most popular piece. It often echoes the imagery of Shakspeare, but has some fine lines, descriptive of the elvish queen She on a dewy leaf doth bathe, And as she sits, the leaf doth wave; There like a new-fallen flake of snow, Doth her white limbs in beauty show. Her garments fair her maids put on, Made of the pure light from the sun. Mirth and Melancholy is another of these fanciful personifications. The former woos the poetess to dwell with her, promising sport and pleasure, and drawing a gloomy but forcible and poetical sketch of her rival, Melancholy : Her voice is low, and gives a hollow sound; I walk in meadows, where grows fresh green grass; To hear how sheep do bleat, and cows do low; Yet better lov'd, the more that I am known; 'Tis true, it looks at distance fair; Or else, like rivers, they make wide The channels where they run; But ne'er true bliss possess ; And its attendant shame. Th' experienc'd prince then reason had, [A Country Life.] How sacred and how innocent This was the first and happiest life, "Twas here the poets were inspir'd, Here taught the multitude; That golden age did entertain From hence our peace doth flow; When all the stormy world doth roar, I cannot fear to tumble lower, JOHN DRYDEN. JOHN DRYDEN, one of the great masters of English verse, and whose masculine satire has never been excelled, was born at Oldwinckle, in Northamptonshire, in August 1631. His father, Erasmus Driden [the poet first spelled the name with a y], was a strict Puritan, of an ancient family, long established in Northamptonshire. John was one of fourteen children, but he was the eldest son, and received a good education, first at Westminster, and afterwards at Trinity college, Cambridge. Dryden's first poetical John Dryden. production was a set of 'heroic stanzas' on the death of Cromwell, which possess a certain ripeness of style and versification that promised future excellence. In all Waller's poem on the same subject, there is nothing equal to such verses as the following: His grandeur he deriv'd 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. Nor was he like those stars which only shine When to pale mariners they storms portend; He had his calmer influence, and his mien lished a long poem, Annus Mirabilis, being an account of the events of the year 1666. The style and versification seem to have been copied from Davenant; but Dryden's piece fully sustained his reputation. About the same time he wrote an Essay on Dramatic Poesy, in which he vindicates the use of rhyme in tragedy. The style of his prose was easy, natural, and graceful. The poet now undertook to write for the king's players no less than three plays a year, for which he was to receive one share and a quarter in the profits of the theatre, said to be about £300 per annum. He was afterwards made poet-laureate and royal historiographer, with a salary of £200. These were golden days; but they did not last. Dryden, however, went on manufacturing his rhyming plays, in accordance with the vitiated French taste which then prevailed. He got involved in controversies and quarrels, chiefly at the instigation of Rochester, who set up a wretched rhymster, Elkanah Settle, in opposition to Dryden. The great poet was also successfully ridiculed by Buckingham in his 'Rehearsal.' In 1681, Dryden published the satire of Absalom and Achitophel, written in the style of a scriptural narrative, the names and situations of personages in the holy text being applied to those contemporaries, to whom the author assigned places in his poem. The Duke of Monmouth was Absalom, and the Earl of Shaftesbury Achitophel; while the Duke of Buckingham was drawn under the character of Zimri. The success of this bold political satirethe most vigorous and elastic, the most finely versified, varied, and beautiful, which the English language can boast-was almost unprecedented. Dryden was now placed above all his poetical contemporaries. Shortly afterwards, he continued the feeling against Shaftesbury in a poem called The Medal, a Satire against Sedition. The attacks of a rival poet, Shadwell, drew another vigorous satire from Dryden, Mac-Flecknoe. A second part of Absalom and Achitophel' was published in 1684, but the body of the poem was written by Nahum Tate. Dryden contributed about two hundred lines, containing highlywrought characters of Settle and Shadwell, under the names of Doeg and Og. His antagonists,' says Scott, 'came on with infinite zeal and fury, discharged their ill-aimed blows on every side, and exhausted their strength in violent and ineffectual rage; but the keen and trenchant blade of Dryden never makes a thrust in vain, and never strikes but at a vulnerable point.' In the same year was published Dryden's Religio Laici, a poem written to defend the church of England against the dissenters, yet evincing a sceptical spirit with regard to revealed religion. The opening of this poem is singularly solemn and majestic Did love and majesty together blend. When monarchy was restored, Dryden went over with the tuneful throng who welcomed in Charles II. He had done with the Puritans, and he wrote poetical addresses to the king and the lord chancellor. The amusements of the drama revived after the Restoration, and Dryden became a candidate for theatrical laurels. In 1662, and two following years, he produced The Wild Gallant, The Rival Ladies, and The Indian Emperor; the last was very successful. Dryden's name was now conspicuous; and in 1665 he married the Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. The match added neither to his wealth nor his happiness, and the poet afterwards revenged himself by constantly inveighing against matrimony. When his wife wished to be a book, that she might enjoy more of his company, Dryden is said to have replied, 'Be an almanac then, my dear, that I may change you once a-year.' In his play of the Spanish Friar, he most unpolitely states, that woman was made from the dross and refuse of a man: upon which his antagonist, Jeremy