your first perusal of this poem you have taken notice of some words which I have innovated (if it be too bold for me to say refined) upon his Latin, which, as I offer not to introduce into English prose, so I hope they are neither improper, nor altogether inelegant in verse; and in this Horace will again defend me "Et nova, fictaque nuper, habebunt verba fidem, si The inference is exceeding plain, for if a Roman poet might have liberty to coin a word, supposing only that it was derived from the Greek, but put into a Latin termination, and that he used this liberty but seldom and with modesty, how much more justly may I challenge that privilege to do it, with the same prerequisites, from the best and most judicious of Latin writers?' In a word, Dryden belonged to a period of social and literary twilight. Of those facts in his history which in the biographies of most distinguished men are fixed and definite, we have but an uncertain knowledge. It is chiefly his published writings which throw their rays through the nebulous atmosphere which invests his career. We peer through the mist to see if indeed he was the morning star of literature, and hail him with a dubious veneration as Brightest in the train of night If, rather, he belonged not to the dawn. Here again we join our voices to the common lamentation, which mourns the absence of that accurate biography which is, in fact, the condensation and the quintessence of all history. In the writings of such men as Dryden, we acquaint ourselves only with their ghosts-'dim forms of uncircumscribed shade,' and how fondly, yet how vainly, we desiderate the men as they lived, and talked, and behaved among their companions. So truly did the poet say, that the brave who flourished before the era of Homeric song perished in inglorious oblivion, for want of the celebrating bard, well called sacred, because he preserved in an inviolable sanctuary the memory of the mighty dead. If it were supposable that the steam engine and the electric telegraph should become the fables of a distant posterity, how gladly would our descendants exchange the mythic wonder of an empire traversed in a day, or a message from distant lands communicated in a second, for the working model of a locomotive, or a clear description of that miraculous machine which realizes the wildest prayer that ever diverted Olympus Ye gods, annihilate but time and space, John Dryden was born at the village of Oldwinkle, All Saints, Northamptonshire, on the 9th of August, 1631. His ancestors were dissenters, and from the absence of any registry of his baptism in this or any of the neighbouring village churches, it has been assumed that his parents were baptists. He received his early education at Tichmarsh, or at the neighbouring school at Oundle, and was afterwards admitted a king's scholar at Westminster School, under Dr. Busby. In May, 1650, he was elected to a scholarship in Trinity College, Cambridge, took his bachelor's degree in January, 1653-4, and was made Master of Arts in 1657, by dispensation from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Of his college course nothing is known. If in early life he was imbued with nonconformist principles, they had little chance of surviving the joint influences of Westminster School and Cambridge University. For the former he always entertained a high veneration, while of the latter he ever held a very low opinion. His vigour of intellect was not torpefied by its routine, and he brought from it a rich accumulation of scholarship. In 1657 he exchanged his college seclusion for London life. This he entered under the auspices of his kinsman, Sir Gilbert Pickering, a rigid puritan, who enjoyed the confidence of Cromwell, and to whom Dryden is generally supposed to have acted as secretary. In accordance not only with the influences of his position, but also with the traditional politics of his family, he attached himself to the faith and fortunes of the Commonwealth; and the first poem which brought him into public notice was his 'Heroic Stanzas' on the death of Oliver Cromwell, written two years afterwards. They indicate a very accurate knowledge of the Protector's great characteristics, and among thirty-seven stanzas, many of which are stiff and turgid, the three following are at once the most laudatory and poetical: 6. His grandeur he derived from heaven alone; 15. His palms, though under weights they did not stand, Heaven in his portrait showed a workman's hand, 37. His body in a peaceful urn shall rest, Within two years from the publication of this poem we find his name attached to another, entitled Astræa Redux; a Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of his Sacred Majesty Charles the Second, 1660.' The publication of this poem gives us the first glimpse of the unprincipled venality of Dryden's character. His nature was insusceptible of that enthusiasm especially natural to the young, which could glow in the contemplation of the greatness of those principles for which Cromwell fought. The stern simplicity of the victor, the reposing majesty and conscious greatness which could dispense with the externals of sovereignty, reigning without the purple, and swaying the destinies of the civilized world without the sceptre; the grandeur of a religion without ceremony; a policy untrammeled by diplomatic artifice; and an imperial power without the coarseness of despotism, and the constellation of the heroes of freedom whose names sparkle with undying lustre in that richest vein of time;-none of the emotions which all this was calculated to excite burned in the bosom of Dryden, nor could the dastard indignities practised on the disinterred person of his belauded Cromwell elicit a single expression of indignation or of scorn. 