as he had laid them down. They had been first expanded and illustrated in his dedication of the play of the 'Rival Ladies' to the Earl of Orrery, and subsequently more fully in his Essay on Criticism;' but in 1680, in his Lines to the Earl of Roscommon, he thus denounces the practice— Barbarous nations, and more barbarous times, We are the less concerned at omitting a criticism on his plays, inasmuch as his fame depends but little upon them, and will probably hereafter depend still less. They were written for the most part with that haste which was necessitated by poverty ;* and while they continually exhibit the inalienable vigour of his mind, were defaced with unbearable indecencies. One of them, indeed, entitled, Mr. Limberhand; or, the Kind Keeper,' was prohibited after the third performance, on the score of its indecency; an event which, having occurred in the reign of Charles the Second needs no comment. It is only doing justice to Dryden to state, that twenty-two years' afterwards, he openly avowed his repentance for these improprieties, in his preface to the 'Fables,' a selection from the tales of Chaucer, modernized by Dryden, in numbers and style. May I have leave,' he says, 'to inform my reader that I have confined my choice to such tales of Chaucer as savour nothing of immodesty. If I have desired more to please than to instruct, the Reeve, the Miller, the Shipman, the Merchant, the Sumner, and above all the Wife of Bath, in the prologue to her tale, would have procured me as many friends and readers as there are beaux and ladies of pleasure in the town. But I will no more offend against good manners. sensible, as I ought to be, of the scandal I have given by my loose writings, and make what reparation I am able by this public acknowledgment. If anything of this nature, or of profaneness, be crept into these poems, I am so far from defending it that I disown it. Totum hoc indictum volo.-Vol. ii. pp. 248. I am In estimating Dryden's dramatic excellence regard must be had to the fact, that during the whole period of the Commonwealth the theatres had been closed, from a sense, and that by no means a mistaken one, of their baneful influence on public morality. Hence dramatic genius had been laid to sleep during a time when all the powers and passions of society had been kept by unparalleled events in the condition of the intensest vigilance. During *The exigencies,' says Dr. Johnson, in which Dryden was condemned to pass his life are reasonably supposed to have blasted his genius, to have driven out his works in a state of immaturity, and to have intercepted the full-blown elegance which longer growth would have supplied.' 6 the long trance of the drama, the pulpit superseded the stage with a power and pathos which stirred up the very depths of the social mind, while the most elaborate and animated controversy not only exalted the tastes of the people, but also developed the copiousness and power of their language, to a degree of which it might before have been supposed incapable. With the Restoration the drama arose from the sepulchre, and shook off the dust but not the corruption. During its long sleep, the age and the language had changed. The Muse,' as Sir Walter Scott happily observes, awoke in the same antiquated and absurd vestments in which she had fallen asleep twenty years before; or, if the reader will pardon another simile, the poets were like those who after long mourning resume for a time their ordinary dresses, of which the fashion has, in the mean time, passed away.' In dismissing Dryden's dramatic productions we quote the language of Mr. Macaulay's admirable Essay in the 'Edinburgh Review.' 'His plays, his rhyming plays in particular, are admirable subjects for those who wish to study the morbid anatomy of the drama. He was utterly destitute of the power of exhibiting real human beings. Even in the far inferior talent of composing characters out of those elements into which the imperfect process of our reason can resolve them he was very deficient. His men are not even good personifications; they are not well assorted assemblages of qualities. Now and then, indeed, he seizes a very coarse and marked distinction, and gives us not a likeness but a strong caricature, in which a single peculiarity is protruded and everything else neglected, like the Marquis of Granby at the inn door, whom we know by nothing but his baldness; or Wilkes, who is Wilkes only in his squint. These are the best specimens of his skill, for most of his pictures seem, like Turkey carpets, to have been expressly designed not to resemble "anything in the heavens above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth.” In 1667, Dryden published the 'Annus Mirabilis,' in which, as remarked by his editor, he first developed his powers of description. We have here,' he says, 'the dawn of the revolution he afterwards completely effected in English poetrydiction distinguished by strength, purity, and fitness, flowing versification, and the final abandonment, with a few exceptional excesses, of metaphysical obscurity and imagerial conceits. This work affords one of many instances in which both the writings and the character of Dryden have been the subject of fierce dispute, and that even among the ablest critics. Dr. Johnson characterizes it as one of his most elaborate works, and in this judgment he is both preceded and followed by the opinions of many others whose criticisms may inspire curiosity even where they do not command respect. On the contrary, Mr. Macaulay says, 'the Annus Mirabilis' shows great command of expression. and a fine ear for heroic rhyme. Here its merits end. Not only has it no claim to be called poetry, but it seems to be the work of a man who could never, by any possibility, write poetry. Its affected similes are the best part of it. Gaudy weeds present a more encouraging spectacle than utter bareness. There is scarcely a single stanza in this long work to which the imagination seems to have contributed anything. It is produced not by creation but by construction. It is made up not of pictures but of inferences.