BRITANNIA REDIVIVA.

A POEM

ON THE BIRTH OF THE PRINCE.

"Dii Patrii indigetes, et Romule, Vestaque mater,
Quæ Tuscum Tiberim et Romana palatia servas,
Hunc saltem everso puerum succurrere sæclo
Ne prohibite satis jampridem sanguine nostro
Laomedonteæ luimus perjuria Troja."

VIRG. Georg. i. 498.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

The birth of a son to James II. on June 10, 1688, and on Trinity Sunday, is celebrated in the following poem. The Queen's pregnancy had excited surprise, and much doubt and distrust; and while the Roman Catholics hailed the birth of the Prince with unbounded joy, as seeing hope of a Roman Catholic successor to James, the opponents of James's measures and the friends of the Prince of Orange generally regarded the pregnancy as a sham and the child as supposititious. The calm verdict of history is that the child was genuine. But the Revolution soon came to destroy all the newly raised hopes of the Roman Catholics, and scatter the poet's visions of long reigns for James and his son.

This is the last of the series of Dryden's Historical and Political Poems. He was too deeply committed as a Roman Catholic, and by his prominent politics, and by all he had written against the Dutch, to render it possible for him to have William III.'s favour. He was deprived of his Laureateship. Since 1681, when he first appeared as a Tory politician with “ Absalom and Achitophel,” he had done very little in the way of play-writing. "The Duke of Guise” and “Albion and Albanius,” which both have a strong political character, are his only two dramas produced between 1681 and 1688. After the Revolution, he returned of necessity to play-writing for some years. Five plays were written between this and 1694, when Dryden gave up writing for the stage, and soon devoted himself to his great labour of the translation of Virgil. This poon was hastily written: the Prince was born on June 10th, and the poem wis licensed on the 19th. The Revolution came too soon to allow of a second edition in Dryden's lifetime. It was first reprinted in Tonson's folio volume of 1701.

BRITANNIA REDIVIVA,

A POEM ON THE PRINCE, BORN ON THE TENTH OF JUNE, 1688.

OUR vows are heard betimes! and Heaven takes care

To grant, before we can conclude the prayer :

Preventing angels met it half the way,

*

And sent us back to praise, who came to pray.
Just on the day, when the high mounted sun
Did farthest in his northern progress run,
He bended forward and even stretched the sphere
Beyond the limits of the lengthened year,
To view a brighter sun in Britain born;
That was the business of his longest morn;
The glorious object seen, 'twas time to turn.
Departing Spring could only stay to shed
Her bloomy beauties on the genial bed,
But left the manly Summer in her stead,
With timely fruit the longing land to cheer
And to fulfil the promise of the year.
Betwixt two seasons comes the auspicious heir,
This age to blossom, and the next to bear.

Last solemn Sabbath saw the Church attend,✈
The Paraclete in fiery pomp descend;
But when his wondrous octave rolled again,+
He brought a royal infant in his train:
So great a blessing to so good a King
None but the Eternal Comforter could bring.
Or did the mighty Trinity conspire,

As once, in council to create our sire?
It seems as if they sent the new-born guest
To wait on the procession of their feast;
And on their sacred anniverse decreed
To stamp their image on the promised seed.
Three realms united and on one bestowed
An emblem of their mystic union showed :
The mighty Trine the triple empire shared,
As every person would have one to guard.
Hail, son of prayers! by holy violence

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Drawn down from Heaven; § but long be banished thence,

* June 10, described as the longest day.

"Whit Sunday."

35

↑ " Trinity Sunday;" the eighth day after Whit Sunday, and the day of the Prince's birth. The birth of a Prince was ascribed by the Jesuits to their prayers. Dryden, probably more

And late to thy paternal skies retire:
To mend our crimes whole ages would require,
To change the inveterate habit of our sins
And finish what thy godlike sire begins.
Kind Heaven, to make us Englishmen again,
No less can give us than a patriarch's reign.

The sacred cradle to your charge receive,
Ye seraphs, and by turns the guard relieve;
Thy father's angel and thy father join
To keep possession and secure the line;
But long defer the honours of thy fate;
Great may they be like his, like his be late,
That James this running century may view,
And give his son an auspice to the new."

Our wants exact at least that moderate stay:
For see the Dragon winged on his way, +
To watch the travail and devour the prey.

