out his toes, and remind him that Keeper Hat-considered as his best, are in blank verse. No ton was a great dancer. We wish that, in our experiment can be more decisive. own time, a writer of a very different order from Puff had not too often forgotten human nature in the niceties of upholstery, millinery, and cookery. It must be allowed, that the worst even of the rhyming tragedies contains good description and magnificent rhetoric. But, even when we forget that they are plays, and, passing by their dramatic improprieties, consider them with reference to the language, we are perpetually disgusted by passages which it is diffi cult to conceive how any author could have written, or any audience have tolerated; rants in which the raving violence of the manner forms a strange contrast with the abject tame We blame Dryden, not because the persons of his dramas are not Moors or Americans, but because they are not men and women; not because love, such as he represents it, could not exist in a harem or in a wigwam, but because it could not exist anywhere. As is the love of his heroes, such are all their other emotions. All their qualities, their cou-ness of the thought. The author laid the whole rage, their generosity, their pride, are on the fault on the audience, and declared, that when same colossal scale. Justice and prudence he wrote them, he considered them bad enough are virtues which can exist only in a moderate to please. This defence is unworthy of a man degree, and which change their nature and of genius, and, after all, is no defence. Ottheir name if pushed to excess. Of justice and way pleased without rant; and so might Dryprudence, therefore, Dryden leaves his favour- den have done, if he had possessed the powers ites destitute. He did not care to give them of Otway. The fact is, that he had a tendency what he could not give without measure. The to bombast, which, though subsequently cortyrants and ruffians are merely the heroes al-rected by time and thought, was never wholly tered by a few touches, similar to those which removed, and which showed itself in performtransformed the honest face of Sir Roger de ances not designed to please the rude mob of Coverley into the Saracen's head. Through the theatre. the grin and frown, the original features are still perceptible. Some indulgent critics have represented this failing as an indication of genius, as the proIt is in the tragicomedies that these absurdi- fusion of unlimited wealth, the wantonness of ties strike us most. The two races of men, or exuberant vigour. To us it seems to bear a rather the angels and the baboons, are there nearer affinity to the tawdriness of poverty, or presented to us together. We meet in one the spasms and convulsions of weakness. Dryscene with nothing but gross, selfish, unblush-den surely had not more imagination than ing, lying libertines of both sexes, who, as a Homer, Dante, or Milton, who never fall into punishment, we suppose, for their depravity, this vice. The swelling diction of Eschylus are condemned to talk nothing but prose. But and Isaiah resembles that of Almanzor and as soon as we meet with people who speak in Maximin no more than the tumidity of a musverse, we know that we are in society which cle resembles the tumidity of a boil. The would have enraptured the Cathos and Made- former is symptomatic of health and strength, lon of Molière, in society for which Oroon- the latter of debility and disease. If ever dates would have too little of the lover, Clelia Shakspeare rants, it is not when his imaginatoo much of the coquette. tion is hurrying him along, but when he is hurAs Dryden was unable to render his plays rying his imagination along-when his mind interesting by means of that which is the pecu- is for a moment jaded-when, as was said of liar and appropriate excellence of the drama, Euripides, he resembles a lion, who excites it was necessary that he should find some his own fury by lashing himself with his tail. substitute for it. In his comedies he supplied What happened to Shakspeare from the occaits place, sometimes by wit, but more fre- sional suspension of his powers, happened to quently by intrigue, by disguises, mistakes of Dryden from constant impotence. He, like persons, dialogues at cross purposes, hair-his confederate Lee, had judgment enough to breadth escapes, perplexing concealments, and rurprising disclosures. He thus succeeded at least in making these pieces very amusing. In his tragedies he trusted, and not altogether without reason, to his diction and his versification. It was on this account, in all probability, that he so eagerly adopted, and so reluctantly abandoned, the practice of rhyming in his plays. What is unnatural appears less unnatural in that species of verse, than in lines which approach more nearly to common conversation; and in the management of the heroic couplet, Dryden has never been equalled. It is unnecessary to urge any arguments against a fashion now universally condemned. But appreciate the great poets of the preceding age, but not judgment enough to shun competition with them. He felt and admired their wild and daring sublimity. That it belonged to another age than that in which he ñved, and required other talents than those which he possessed; that, in aspiring to emulate it, he was wasting, in a hopeless attempt, powers which might render him pre-eminent in a different career, was a lesson which he did not learn till late. As those knavish enthusiasts, the French prophets, courted inspiration, by mimicking the writhings, swoonings, and gaspings, which they considered as its symptons, he attempted, by affected poetical fury, it is worthy of observation, that though Dry- to bring on a real par and, like them, den was deficient in that talent which blank verse exhibits to the greatest advantage, and was certainly the best writer of heroic rhyme in our language, yet the plays which have, from the time of their first appearance, been he got nothing but his distortions for his pains. Horace very happily compares