 music, 218-25; poetry, 43, 99, 
 
 loo, 103, 109, 120; romance, 
 
 109; tragedy, 109. 
 
 Gamble, John, 219. 
 Garrick, David, 166, 305. 
 Garth, Sir Samuel, 310. 
 Gascoigne, George, 73, 95. 
 Gassendi, Pierre, 20. 
 Gibbon, Edward, 181, 305, 332. 
 Gifford, William, n, 317, 318, 328. 
 Gilbert, William, 19. 
 
 Gildon, Charles, 224, 244, 262, 
 
 303, 311, 326. 
 Goldsmith, Oliver, 28, 36, 157, 
 
 166, 203, 305, 314, 315, 327. 
 Gondibert, 30-4, 73, 105, 146, 348. 
 Gosse, Edmund, 308. 
 Gower, John, 279. 
 Granville, To the Marquis of, 152, 
 
 184. 
 Gray, Thomas, 84, 104, 215, 
 
 242, 244, 246, 311, 322, 323, 
 
 327. 
 
 Green, D., 339~4i, 345- 
 Greene, Robert, 191. 
 Griffith, A. F., 305. 
 Guardian, The, 309. 
 Gwynn, Nell, 168. 
 
 Halifax, Marquis of, 193, 295. 
 
 Hall, John, n, 117. 
 
 Hall, Joseph, 88, 90, 99, 185, 191, 
 
 192. 
 
 Hallam, Henry, 316. 
 Handel, G. F., 252, 294. 
 Harris, Joseph, 169. 
 Harte, Walter, 114, 326. 
 Harvey, William, 17, 19, 26. 
 Hastings, Elegy on Lord, 4, 16, 
 
 46, 104-5, I S7, l88 34- 
 Hastings, Henry, of Woodlands, 
 
 193-6. 
 
 Hazlitt, William, 307, 318, 329. 
 Herbert, George, 2. 
 Heroic couplet, 88-93. 
 Heroic plays, 39, 40, 49-50, 62-3, 
 
 109-115. 
 
 Essay of, 109, 261. 
 
 Heroic stanza, the, 105-8. 
 Heroic Stantas on Cromwell, 3, 
 
 9, 1 6, 26, 29, 105-6, 132, 142, 
 
 34, 346. 
 Herrick, Robert, 2, 13, 225.
 
 356 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Herringman, Henry, 37, 146, 147. 
 Heywood, Thomas, 165. 
 Higden, To Henry, 150, 304. 
 Hind and the Panther, The, 16, 
 
 56, 104, 114, 119, 135, 180, 202, 
 
 210-12, 214, 216, 217-8, 265-6, 
 
 34, 37, 308, 325, 346. 
 Hobbes, Thomas, 15, 19, 20, 21, 24, 
 
 26, 30-35, 41-2, 66, 82, 221, 316. 
 Hoddtsdon, To John, 105, 146. 
 Homer, 7, n, 68, 70, 73, 82, 122, 
 
 154, 270, 294. 
 Translation of, 130, 271-2, 
 
 304. 332. 
 
 Hoole, Charles, 6. 
 Horace, 5, 12, 44, 52, 66, 67, 118, 
 
 122, 185, 190, 191, 215, 343. 
 Translation of, 125, 247-9, 
 
 250, 294, 304, 308. 
 Howard, Sir Robert, 94, no, 136. 
 
 Epistle to, 26, 87, 146-7, 304. 
 
 Hughes, John, 240, 326. 
 Hunt, Leigh, 74, 329, 330. 
 Hutchin, John, 196. 
 Hymns, 232-33. 
 
 Imagination, 33-35. 
 Imitative harmony, 80-5. 
 Indian Emperor, The, 13, no-n, 
 
 114, 159, 223, 226, 253. 
 Indian Queen, The, no, 223. 
 Isocrates, 7, 139. 
 
 Jackson, John, 71. 
 
 Jeffreys, Francis, 315. 
 
