Matchless Orinda, with every desire to be writing in the good old Royalist way as Donne and Herrick wrote, snatches her lyre and strikes the rebellious strings. This is the sort of music which they utter : "You justly may forsake a land which you Fortune injurious to your innocence Shot all her poison'd arrows here, or hence'.” We need no more; we see that Waller has bewitched her, that she is totally ensnared. It may be that my readers have been awaiting the introduction of a great name into this discourse, which hitherto has scarcely been mentioned. I may be asked, where is Dryden, the accredited source and leader of the classical movement? My answer is, that in tracing the rise of that movement, and in examining its early development, I do not discover the influence of Dryden. In guiding the movement when it was once organized, in lending to it the force and prestige of his commanding genius, in forging the distich anew and in directing it as a missile is directed by a powerful machine, in all this Dryden took a foremost part, but he was not an inventor or a primal force in the new 1 To the Queen Mother's Majesty, Il 1-4. Jan. 1, 1661. scheme. When in the course of events he began to follow it, he was long attracted to the most volatile part of it, the heresy of Cowley. A glance at dates is here most valuable. Dryden was born in 1631, more than a quarter of a century later than Waller; he was but a child when the epochmaking volumes of the school were published, and when at last he began himself to be a poet,-for he was slow and laborious in development,-he came forward as the most absurd of Marinists. His lines on the death of Lord Hastings have supplied matter for mirth to critic after critic; the terrible series of similes by which the symptoms of the smallpox are described, are well known, and offensive beyond measure. Here is a less hackneyed fragment, in which Dryden plays with the notion that Lord Hastings' death was premature: "Thus fades the oak in the spring, in the blade the corn, Or to hang an antiquary's rooms withal." In taste, in language, above all in versification, this belongs to the first decades of the century; it is almost Elizabethan. Dryden's next departure was in the direction of Davenant, whose Gondibert affected him to the exclusion of almost every other influence in the Heroic Stanzas of 16591, and in the Annus Mirabilis of 1666. In his Astræa Redux he is feeling after the new prosody, with only doubtful success, and his verse is first worthy to be named with that of Waller and Denham in the Coronation Panegyric. But by this time the Restoration was already a part of history, and we feel that Dryden, as Eusden said, "Faintly distinguished in his thirtieth year," is by no means to be counted among those who led the van of classicism. Of course a man so intelligent and so worldly as he would not long resist the dominant stream of his generation. Milton, awakening from his long indifference to verse, might disdain to observe the change in taste which had taken place; but Dryden was of a temperament less sublime and less austere, and his finger was ever upon the pulse of public feeling, guiding it, indeed, in one sense, but none the less directed by it in another. It is time, however, if Dryden is excluded from our attention in this place, for us to turn to those 1 It is noticeable that in this, his earliest publication, Dryden was associated with Sprat and with the veteran Waller. writers of far less genius than he who preceded him and made a road for him. And chiefly Waller, whose name has been so frequently repeated by us; and who has now for a long time been left in the background. We saw that his mother, the clever woman at Beaconsfield, had carried those amiable pleasantries of hers with her awful cousin, the Protector, to a point where the throwing of a napkin over her head at the dinner-table seemed scarcely chastisement enough. Oliver Cromwell lost his temper with her at last; Mrs Waller was requested to pay her daughter, Mrs Scroope, a visit, and to let it be a permanent one. The poet's mother, in fact, became a prisoner in her son-inlaw's house, and though gifted with no small share of her son's brazen and irrepressible assurance, she seems to have felt that it was time for a change of tactics. We do not know the terms upon which she, and presently Edmund Waller, also, made peace with the Commonwealth, nor how the poet contrived to temper this second act of apparent treachery to his Queen and their common friends. In spite of our romantic confidence in the chivalry of our ancestors, it is certain that personal honour was not regarded as we regard it now. Waller had lost no caste with his own party by his pusillanimous confessions in 1643; he found no want of warmth among the Roundheads when he ratted to them in 1654. Among the pencil memoranda taken in the House of Commons during the Long Parliament, by Sir Ralph Verney, there is this astounding entry, namely, that Waller, from his place in the House, remarked on Tuesday, the 23rd of June, 1642, "Let us look first to our safety, and then to our honour." Nobody seems to have been shocked, although subsequent speakers expressed a different view regarding the duty of parliament. We may gauge the difference between now and then, and in so doing excuse a little the apparent worthlessness of Waller's morality, by imagining the uproar which such a sentiment would nowadays create in any representative body of legislators in the world. Another phrase of Waller's, casually noted down by Sir Ralph Verney, is also perhaps worthy of citation as throwing light upon the poet's character and position. When the ire of the Long Parliament was roused by Palmer's protestation, Waller rose and said, "Let no man be punished for temperance, lest we seem to punish virtue." This was the voice of the neutral, of the scholarly man who saw right on both sides, and who would fain be friends with both. No one could be further removed from such treasonable fickleness as history |