those who, in his time, imitated Pindar, to the youth who attempted to fly to heaven on waxen wings, and who experienced so fatal and ignominiou? a fall. His own admirable good sense preserved him from this error, and taught him to cultivate a style in which excellence was within his reach. Dryden had not the same self-knowledge. He saw that the greatest poets were never so successful as when they rushed beyond the ordinary bounds, and that some inexplicable good fortune preserved them from tripping even when they staggered on the brink of nonsense. He did not perceive that they were guided and sustained by a power denied to himself. They wrote from the dictation of the imagination, and they found a response in the imaginations of others. He, on the contrary, sat down to work himself, by reflection and argument, into a deliberate wildness, a rational frenzy. flowers with the bee; or the little bower-women "Shakspeare's magic could not copied be; It would have been well if he had not himself Half-tippled at a rainbow feast. In the bright moonshine, while winds whistle loud, In a jelly of love." These are very favourable instances. Those who wish for a bad one may read the dying speeches of Maximin, and may compare them with the last scenes of Othello and Lear. In looking over the admirable designs which accompany the Faust, we have always been much struck by one which represents the wizard and the tempter riding at full speed. The demon sits on his furious horse as heedlessly as if he were reposing on a chair. That he should keep his saddle in such a posture, would seem impossible to any who did not If Dryden had died before the expiration of know that he was secure in the privileges of the first of the periods into which we have dia superhuman nature. The attitude of Faust, vided his literary life, he would have left a reon the contrary, is the perfection of horseman-putation, at best, little higher than that of Lee ship. Poets of the first order might safely or Davenant. He would have been known only write as desperately as Mephistopheles rode. to men of letters; and by them he would have But Dryden, though admitted to communion with higher spirits, though armed with a portion of their power, and intrusted with some of their secrets, was of another race. What they might securely venture to do, it was madness in him to attempt. It was necessary that taste and critical science should supply its deficiencies. We will give a few examples. Nothing can be finer than the description of Hector at the Grecian wall. ο δ' αρ' εσθορε φαίδιμος Έκτωρ, What daring expressions! Yet how significant! How picturesque! Hector seems to rise up in his strength and fury. The gloom of night in his frown-the fire burning in his eyes-the javelins and the blazing armourthe mighty rush through the gates and down the battlements-the trampling and the infinite roar of the multitude-every thing is with us; every thing is real. been mentioned as a writer who threw away, on subjects which he was incompetent to treat, powers which, judiciously employed, might have raised him to eminence; whose diction and whose numbers had sometimes very high merit, but all whose works were blemished by a false taste and by errors of gross negligence. A few of his prologues and epilogues might perhaps still have been remembered and quoted. In these little pieces, he early showed all the powers which afterwards rendered him the greatest of modern satirists. But during the latter part of his life, he gradually abandoned the drama. His plays appeared at longer intervals. He renounced rhyme in tragedy. His language became less turgid, his characters less exaggerated. He did not indeed produce correct representations of human nature; but he ceased to daub such monstrous chimeras as those which abound in his earlier pieces. Here and there passages occur worthy of the best ages of the British stage. The style which the drama requires changes with every change of character and situation. He who can vary his manner to suit the variation is the great dramatist; but he who excels in one manner only, will, when that manner happens to be appropriate, appear to be a great dramatist; as the hands of a watch, which does not go, point right once in the twelve hours. Sometimes Dryden has described a very similar event in Maximin; and has done his best to be sub-there is a scene of solemn debate. This a mere lime, as follows: rhetorician may write as well as the greatest "There with a forest of their darts he strove, tragedian that ever lived. We confess that to And stood like Capaneus defying Jove; us the speech of Sempronius in Cato seems With his broad sword the boldest beating down, Till Fate grew pale, lest he should win the town, very nearly as good as Shakspeare could have And turned the iron leaves of its dark book made it. But when the senate breaks up, and To make new dooms, or mend what it mistook." we find that the lovers and their mistresses, the How exquisite is the imagery of the fairy-hero, the villain, and the deputy villain, all songs in the Tempest and the Midsummer continue to harangue in the same style, Night's Dream; Ariel riding through the twi- we perceive the difference between a man light on the bat, or sucking in the bells of who can write a play and a man who can write a speech. In the same manner, wit, a fell into natural and pleasing verse. In this talent for description, or a talent for narration, department, he succeeded as completely as his may, for a time, pass for dramatic genius. contemporary Gibbons succeeded in the similar Dryden was an incomparable reasoner in verse. enterprise of carving the most delicate flowers He was conscious of his power; he was proud from heart of oak. The toughest and most of it; and the authors of the Rehearsal justly knotty parts of language became ductile at his charged him with abusing it. His warriors and touch. His versification in the same manner, princesses are fond of discussing points of while it gave the first model of that neatness amorous