 Jonson, Ben, 2, 3, II, 13, 24, 30, 
 60, 66, 88, 90, 95, 105, 1 20, 
 137-8, 144, 146, 161, 164, 173, 
 192, 204, 219, 241, 244, 314, 
 
 347- 
 
 Jonsonus Virbius, 146. 
 
 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 5, 16, 36, 
 
 37, 39, 43, 55, 81, 82, 88, 99, 
 108, 114, 134, 142, 155, 157, 
 166, 181, 214, 245, 250, 294, 
 296, 301, 305, 308, 312, 315, 316, 
 321. 
 
 Jordan, Thomas, 137. 
 
 Juvenal, 5, 12, 105, 122, 185, 186, 
 188, 189, 190. 
 
 Translation of, 119, 125-6, 
 
 212, 302, 304, 305-6, 320. 
 
 Keats, John, 242, 262, 307, 317, 
 
 33-2, 333. 
 Killigrew, Mrs. Anne, Ode on, 
 
 87, 160, 250-1, 255, 302, 304, 
 
 306, 308, 323, 335. 
 King Arthur, 223, 231, 234-5. 
 Kneller, Sir Godfrey, To, 94, 151, 
 
 304, 307. 
 
 La Bruyere, Jean de, 192. 
 La Fontaine, Jean de, 242. 
 Lady's Song, The, 228. 
 Landor, W. S., 233, 241, 319, 330. 
 Langbaine, Gerald, 132. 
 Laniere, Nicholas, 219. 
 Laokoon, 59. 
 
 Lauderdale, Earl of, 129. 
 Lawes, Henry, 65, 138, 219, 221, 
 
 224-5. 
 
 Lawes, William, 219. 
 Latvian, Erasmus, Epitaph on, 
 
 IS7- 
 Lee, Nathaniel, 166, 170, 176. 
 
 Epistle to, 87, 148. 
 
 Leicester, Earl of, 278. 
 Leonidas, 155. 
 Lessing, Gotthold, 59, 66. 
 Leviathan, The, 2021. 
 Lillo, George, 166. 
 Limberham, 340, 349. 
 Livy, 7-
 
 INDEX 
 
 357 
 
 Locke, John, 15. 
 Lockhart, J. G., 306, 316. 
 Lockier, Dean, 297, 341, 346. 
 Lodge, Thomas, 88. 
 Longfellow, H. W., 262. 
 Longinus, n, 52-54, 78, 119, 256. 
 Lord Chancellor, To My, 21, 29, 
 
 ic6, 142, 304. 
 Love Triumphant, 114. 
 Lovelace, Richard, 2. 
 Lowell, J. R., i, 17, 65, 307, 321, 
 
 324- 
 
 Lucan, 3, 13, 254, 263. 
 Lucilius, 185. 
 Lucretius, 12, 13, 20, 21, 22, 214, 
 
 254, 276, 284, 287. 
 Translation of, 100, 102, 
 
 124-5, 233, 304, 308, 320. 
 Lupton, Donald, 192. 
 Luttrell, Narcissus, 341. 
 Lycidas, 132, 159. 
 Lydgate, John, 279. 
 
 Mac Flecknoe, 27, 206, 265, 303, 
 
 307, 325, 339-50. 
 Macaulay, T. B., 18, 44, 99, 262, 
 
 321. 
 
 Mackenzie, Sir George, 103. 
 Maiden Queen, 112, 115, 229. 
 Mainwaring, Arthur, 203. 
 Malherbe, Francois de, 28, 76, 
 
 88, 141, 242. 
 Malone, Edmund, 301. 
 Marlowe, Christopher, 88, 92, 
 
 164. 
 Marriage d la Mode, 115, 119, 204, 
 
 220, 227. 
 
 Marshall, Mrs., 10, 168, 172. 
 Marston, John, 88, 115, 185. 
 Martial, 154. 
 Marvell, Andrew, 140, 142, 143, 
 
 186, 196, 241, 251, 253-4. 
 
 Masefield, John, 262. 
 
 Mason, William, 104, 327. 
 
