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Compelled instead of fiends to worship you,
The more inhuman devils of the two.
Rare way and method of conversion this,
To make your votaries your sacrifice!

If to destroy be Reformation thought,

A plague as well might the good work have wrought.
Now see we why your founder, weary grown,
Would lay his former trade of killing down1:
He found 'twas dull; he found a crown would be
A fitter case, and badge of cruelty.

Each snivelling hero seas of blood can spill,

When wrongs provoke, and honour bids him kill ;—
Give me your through-paced rogue, who scorns to be
Prompted by poor revenge, or injury,

But does it of true inbred cruelty;

Your cool and sober murderer, who prays

And stabs at the same time, who one hand has
Stretched up to Heaven, the other to make the pass.
So the late saints of blessèd memory,

Cut-throats in godly pure sincerity,

So they with lifted hands, and eyes devout,

Said grace, and carved a slaughtered monarch out.
When the first traitor Cain (too good to be
Thought patron of this black fraternity)
His bloody tragedy of old designed,

One death alone quenched his revengeful mind,
Content with but a quarter of mankind:
Had he been Jesuit, and but put on

Their savage cruelty, the rest had gone;
His hand had sent old Adam after too,

And forced the Godhead to create anew.

THE DOMESTIC CHAPLAIN.

[From A Satire addressed to a Friend that is about to leave the University, and come abroad in the world.]

Some think themselves exalted to the sky,

If they light in some noble family.

1 Loyola ceased to be a soldier after the siege of Pampeluna.

Diet, a horse, and thirty pounds a year,
Besides the advantage of his lordship's ear,
The credit of the business, and the state,

Are things that in a youngster's sense sound great.
Little the inexperienced wretch does know,
What slavery he oft must undergo,

Who, though in silken scarf and cassock dressed,
Wears but a gayer livery at best.

When dinner calls, the implement must wait,
With holy words to consecrate the meat,
But hold it for a favour seldom known,
If he be deigned the honour to sit down--
Soon as the tarts appear, Sir Crape, withdraw !
Those dainties are not for a spiritual maw.
Observe your distance, and be sure to stand
Hard by the cistern with your cap in hand;
There for diversion you may pick your teeth,
Till the kind voider1 comes for your relief.
For mere board wages such their freedom sell,
Slaves to an hour, and vassals to a bell;
And if the enjoyment of one day be stole,
They are but prisoners out on parole:
Always the marks of slavery remain,

And they, though loose, still drag about their chain.
And where's the mighty prospect after all,

A chaplainship served up, and seven years' thrall? The menial thing, perhaps, for a reward

Is to some slender benefice preferred,

With this proviso bound: that he must wed
My lady's antiquated waiting-maid

In dressing only skilled, and marmalade.

1 Basket for the scraps of dinner.

}

JOHN DRYDEN.

[BORN in 1631, at Aldwincle All Saints, in the valley of the Nen in Northamptonshire, of Puritan parentage; and educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He appears to have become a Londoner about the middle of the year 1657. At the Restoration he changed into an ardent royalist; and towards the close of 1663 married the daughter of a royalist nobleman, the Earl of Berkshire. In 1670 he was appointed Historiog apher-Royal and Poet-Laureate. After having hitherto been conspicuous as a dramatist and a panegyrical poet, he in 1681, by the publication of the First Part of Absalom and Achitophel, sprang into fame as a writer of satirical verse. In December 1683 he was appointed Collector of Customs in the port of London. His offices were renewed to him on the accession of King James II, but his pension of 100l. was not renewed till rather more than a year later. About the same time Dryden became a Roman Catholic; and in April 1687, he published The Hind and the Panther. Deprived of both offices and pension by the Revolution of 1688, he again for a time wrote for the stage, but after a few years finally abandoned dramatic composition for translation. Some of his greatest lyrics likewise belong to his later years. He died at his house in Gerard Street, Soho, May 1, 1700, and was buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey.]