-Edinburgh Review,' vol. xlvii. p. 22. In the face of these criticisms we must venture to say, that in many stanzas the poetry shows like crippled prose, while in some it exhibits the most detestable vice of Dryden's adulation, the comparison of Charles the Second with the Supreme Being. We instance a stanza describing the sequel of the great conflagration of London in 1666: The father of the people opened wide His stores, and all the poor with plenty fed; And filled the empty with his daily bread. Had the monarch supplied the wants of the houseless citizens from his own private resources this eulogium could scarcely be defended by religious reverence; but as all the bounties commemorated were extorted from the pockets of the nation, our censure on the impiety of the poet is lost in our ridicule of his absurdity. In 1681, he brought out the tragic comedy of 'The Spanish Friar,' which we only mention to indicate the change which was now about to pass upon Dryden's religious profession. This, with one memorable exception, was his last manifesto on the side of protestantism, and in it he satirized the Catholics with the utmost animosity; yet in the same year he produced the first part of his celebrated poem, 'Absalom and Achitophel,' which is supposed to have been written at the instance of the king, and to have occupied nine months in its composition. The poem was occasioned by the rebellion of the Earl of Monmouth, a natural son of Charles the Second. Monmouth is represented as Absalom, whose chief adviser, the Earl of Shaftesbury, was Achitophel. "The Exclusion Bill,' says Mr. Bell, 'was the great question at issue between the king and the whigs; and the Roman-catholic religion, if not actually the religion of the sovereign, was notoriously identified with his party. It was impossible to defend the king, therefore, without seeming to support popery. Such was the dilemma in which Dryden placed himself by his sudden transition from the Spanish Friar,' in which the bitterest scorn and detestation were flung upon the Jesuits, to the 'Absalom and Achitophel,' in which the royal obstinacy was sustained, in its resistance to the protestant appeals of the people. Conscious of the damaging arguments that might be brought against the poem, if the source from whence it proceeded were avowed, he published it anonymously. But the art, the variety, the exquisite acrimony of the satire could not be mistaken. The authorship was detected at once.'-Vol. i. p. 50. 'Absalom and Achitophel' was one of the most powerful, and has ever been one of the most admired of Dryden's poetical compositions. The portrait of Lord Shaftesbury as Achitophel has become familiar to every reader of English verse, and furnished Lord Byron with an opportunity of sneering at what he regarded as the comparative imbecility of Wordsworth. A single line, For priests of all religions are the same,' gives the key to the ecclesiastical tendencies of the work. Dryden evidently desired to assume a position of neutrality, in order to cover his intended secession to the ranks of the Roman Catholics. If he meant, as we presume he did, to condemn only the generality of the clergy of the popish and Anglican churches, it is unnecessary to except against his satire; while if, on the other hand, he intended to place Jeremy Taylor, Baxter, and Bunyan in the same category with Laud and his hireling associates, his statement would be too absurd to merit a reply. The second part of 'Absalom and Achitophel,' which appeared in 1682, was chiefly written by Nahum Tate, to whom Dryden transferred the task for reasons not sufficiently explained; his own contribution to it having been confined to about two hundred lines. The principal characters,' says Mr. Bell, 'drawn by Dryden in his contributions to this second part, are those of Little and Shadwell, under the names of Doeg and Og. He treats them both with the utmost contempt, and descending to personal traits, has bequeathed to us an immortal portrait of Shadwell reeling home drunk from a treason-tavern' behind his flambeau, 'Round as a globe, and liquored every chink.' The publication of the second part of 'Absalom and Achitophel' was followed in a few days by that of the 'Religio Laici,' a poem the title of which was evidently derived from Sir Thomas Brown's 'Religio Medici.' The light which this poem throws on Dryden's religious opinions is not only dubious but extremely perplexing. It is a bold declaration of the protestant faith, and that in doubtful and dangerous times, on the part of a man who seems to have given a very thoughtful attention to the points at issue between the rival churches. Indeed, he felt it necessary to justify his entering as a layman on so profound a theological disquisition. 'If,' he says in his preface, 'it be objected to me that being a layman I ought not to have concerned myself with speculations which belong to the profession of divinity, I could answer, that, perhaps, laymen, with equal advantages of parts and knowledge, are not the most incompetent judges of sacred things; but in the due sense of my own weakness and want of learning I plead not this. I pretend not to make myself a judge of faith in others, but only to make a confession of my own. I lay no unhallowed hand upon the ark, but wait on it with the reverence that becomes me at a distance. In the next place, I will ingenuously confess, that the helps I have used in this small treatise were many of them taken from the works of our own reverend divines of the Church of England; so that the weapons with which I combat irreligion are already consecrated.'-Vol. ii. p. 35. But, in truth, Dryden does not seem to have been floating on the billows of an ocean vague from its boundlessness, but rather to have been tossed about in the short and chopping sea of selfinterest. In the text of the Poem we find the following lines in advocacy of personal religious responsibility and the right of private judgment: More safe and much more modest 'tis to say, In all things which our needful faith require. If others in the same glass better see, "Tis for themselves they look, but not for me; For my salvation must its doom receive, Not from what others, but what I believe.-Ib. p. 53. Yet so little does he seem grounded in the great principle of private judgment that he writes a few pages afterwards the following lines: And after hearing what our Church can say, If still our reason runs another way, That private reason 'tis more just to curb But common quiet is mankind's concern.-Ib. p. 56. The Athanasian Creed seems to have been a sad stumblingblock to Dryden. If its prefatory damnation includes all who never heard of the Gospel, his perplexed understanding honestly revolts against it, though even of this he says, 'I am far from blaming even that prefatory addition to the Creed, and as far from cavilling at the continuation of it in the Liturgy of the Church, where, on the days appointed, it is publicly read.' Dryden's |