 Medal, The, 206, 304, 340, 341, 
 349- 
 
 Medal of John Bayes, The, 9, 
 37, 109, 188, 340, 341. 
 
 Meleager and Atalanta, 272. 
 
 Middleton, Earl of, 150. 
 
 Milbourne, Luke, 103. 
 
 Milton, John, 2, 3, 12, 17, 23, 
 24, 34. 75. 81, 91, 132-5, 138, 
 184, 214, 225, 238-9, 242, 251, 
 255, 260-1, 262, 277, 286, 296, 
 311, 314, 316, 324, 325, 329, 
 
 333- 
 
 Epigram on, 154, 304, 308. 
 
 Minshull, Geoffrey, 192. 
 
 Miscellanies, 266, 299, 303-4; 
 First, 122, 123, 126, 167, 247, 
 34i> 3455 Second, 123, 124, 
 125, 128, 129, 160, 183, 246, 
 266; Third, 122, 130, 187, 232, 
 268; Fourth, 128, 277. 
 
 Moliere, 20, 204, 220, 242. 
 
 Monosyllables, 78, 94-6. 
 
 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 
 
 305. 
 
 Montaigne, 5. 
 Montpensier, Mademoiselle de, 
 
 193- 
 
 Moore, Tom, 329. 
 Morfitt, John, 312. 
 Morris, William, 262. 
 Moschus, 157. 
 Motteux, Pierre, 223, 257, 298. 
 
 Epistle to, 87, 152. 
 
 Mountfort, Mrs., 168. 
 Mulgrave, Earl of, 38, 52, 75, 
 
 118, 128, 178, 197, 295, 297. 
 Music, seventeenth century, 219- 
 
 25- 
 Music and poetry, 73-85.
 
 358 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Naboth's Vineyard, 197-8. 
 Nash, Thomas, 191. 
 Newcastle, Duke of, 14. 
 Nichols, John, 305. 
 Norris, John, 222. 
 Northleigh, J., To, 150. 
 
 Gates, Titus, 179, 198. 
 
 Ode on the Morning of Christ's 
 
 Nativity, 3, 132. 
 Odes, 237-59. 
 
 (Edipus, 114, 115, 133-5, 223, 231. 
 Og, character of, 202, 208-9, 36, 
 
 32S, 349- 
 
 Ogilby, John, 126. 
 Oldham, John, 3, 118, 120, 186-8, 
 
 197, 252, 253, 258, 267, 342-50. 
 Elegy on, 85, 87, 158-60, 307, 
 
 308. 
 
 Oldmixon, John, 94, 103, 310. 
 Operas, 233-37. 
 Oratory and poetry, 58-65. 
 Ormond, Duke of, 160, 295. 
 Orrery, Earl of, 135. 
 Otway, Thomas, 166. 
 Overbury, Sir Thomas, 192. 
 Ovid, 12, 17, 20, 36, 44, 51, 61, 
 
 IO3, 122, 148, 157, 262, 269, 
 270, 287. 
 
 Translations from, 47, 122-3, 
 
 268, 273-6, 302, 306. 
 Owen, John, 154. 
 Oxford University, 9. 
 
 Painting and poetry, 65-73. 
 Palamon and Arcite, 63-4, 72, 
 
 153, 233, 280-83, 287, 307. 
 Palgrave, Francis, 308. 
 Panegyrici Veteres, 139. 
 Panegyrics, 46, 139-44. 
 Paradise Lost, 22, 75, 132, 135, 
 
 155, 186, 265, 298. 
 
 Parallel of Poetry and Painting, 
 
 67,69. 
 Paston, Mrs. Margaret, Epitaph on, 
 
 157- 
 
 Pater, Walter, 324. 
 Pearch, Christopher, 305. 
 Pembroke, Earl of, 161. 
 Pepys, Samuel, 46, 143, 204, 213. 
 Persius, 5, 12, 122, 159, 185, 305-6. 
 
 Translation of, 7, 212, 302. 
 
 Petrarch, 140, 157, 231. 
 
 Petre, Father, 211. 
 