Collier, remarks, with some humour and smartness, I did not know before that a man's dross lay in his ribs; I believe it sometimes lies higher.' All Dryden's plays are marked with Good life be now my task-my doubts are done. licentiousness, that vice of the age, which he fostered, His change of religion happening at a time when it rather than attempted to check. In 1667 he pub-suited his interests to become a Catholic, was looked Dim as the borrow'd beams of moon and stars and the consequence is, that light ephemeral trifles, or personal sallies, are thrust in between the more durable memorials of genius, disturbing their symmetry and effect. In the case of Dryden, however, such a chronological survey would be instructive; for, between the Annus Mirabilis' and the Ode to St Cecilia' or the 'Fables,' through the plays and poems, how varied is the range in style and taste! It is like the progress of Spenser's Good Knight,' through labyrinths of uncertainty, fantastic conceits, flowery vice, and unnatural splendour, to the sober daylight of truth, virtue, and reason. Dryden never attained to finished excellence in composition. His genius was debased by the false taste of the age, and his mind vitiated by its bad morals. He mangled the natural delicacy and simplicity of Shakspeare's Tempest;' and where even Chaucer is pure, Dryden is impure. This great high-priest of all the nine,' remarks Mr Campbell, was not a confessor to the finer secrets of the human breast. Had the subject of "Eloisa" fallen into his hands, he would have left but a coarse draught of her passion.' But if Dryden was deficient in the higher emotions of love and tenderness, their absence is partly atoned for in his late works, by wide surveys of nature and mankind, by elevated reasoning and declamation, and by the hearty individuality of his satire. The 'brave negligence' of his versification, and his 'long resounding line,' have an indescribable charm. His style is like his own Panther, of the spotted kind,' and its faults and virtues lie equally mixed; but it is beloved in spite of spots and blemishes, and pleases longer than the verse of Pope, which, like the milk-white hind, is 'immortal and unchanged.' The satirical portraits of Pope, excepting those of Addison and Lord Hervey, are feeble compared with those of Dryden, whom he acknowledged to be his master and instructor in versification. The bard of Twickenham is too subtile, polished, and refined. Dryden drew from the life, and hit off strong likenesses. Pope, like Sir Joshua Reynolds, refined in his colours, and many of his pictures are faint and vanishing delineations. Dryden, with his tried and homely materials, and bold pencil, was true to nature; his sketches are still fresh as a genuine Vandyke or Rembrandt. His language, like his thoughts, was truly English. He was sometimes Gallicised by the prevailing taste of the day; but he felt that this was a license to be sparingly used. If too many foreign words are poured in upon us,' said he, it looks as if they were designed not to assist the natives, but to conquer them.' His lines, like the Sibyl's prophecies, must be read in the order in which they lie. In better times, and with more careful culture, Dryden's genius would have avoided the vulgar descents which he seldom escaped, except in his most finished passages and his choicest lyrical odes. As it is, his muse was a fallen angel, cast down for manifold sins and impurities, yet radiant with light from heaven. The natural freedom and magnificence of his verse it would be vain to eulogise. [Character of Shaftesbury.] [From Absalom and Achitophel.'] And o'er-inform'd the tenement of clay. Pleas'd with the danger when the waves went high, He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit, From cockle, that oppress'd the noble seed; [Character of Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.] Some of their chiefs were princes of the land: That ev'ry man with him was God or devil. *The proposition of Dryden, that great wit is allied to madness, will not bear the test of scrutiny. It has been successfully combated by Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. The greatest wits,' says Lamb, will ever be found to be the sanest writers. It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakspeare. The greatness of wit, by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be understood, manifests itself in the admirable balance of all the faculties. Madness is the disproportionate straining or excess of any one of them.' Shaftesbury's restlessness was owing to his ambition and his vanity; to a want of judgment and principle, not an excess of wit. Beggar'd by fools, whom still he found too late, [Shaftesbury's Address to Monmouth.] Auspicious prince, at whose nativity Whose motions, if we watch and guide with skill Mac-Flecknoe. [The design of this poem is the sublime of personal satire. The leading idea is to represent the solemn inauguration of one inferior poet as the successor of another in the monarchy of nonsense. The title involves this idea with a happy reference to the nation of the resigning sovereign-Mac, in Celtic, being son.] All human things are subject to decay; And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey. 1 Richard Flecknoe, an Irish Roman Catholic priest, and a well-known hackneyed poetaster of the day. And pond'ring which of all his sons was fit The lute still trembling underneath thy nail. Here stopp'd the good old sire, and wept for joy, Close to the walls which fair Augusta bind Where unfledg'd actors learn to laugh and cry, 1 Thomas Shadwell, the dramatic author, was a rival of Dryden's both in politics and poetry. His scenes of low comedy evince considerable talent in the style of Ben Jonson, whom he also resembled in his person and habits. 2 A fashionable dancing-master. 3 Psyche was the name of one of Shadwell's operas. * An actor in operas, celebrated for his performance of Villerius in Davenant's Siege of Rhodes.' |