Dryden has been called the greatest writer of a little age; but it may well be doubted whether he for one would have cared to accept either limb of the antithesis. None of his moral qualities better consorted with his magnificent genius than the real modesty which underlay his buoyant self-assertion. His attitude towards the great literary representative of an age earlier than that to which his own maturity belonged was from first to last one of reverent recognition; and though the lines written by Dryden under Milton's portrait have more sound than point, they should not be forgotten as testifying to the spirit which dictated them. Of Oldham, in both the species of verse to which he owed his reputation infinitely Dryden's inferior, the elder poet wrote that their souls were near allied, and cast in the same poetic mould. To Congreve, his junior by full forty years, he declared that he would

gladly have resigned the laureateship, in which he had been supplanted by a Whig poetaster. On the other hand, whatever aspect the Restoration age, either in politics or in literature, may wear in our eyes, in its own it assumed any semblance rather than that of an age of decline. And indeed, to speak of its literature only, it must be admitted that there are not a few considerations to be urged against the acceptance of such a designation. It is common enough to find the literature of the Restoration age set down as essentially a foreign literature, reproduced and imitated. Yet a survey of Dryden's works alone, both dramatic and non-dramatic, should suffice to shake the foundations of any such criticism. The 'heroic plays'-a species in which Dryden had rivals but no equal-differed from the courtly romances of the Scudéry school as full-bodied Burgundy differs from diluted claret. The so-called Restoration comedy—of the later and more perfect growth of which Dryden's efforts were but the precursors-is both for better and for worse as genuinely national as it is unmistakeably real. It would of course be extremely absurd to deny the great influence in this period of French literature upon our own; but it was an influence of much greater importance for the future of our literature, both prose and verse, as to form than as to matter. Yet though the clearness as well as the pointedness of the Restoration style was partly due to French example, these qualities were something very different from the imported fashions of a season. Dryden may be charged with more than his usual audacity when, in a Prologue of 1672, he spoke of 'our wit' as far excelling 'foreign wit,' after, in an Epilogue of 1670, he had extolled his own times as not only wittier but 'more refined and free' in their use of the native tongue than any preceding age. Yet inasmuch as during two centuries English writers have on the whole followed Dryden and his contemporaries instead of reverting to their predecessors of the Elizabethan and earlier Stuart periods, it would savour of rashness contemptuously to dismiss the claims to literary honours of an age which formed for itself a style of so proved a merit. With the aid of this style it virtually called into life a new species of English poetry-that satirical poetry of which Dryden is not indeed the originator, but in which he was the first as he has in most respects remained the greatest master.

Whatever view be taken of the general features of the age of which Dryden was the chief literary ornament-while Milton's muse, like the blind poet himself, dwelt apart-it is certain that

this age speaks to us from the pages of its most brilliant writer. He was not formed, as a man or as a poet, to live out of his times. Yet neither was he, in character or in genius, one of those who merely give back what they have received, more or less changed in form or intensified in manner. He has been decried as a time

server in politics, as a turncoat in religion, and in literature as the flexible follower of a succession of schools. The reasons for and against these charges cannot be examined here; and there seems something specially unsuitable in treating of Dryden in a tone of apology. At the same time both his life and works, the relations between which are peculiarly intimate, often require to be protected from some of the commentaries with which they have been visited. Many of our poets have been subjected to ungenerous criticism; but none has, so to speak, been hansardised' so mercilessly as Dryden.

He was the descendant of Puritan ancestors on both the father's and the mother's side; his own father-according to an adversary of the poet's-was a Committee-man, and one of his maternal cousins was a peer of Oliver's creation. Nothing could therefore be more natural or becoming than that on the Protector's death, Dryden, then a young man of twenty-seven, should have sung the praises of 'our Prince,' generally selecting for celebration qualities which even Cromwell's angriest enemies would not have denied him to have possessed. That the author of the Heroic Stanzas should with the Restoration have blossomed forth as a royalist implies no tergiversation at all. It should not be forgotten that the Restoration was not a mere party act; and that much had happened between it and the death of Oliver Cromwell. Whatever may have been the hereditary politics of Dridens and Pickerings, John Dryden was a born royalist, and with the Restoration his political changes were at an end. Panegyrical poetry was the fashion of the age, and the exuberant inventiveness and felicitous readiness of Dryden's genius made it easy for him to excel in this kind of composition. To be sure, even the most willing and the most fluent muse must rapidly exhaust such a theme as the virtues of King Charles II; and in his Threnodia Augustalis, written on the King's death, Dryden found little to add to what he had sung in the Astræa Redux, composed in honour of the Restoration,-except that his Majesty died hard. In shorter pieces in honour of the King, the Duchess of York, and Lord Clarendon, Dryden displayed the same talent for waving gorgeous

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