 Petronius, 44, 248. 
 
 Phillips, Edward, 34, 244. 
 
 Pindar, 139, 293, 294, 323. 
 
 Pindaric Ode, 67, 241-51. 
 
 Pitcairne, Dr. Archibald, 156. 
 
 Pitt, Christopher, 301. 
 
 Plato, 59, 79. 
 
 Plautus, 164. 
 
 Playford, Henry, 219, 226. 
 
 Playford, John, 219, 222, 226, 
 
 256. 
 
 Pliny, 5, 44. 
 Plutarch, 5, 6, 66, 192. 
 Plutarch, Life of, 4, 9, 67, 1 1 8, 
 
 155- 
 
 Poe, Edgar Allan, 333. 
 
 Poems on Affairs of State, 75, 303. 
 
 Poetic diction, 67-73. 
 
 Poetic license, 51-6. 
 
 Polybius, 14. 
 
 Polysyllables, 78-9. 
 
 Poole, Joshua, 77. 
 
 Pope, Alexander, i, 37, 72, 74, 
 75, 77, 80, 8 1, 84, 90, 91, 95, 
 97, 144, 166, 202, 203, 205, 214, 
 272, 294, 296, 298, 305, 307, 
 308, 309-19, 3^1, 322, 324-5. 
 327-9, 332. 
 
 Primer, Catholic, 232. 
 
 Prior, Matthew, 150, 226, 314.
 
 INDEX 
 
 359 
 
 Prologues and epilogues, 162-77. 
 
 Prophetess, The, 223. 
 
 Prosodia, 93. 
 
 Purcell, Henry, 73, 219, 223, 224, 
 
 235. 252- 
 
 Ode on the Dath of, 251. 
 
 Puttenham, George, 60, 73. 
 Pygmalion and the Statue, 275. 
 Pythagoras, 256. 
 
 Quarles, Francis, 3. 
 Quarterly Review, 320. 
 Quintilian, 59. 
 
 Rabelais, 207. 
 Racine, 242. 
 Ralph, James, 300. 
 Rambouillet, Hotel de, 116. 
 Ramus, Petrus, 17. 
 Randolph, Thomas, 2, 15, 241. 
 Rapin, Rene, 52, 116, 117, 119, 
 
 1 20, 292. 
 
 Ratiocination in verse, 214-8. 
 Rehearsal, The, 5, 44, 165, 178, 
 
 214. 
 Religio Laid, 20, 119, 149, 2IO, 
 
 214, 217, 233, 284, 304, 307, 308, 
 
 32S- 
 
 Retz, Cardinal de, 193. 
 Reynolds, Henry, 144. 
 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 34, 70. 
 Rhyme, 94. 
 
 Richelieu, Cardinal de, 193. 
 Rival Ladies, The, 28, 94, no, 115, 
 
 130, 135, 187, 345. 
 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 233, 294, 
 
 3I9- 
 Rochester, Earl of, 99, 118, 141, 
 
 167, 197, 225, 297. 
 Rogers, Samuel, 317, 318. 
 Rogers, Upon Young Mr., 157, 
 
 304. 
 
 Roscommon, Earl of, 80-1, 118, 
 
 1 20, 129. 
 Epistle to, 87, 94, 149-50, 
 
 152, 34- 
 
 Rowe, Nicholas, 262. 
 Royal Society, 18, 26. 
 Rubens, Peter Paul, 69. 
 Ruskin, John, 70. 
 Rutland, Countess of, 144. 
 Rymer, Thomas, 52, 117, 120. 
 
 Sacred Majesty, To His. A Pane- 
 gyric, 29, 106, 142, 304. 
 St. Cecilia's Day, Odes for, 251-9. 
 St. Evremond, 118, 121, 234. 
 Saintsbury, George, 3, 300-1. 
 Sallust, 7. 
 
 Saltonstall, Wye, 192. 
 Sandys, George, 12, 90-1, 92, 144, 
 
 325. 
 
 Sappho, 13. 
 
