Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers come to dust.

"Fear no more the frown o' the great.
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;

To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic must
All follow this and come to dust.

"Fear no more the lightning flash,

Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;

Thou hast finished joy and moan:
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.

"No exorciser harm thee!

Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee !
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;

And renowned be thy grave!"

Collins changed this to the following:

"To fair Fidele's grassy tomb

Soft maids and village hinds shall bring
Each opening sweet of earliest bloom,
And rifle all the breathing spring.

"No wailing ghost shall dare appear
To vex with shrieks this quiet grove;

But shepherd lads assemble here

And melting virgins tell their love.

"No withered witch shall here be seen,
No goblins lead their nightly crew:
The female fays shall haunt the green,
And dress thy grave with pearly dew:

"The redbreast oft, at evening hours,
Shall kindly lend his little aid,

With hoary moss and gathered flowers,

To deck the ground where thou art laid.
"When howling winds and beating rain
In tempests shake thy sylvan cell;
Or midst the chase, on every plain

The tender thought on thee shall dwell.

"Each lonely scene shall thee restore,
For thee the tear be duly shed;
Beloved till life can charm no more,

And mourned till Pity's self be dead."

Collins's version is not without beauty and plaintiveness, but it lacks strength and truth of sentiment. The rhymes are all perfect, the diction is "correct and pleasing," as Dr. Johnson would say (if we except the expression "female fays "), and nothing so common as "chimney-sweepers" is alluded to, but the whole thing is unreal. The Elizabethan vigorous simplicity is replaced by Augustan polish, and the change is illustrative of the change that comes over the form and spirit of poetry as we pass from the seventeenth into the eighteenth century.

The minor dramatists of the Restoration Congreve, Wycherley, Vanbrugh, and Etheredge—are representative Drama of the figures, but our limits compel us to restrict our Restoration. notice of them to the first. The comedy which satirizes the follies and foibles of society, illustrated in the next generation by Sheridan's "School for Scandal" and Goldsmith's "She Stoops to Conquer," was brought to great perfection. Its tone, at first decidedly immoral, called forth a severe attack from a clergyman named Collier, and Dryden himself acknowledged that the rebuke was at least in part deserved. Since then the English

stage, with the exception of occasional importations of French plays, has rarely been immoral, though rarely rising much above the level of cheap entertainment.

William
Congreve,

1670-1729.

Although Congreve was not born till 1670 and lived till 1729, his success was attained so early (1693), and his productive period was so short, terminating in 1700, that he is to be reckoned among the group known as "comic dramatists of the Restoration." Congreve is rather the typical figure among them, and the "Old Bachelor," the "Double Dealer," and "Love for Love" and the " Way of the World" are the best representatives of the plays of the period, which aimed to give a witty and entertaining picture of social folly and intrigue. All are in prose, and the dialogue is extremely lively and natural. The characters are contemporary men and women, and the plays are comedies in the sense of not being tragedies. They are not thoughtful enough for true comic satire, nor do they, like some of the plays of Molière, who was just achieving his fame in France and being adapted and imitated in England, reach deep into human nature with serious suggestion. Congreve essayed blank-verse tragedy once in the "Mourning Bride," and although this enjoyed a great reputation for a century, it is too artificial to rank among the great dramatic pictures of life. As pictures of manners Congreve's comedies are valuable, since they undoubtedly give a lively presentation of the fashionable society of his day. The author always assumed to be a man of fashion and wit writing for amusement, and told Voltaire, who came to visit him, that he wished to be considered "merely as any other gentleman of no literary fame." The great Frenchman replied very naturally that “if that had been the case he would not have taken the trouble

to call upon him.” It is pleasant to record that Dryden disproved the current idea that literary men are always jealous of the success of a younger aspirant, by hearty and generous praise of the "Old Bachelor" and the "Double Dealer." Had Congreve been born in a different age or had he been a man of more serious penetration into human nature, his plays might have contained some of the great, typical stage figures in which comedy satirizes human nature and society so artistically that they remain true for all time. Congreve is a much more important figure in the history of the theater than in the history of the drama. It should be remembered that during this period stage machinery and stage setting were much improved and that the female parts were first acted by women instead of boys.

Samuel
Butler,

Samuel Butler, about whose early life very little is known, is the author of "Hudibras," a doggerel poem of some ten thousand rattling, jingling verses, ridiculing the Presbyterians and Independents, 1612-1680. which had great success-in its day, and was much liked by Charles II. The scheme of the poem is to represent the knight and justice of the peace, "Hudibras," and his squire or clerk, Ralpho, as engaged in ludicrous adventures against the harmless amusements of the populace, and courting a lady, consulting a lawyer, and the like. There is not much plot or story, indeed the poem is frank burlesque. But the liveliness of the rattling meter, the extraordinarily ingenious similes, and the astonishing rhymes, make it possible to read parts of "Hudibras even now without weariness. But it suffers just as Congreve's plays do from the lack of any grasp of human nature or underlying seriousness of conception

"Hudi

of life. The difference between it and "Don Quixote" in this regard is profound. "Hudibras" is good-humored, extravagant fun, resting on no foundation whatbras." ever except temporary party feeling, and consequently to us it is meaningless. It is full of verbal wit, and has given many familiar quotations to current literature which, however, unlike those from Pope, are gradually dropping out of use. A few extracts will show the character of the work.

THE LEARNING OF HUDIBRAS

He was in logic a great critic,
Profoundly skilled in analytic;
He could distinguish and divide

A hair 'twixt south and southwest side;
On either which he would dispute,
Confute, change hands, and still confute;
He'd undertake to prove by force
Of argument, a man's no horse;
He'd prove a buzzard is no fowl,
And that a lord may be an owl,

A calf an alderman, a goose a justice,

And rooks committee-men and trustees,
He'd run in debt by disputation:
And pay with ratiocination:

*

For rhetoric, he could not ope

His mouth but out there flew a trope.

RELIGION OF HUDIBRAS

For his religion it was fit

To match his learning and his wit.
'Twas Presbyterian, true blue;
For he was of that stubborn crew
Of errant saints whom all men grant

To be the true church militant;