casuistry, such as would have de- and precision which the following generation lighted a Parliament of Love. They frequently esteemed so highly, exhibited, at the same go still deeper, and speculate on philosophical time, the last examples of nobleness, freedom, necessity and the origin of evil. variety of pause and cadence. His tragedies in rhyme, however worthless in themselves, had at least served the purpose of nonsenseverses: they had taught him all the arts of me lody which the heroic couplet admits. For bombast, his prevailing vice, his new subjects gave little opportunity; his better taste gradually discarded it. There were, however, some occasions which absolutely required this peculiar talent. Then Dryden was indeed at home. All his best scenes are of this description. They are all between men; for the heroes of Dryden, like many other gentlemen, can never talk sense when ladies are in company. They are all intended to exhibit the empire of reason over violent passion. We have two interlocutors, the one eager and impassioned, the other high, cool, and judicious. The composed and rational character gradually acquires the ascendency. His fierce companion is first inflamed to rage by his reproaches, then overawed by his equanimity, convinced by his arguments, and soothed by his persuasions. This is the case in the scene between Hector and Troilus, in that between Antony and Ventidius, and in that between Sebastian and Dorax. Nothing of the same kind in Shakspeare is equal to them, except the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, which is worth them all three. Some years before his death, Dryden altogether ceased to write for the stage. He had turned his powers in a new direction, with success the most splendid and decisive. His taste had gradually awakened his creative faculties. The first rank in poetry was beyond his reach, but he challenged and secured the most honourable place in the second. His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar. When he attempted the highest flights, he became ridiculous; but while he remained in a lower region, he outstripped all competitors. He possessed, as we have said, in a preeminent degree, the power of reasoning in verse; and this power was now peculiarly useful to him. His logic is by no means uniformly sound. On points of criticism, he always reasons ingeniously; and, when he is disposed to be honest, correctly. But the theological and political questions, which he undertook to treat in verse, were precisely those which he understood least. His arguments, therefore, are often worthless. But the manner in which they are stated is beyond all praise. The style is transparent. The topics follow each other in the happiest order. The objections are drawn up in such a manner, that the whole fire of the reply may be brought to bear on them. The circumlocutions which are substituted for technical phrases, are clear, neat, and exact. The illustrations at once adorn and elucidate the reasoning. The sparkling epigrams of Cowley, and the simple garrulity of the burlesque poets of Italy, are alternately employed, in the happiest manner, to give effect to what is obvious; or clearness to what is obscure. His literary creed was catholic, even to latitudinarianism; not from any want of acuteness, but from a disposition to be easily satisAll his natural and all his acquired powers fied. He was quick to discern the smallest fitted him to found a good critical school of glimpse of merit; he was indulgent even to poetry. Indeed, he carried his reforms too far gross improprieties, when accompanied by any for his age. After his death, our literature re- redeeming talent. When he said a severe trograded; and a century was necessary to bring thing, it was to serve a temporary purpose, it back to the point at which he left it. The to support an argument, or to tease a rival. general soundness and healthfulness of his Never was so able a critic so free from fastidimental constitution; his information, of vast ousness. He loved the old poets, especially superficies, though of small volume; his wit, Shakspeare. He admired the ingenuity which scarcely inferior to that of the most distinguish- Donne and Cowley had so wildly abused. He ed followers of Donne; his eloquence, grave, did justice, amidst the general silence, to the deliberate, and commanding, could not save memory of Milton. He praised to the skies him from disgraceful failure as a rival of the schoolboy lines of Addison. Always lookShakspeare, but raised him far above the leveling on the fair side of every object, he admired of Boileau. His command of language was immense. With him died the secret of the old poetical diction of England-the art of producing rich effects by familiar words. In the following century, it was as completely lost as the Gothic method of painting glass, and was bat poorly supplied by the laborious and tesselated imitations of Mason and Gray. On the other hand, he was the first writer under whose skilful management the scientific vocabulary extravagance on account of the invention which he supposed it to indicate; he excused affectation in favour of wit; he tolerated even tameness for the sake of the correctness which was its concomitant. It was probably to this turn of mind, rather than to the more disgraceful causes which Johnson has assigned, that we are to attribute the exaggeration which disfigures the panegyrics of Dryden. No writer, it must be ch owned, has carried the fiattery of dedication to his writings exhibit the sluggish magnificence Such are the beauties and the faults which may be found in profusion throughout the later works of Dryden. A more just and complete estimate of his natural and acquired powers, of the merits of his style and of its blemishes, may be formed from the Hind and Panther, than from any of his other writings. As a didactic poem, it is far superior to the Religio Laici. The satirical parts, particularly the character of Burnet, are scarcely inferior to the best passages in Absalom and Achitophel. There