 Sarrasin, Jean Francois, 117. 
 Satirist, Dryden as, 183-214. 
 Saunders, Charles, 174. 
 Savile, Sir Henry, 146. 
 Scaliger, Joseph, n. 
 Schlegel, A. W., 294. 
 Schlegel, Friedrich, 65. 
 Scholasticism, 15-17, 26, 42. 
 Science, 17-23, 44-5. 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 160, 196, 232, 
 
 245, 261, 262, 270, 287, 300, 
 
 306, 316, 319. 
 
 Scroggs, Lord Chief Justice, 197. 
 Scudery, Madeleine de, 193. 
 Sea-Fight, The, 231. 
 Secular Masque, 236-7, 307. 
 Sedley, Sir Charles, 9, 226, 295. 
 Selden, John, 93. 
 Seneca, 5, 13,62, 134. 
 Settle, Elkanah, 4, 5, 132, 184, 
 
 207, 308, 341.
 
 360 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Seward, Anna, 313. 
 
 Shadwell, Thomas, 9, 27, 36-7, 
 43, 109, 175, 185, 188, 207, 209, 
 308, 340, 341, 342, 346, 348, 
 
 349- 
 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 16, 184, 193, 
 
 308. 
 Shakespeare, William, 3, 12, 35, 
 
 47, 54, 55, 86, 88, 90, 102, 130-1, 
 
 132, 135, 146, 151, 157, 164, 173, 
 
 2O3, 204, 212, 263, 286, 305, 
 
 3H, 316, 325, 327. 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 242. 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, 60, 73. 
 Sigismonda and Guiscardo, 287-8, 
 
 307. 
 
 Silius Italicus, 14. 
 Simonides, 155. 
 Sir Martin Mar-All, 220. 
 Soame, Sir William, 28, 105, 118, 
 
 Hi, 344- 
 
 Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 252-5, 
 
 302, 308, 325, 333. 
 Song to a Fair Young Lady, 231. 
 Songs, 219-32. 
 Sophocles, 134. 
 Southerne, Thomas, 174. 
 
 Epistle to, 151. 
 
 Sou they, Robert, 141, 317, 319. 
 Spanish Friar, 54, 115, 205, 223, 
 
 230, 328. 
 
 Spectator, 302, 305, 309. 
 Speeches of Ajax and Ulysses, 275. 
 Speght's edition of Chaucer, 276, 
 
 279. 
 Spence's Anecdotes, 37, 77, 81, 
 
 297, 309, 325- 
 
 Spenser, Edmund, 3, 12, 88, 90, 
 99, 100, 103, 105, 131-2, 135, 
 154, 157, 241, 253, 262, 270, 277, 
 285, 286, 314, 324, 325, 326, 
 329- 
 
 Sprat, Thomas, 193. 
 
 State of Innocence, iS, 22, 32, 113-4, 
 
 132, 148, 205, 234, 238-40, 
 
 326. 
 
 State of Nature, Dryden on, 21-3. 
 Statius, 13, 44. 
 
 Steele, Sir Richard, 166, 192, 309. 
 Stevens, John, 192. 
 Stevensoh, R. L., 308. 
 Steward, Mrs. Elmes, 268, 274, 
 
 295. 
 
 Suckling, Sir John, 2. 
 Suetonius, 192. 
 Suidas, 256. 
 Swift, Jonathan, 16, 99, 308-9, 
 
 312,321, 323. 
 Swinburne, 242. 
 Sylvee, 67, 82, 123, 124, 125, 128, 
 
 129, 160, 183, 246, 266. 
 Sylvester, Joshua, 3, 254. 
 
 Tacitus, 44, 58, 59, 192. 
 
 Taine, H. A., 35-6, 216. 
 
 Tasso, 3, 78, 89, 103, 140. 
 
 Tassoni, 341. 
 
 Tate, Nahum, 170, 252. 
 
 Taller, 302, 305, 309. 
 
 Te Deum, 232. 
 
 Tempest, 43, 115, 223. 
 
 Temple, Sir William, 57, 73, 154. 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 242, 262, 
 
 320, 332-3. 
 