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45

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Or if allusions may not rise so high,

Thus, when Alcides raised his infant cry,§

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The snakes besieged his young divinity;

But vainly with their forked tongues they threat,

For opposition makes a hero great.

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To needful succour all the good will run,
And Jove assert the godhead of his son.

O still repining at your present state,
Grudging your selves the benefits of fate,
Look up, and read in characters of light
A blessing sent you in your own despite !
The manna falls, yet that celestial bread

65

Like Jews you munch, and murmur while you feed.

May not your fortune be like theirs, exiled

Yet forty years to wander in the wild;

Or if it be, may Moses live at least,

To lead you to the verge of promised rest!

70

Though poets are not prophets, to foreknow

What plants will take the blight, and what will grow,

By tracing Heaven his footsteps may be found;

Behold! how awfully He walks the round!

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God is abroad, and, wondrous in his ways,
The rise of empires and their fall surveys;

as a poet than as a believer, ascribes it to the prayers of Roman Catholics. For the phrase, "by holy violence drawn down from Heaven," compare "Astræa Redux," 144.

"And Heaven is won by violence of song."

POPE, Imitations of Horace, 2 Ep. i. 240. *James II. saw the end of the century, and died in 1701; but could not give a happy auspice of the new century to his son, the unfortunate "Pretender.

"Alluding only to the Commonwealth party here and in other parts of the poem." Such is Dryden's note: but why this allusion should be confined to the Commonwealth party is not appaThe disbelief of the genuineness of the Queen's pregnancy was not confined to the Com monwealth party; grave suspicion was general in the highest among those who were not Roman Catholics, The Princess Anne suspected.

rent.

"Rev. xii. 4.' "And the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born."

§ Alcides, Hercules. See note on "Threnodia Augustalis,"447, where the same simile is used.

More (might I say) than with an usual eye,*

He sees his bleeding Church in ruin lie,

And hears the souls of saints beneath his altar cry.

**

Now view at home a second Constantine¶
(The former too was of the British line.)
Has not his healing balm your breaches closed,
Whose exile many sought and few opposed?
Or did not Heaven by its eternal doom
Permit those evils, that this good might come?
So manifest, that even the moon-eyed sects
See whom and what this Providence protects.
Methinks, had we within our minds no more
Than that one shipwrack on the fatal Ore,
That only thought may make us think again
What wonders God reserves for such a reign.
To dream that chance his preservation wrought
Were to think Noah was preserved for nought,
Or the surviving eight were not designed
To people earth and to restore their kind.
When humbly on the royal babe we gaze,
The manly lines of a majestic face
Give awful joy; 'tis Paradise to look
On the fair frontispiece of Nature's book.

If the first opening page so charms the sight,
Think how the unfolded volume will delight!

See how the venerable infant lies

In early pomp; how through the mother's eyes

* An unusually bad line for Dryden. If arranged correctly, according to the meaning, "with a more than usual eye," it would be very prosaic. A synchysis or ill-placing of words, of which Tully so much complains in oratory," is Dryden's criticism on a passage of Ben Jonson, in which words are not so badly distorted. (Defence of Epilogue to " Conquest of Granada.")

"The Cross." A forced reference to the legend of the appearance of the cross, with the motto "In hoc signo vinces," to Constantine on the eve of his victory: and Dryden poetically represents that the elevation by James of the Roman Catholic religion had had a beneficial effect on the progress of the Christian arms in the war between the German Emperor and the Turks.

"The Crescent, which the Turks bear for their arms."

"The Pope in the time of Constantine the Great, alluding to the present Pope." "The present Pope," here called by Dryden another Sylvester, was Innocent XI. The compliment to him is introduced to pave the way for calling James "a second Constantine." Pope Innocent XI. was opposed to the Jesuits, and not sympathetic with James's policy: he had the name of the Protestant Pope.

"Largus opum," (Virg. Æn. xi. 338.) See for instances of similar Latinisms note on "Absalom and Achitophel," 479.

**

གླ King James the Second."

See

"The Lemmon Ore." The sandbank in Yarmouth road where the "Gloucester" frigate, carrying James to Scotland in May 1682, was wrecked, James narrowly escaping death. "Absalon and Achitophel," part 2, 1065-1098.

U