'There was nothing,' says the editor, to be hoped or feared from the descendants or adherents of the Protector.' This consideration may not have influenced the poet; but the reader can hardly avoid being affected by it when he finds that almost every topic which in the former poem was referred to as a subject of panegyric is here made a ground of reproach or lamentation. England is described as having been isolated from the policy of Europe; church and state as groaning for the return of the king, with fanaticism in the pulpit and faction on the throne. Even peace, which had been extolled as the great work of the 'Protector,' becomes a 'dreadful quiet' and horrid stillness; and the treaty which followed speedily on the death of Cromwell between France and Spain is cited as evidence that Providence had abandoned the kingdom. His eulogy of Cromwell was evidently what he himself designates 'painted fire;' while his adulation of the second Charles is something at once more tame and less natural. One or two of his extravagancies will suffice to justify our censure: And welcome now, great monarch, to your own! Not tied to rules of policy, you find Long suffering, goodness, mercy, in his name. Whose rigid letter, while pronounced by you, The agitated soul of generous wine, So tears of joy for your returning spilt Work out, and expiate our former guilt.—Vol. i. pp. 123, 124. And again That star that at your birth shone out so bright, It stained the duller sun's meridian light, Did once again its potent fires renew, Guiding our eyes to find and worship you.-Ib. p. 125. One other line seems to sign and seal this abdication of all self-respect and manhood 'For what the powerful takes not, he bestows.' The line of Virgil, Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos,' It is will not bear reflection; but this wholesale justification of the right of might might have been heard without surprise from Jeffries, but is painfully strange from the lips of Dryden. humiliating to imagine the author of the Eulogy on Cromwell sneaking by the wall about town, hugging his carcase and pouring out his abject blessings on the almighty grace of the king which suffered him to be in existence. But this, it may be said, was in anticipation of a reign which might be illustrated by dignity and virtue, and blest with halycon days of peace and freedom.* Not so; after an interval of twenty-five years, over the annals of which humanity blushes The same remarks apply to his panegyric on the coronation of his majesty in 1661, in which, among other follies, the following lines occur: Wrapt soft and warm, your name is sent on high, As flames do on the wings of incense fly. Music herself is lost; in vain she brings Her choicest notes to praise the best of kings: Her melting strains in you a tomb have found, And lie like bees in their own sweetness drowned.—Vol. i. and sickens, we find him writing in the same strain the 'Threnodia Augustalis, a Funeral Pindarick Poem, Sacred to the Happy Memory of King Charles the Second,' in which his eulogies on the king are still more nauseous:— Kind, good, and gracious, to the last, On all he loved before, his dying beams he cast; Oh, truly good, and truly great, For glorious as he rose, benignly so he set!-Vol. ii. p. 65. Nor was Dryden's monstrous adulation of the king, and that with reference to the basest attributes of his nature, confined to his poetry, to which branch of literature a considerable amount of licence has always been conceded. In his preface to 'Absalom and Achitophel,' his eulogium upon the king is equally absurd and profane. God is infinitely merciful, and his vicegerent is only not so because he is not infinite.' To apologize for this prostitution of genius and literary position would be vicious, even were it possible; but to account for it is not so difficult a matter. He had meanwhile been made the poet laureate to Charles the Second; and such laurels might well drip an oblivion of virtue and honour over a higher nature and a purer heart than that of John Dryden. As the work before us excludes the plays of Dryden, we shall no further notice him as a dramatic writer than to exhibit his views on the use of rhyme in this department of poetical literature. Its editor observes that he was the first writer who advocated and attempted to vindicate, upon critical grounds, the employment of rhyme in plays. Dryden then maintained that 'rhyme has all the advantages of prose, besides its own,' and that in repartee the sudden smartness of the answer and the sweetness of the rhyme set off the beauty of each other. His views on this subject are thus succinctly given by Mr. Bell:— "The principal benefit he proposes as resulting from the use of rhyme is, that it prescribes bounds to the fancy, and by compelling the sense within certain limitations, prevents the poet from being carried away into that luxuriance and superfluity to which he is liable, from the great easiness of blank verse. The manner in which Dryden expresses this doctrine is as remarkable as the doctrine itself: 66 The great easiness of blank verse renders the poet too luxuriant; he is tempted to say many things which might better be omitted, or at least shut up in fewer words; but when the difficulty of artful rhyming is interposed, when the poet commonly confines his sense to his couplet, and must contrive that sense into such words that the rhyme shall naturally follow them, not they the rhyme, the fancy then gives leisure to the judgment to come in, which seeing so heavy a tax imposed, is ready to cut off all unnecessary expenses.' -Vol. i. P. 32. All these opinions, however, he subsequently retracted as boldly |