 Tennyson, Hallam, 332. 
 Terence, 164. 
 Thackeray, W. M., 292. 
 Theocritus, 11, 157. 
 
 Translation of, 123-4, 304. 
 
 Theodore and Honoria, 288-9, 
 
 307, 316, 332. 
 
 Thomson, James, 166, 299. 
 Threnodia Augustalis, 46, 143-4, 
 
 249-50, 304.
 
 INDEX 
 
 361 
 
 Theophrastus, 189, 192. 
 Thompson, Francis, 332-5. 
 Thorn-Drury, G., 339. 
 Thornton, Bonnell, 252. 
 Titian, 68. 
 Tonson, Jacob, 121, 122, 128, 155, 
 
 184, 258, 267, 299, 300, 302, 
 
 303, 304, 309, 310, 339, 345, 
 
 346. 
 
 Tragedies, 50. 
 Trinity College, Cambridge, 8-9, 
 
 15, 146. 
 
 Triplets, 99-102. 
 Troilus and Cressida, 8, 31, 54, 
 
 55, 115, 184. 
 Turns, 102-3. 
 Tyrannic Love, 112, 223, 231, 325. 
 
 Van Dyck, Anthony, 65. 
 
 Varro, 185. 
 
 Vaughan, Henry, 2. 
 
 Veni, Creator Spirilus, 232, 304. 
 
 Vida, 80. 
 
 Vindication of the Duke of Guise, 
 
 209, 349- 
 
 Virgil, 6, 7, u, 13, 14, 44, 51, 63, 
 68-72, 78, 81, 82, 103, 122, 131, 
 154, 159-60, 262, 323. 
 
 Translation of, 12, 30, 39, 
 
 40, 63, 68-73, 79, 80-4, 89, 93- 
 5, 100-2, 119-20, 123, 126-30, 
 160, 213, 233, 235, 240, 261, 
 266-8, 285, 298, 301-2, 304, 
 305, 306, 320, 325. 
 
 Voiture, Vincent, 220. 
 
 Voltaire, 293-4, 3 12 - 
 
 Voss, Johann Heinrich, 294. 
 
 Waller, Edmund, 20, 24, 25, 28-9, 
 30-1, 45, 76, 78, 89, 91-2, 93, 
 99, 103, 106-7, 128, 131, 138, 
 
 141-3, 146, 219, 251, 311, 314, 
 
 325- 
 
 Walsh, William, 95, 297. 
 Walton, Izaac, 193. 
 Ward, Seth, 17. 
 Warner, William, 263. 
 Warton, Joseph, 302, 314-5. 
 Warton, Thomas, 132. 
 
 Edition of Dryden, 301, 321. 
 
 Webb, Daniel, 81. 
 
 Webb, William, 60, 219. 
 
 Webster, John, 157. 
 
 West, Gilbert, 244. 
 
 Westminster Drolleries, 226, 303. 
 
 Westminster School, 5-8. 
 
 Weston, Joseph, 312-3. 
 
 Wharton, Duke of, 202, 325. 
 
 Whitman, Walt, 271. 
 
 Whitmore, Lady, Epitaph on, 157, 
 
 34- 
 Wife of Bath, Her Tale, 132, 285-7, 
 
 288, 293. 
 Wild Gallant, no. 
 Wilkes, John, 259. 
 Will's Coffee-house, 296-7, 311, 
 
 341, 347- 
 
 Wilson, John, 219. 
 Winchester, Marquis of, Epitaph 
 
 on, 156. 
 
 Wit, 24-5, 41-3. 
 Wither, George, 3. 
 Wolseley, Robert, 297. 
 Wolsey, Cardinal, 6. 
 Wordsworth, William, 13, 35, 
 
 81, 86, 219, 241, 242, 270, 287, 
 
 307, 313, 317, 3i8, 319, 320, 
 
 324, 328. 
 
 Zambra Dance, 229, 247. 
 Zeuxis, 68. 
 
 Zimri, character of, 189, 197-202, 
 306, 325.
 
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