are, moreover, occasional touches of a tenderness which affects us more, because it is decent, rational, and manly, and reminds us of the best scenes in his tragedies. His versification sinks and swells in happy unison with the subject; and his wealth of language seems to be unlimited. Yet the carelessness with which he has constructed his plot, and the innumerable inconsistencies into which he is every moment falling, detract much from the pleasure which such varied excellence affords. In Absalom and Achitophel he hit upon a new and rich vein, which he worked with signal success. The ancient satirists were the subjects of a despotic government. They were compelled to abstain from political topics, and to confine their attention to the frailties of private life. They might, indeed, sometimes venture to take liberties with public men, This is an amiable temper; but it is not the temper of great men. Where there is elevation of character, there will be fastidiousness. It is only in novels, and on tombstones, that we meet with people who are indulgent to the faults of others, and unmerciful to their own; and Dryden, at all events, was not one of these paragons. His charity was extended most liberally to others, but it certainly began at home. In taste he was by no means deficient. His critical works are, beyond all comparison, superior to any which had, till then, appeared in England. They were generally intended as apologies for his own poems, rather than as expositions of general principles; he, therefore, often attempts to deceive the "Quorum Flaminia tegitur cinis atque Latina." reader by sophistry, which could scarcely have deceived himself. His dicta are the dicta, not Thus Juvenal immortalized the obsequious of a judge, but of an advocate; often of an senators, who met to decide the fate of the advocate in an unsound cause. Yet, in the memorable turbot. His fourth satire frequently very act of misrepresenting the laws of com- reminds us of the great political poem of Dryposition, he shows how well he understands den; but it was not written till Domitian had them. But he was perpetually acting against fallen, and it wants something of the peculiar his better knowledge. His sins were sins against flavour which belongs to contemporary invec light. He trusted, that what was bad would tive alone. His anger has stood so long, that, be pardoned for the sake of what was good. though the body is not impaired, the effervesWhat was goal, he took no pains to make bet-cence, the first cream, is gone. Boileau lay ter. He was not, like most persons who rise to eminence, dissatisfied even with his best productions. He had set up no unattainable standard of perfection, the contemplation of which might at once improve and mortify him. His path was not attended by an unapproachable mirage of excellence, forever receding and forever pursued. He was not disgusted by the negligence of others, and he extended the same toleration to himself. His mind was of a slovenly character-fond of splendour, but indifferent to neatness. Hence most of VOLL 7 under similar restraints; and, if he had been free from all restraint, would have been no match for our countryman. The advantages which Dryden derived from the nature of his subject he improved to the very utmost. His manner is almost perfect. The style of Horace and Boileau is fit only for light subjects. The Frenchman did indeed attempt to turn the theological reasonings of the Provincial Letters into verse, but with very indifferent success. The glitter of Pope is cold. The ardour of Persius is without E rather resembled our Kents and Browns, who, imitating the great features of landscape without emulating them, consulting the genius of the place, assisting nature and carefully disguising their art, produced, not a Chamouni nor a Niagara, but a Stowe or a Hagley. We are, on the whole, inclined to regret that brilliancy. Magnificent versification and in- | parterres and the rectangular walks. He genious combinations rarely harmonize with the expression of deep feeling. In Juvenal and Dryden alone we have the sparkle and the heat together. Those great satirists succeeded in communicating the fervour of their feelings to materials the most incombustible, and kindled the whole mass into a blaze at once dazzling and destructive. We cannot, indeed, think, without regret, of the part which so emi-Dryden did not accomplish his purpose of nent a writer as Dryden took in the disputes writing an epic poem. It certainly would not of that period. There was, no doubt, madness have been a work of the highest rank. It and wickedness on both sides. But there was would not have rivalled the Iliad, the Odyssey, liberty on the one, and despotism on the other. or the Paradise Lost; but it would have been On this point, however, we will not dwell. At superior to the productions of Apollonius, Talavera the English and French troops for a Lucan, or Statius, and not inferior to the Jerumoment suspended their conflict, to drink of a salem Delivered. It would probably have been stream which flowed between them. The a vigorous narrative, animated with something shells were passed across from enemy to ene- of the spirit of the old romances, enriched with my without apprehension or molestation. We, much splendid description, and interspersed in the same manner, would rather assist our with fine declamations and disquisitions. The political adversaries to drink with us of that danger of Dryden would have been from ainfountain of intellectual pleasure which should ing too high; from dwelling too much, for exbe the common refreshment of both parties, ample, on his angels of kingdoms, and attemptthan disturb and pollute it with the havoc of ing a competition with that great writer, who unseasonable hostilities. in his own time had so incomparably succeeded in representing to us the sights and sounds of another world. To Milton, and to Milton alone, belonged the secrets of the great deep, the beach of sulphur, the ocean of fire; the palaces of the fallen dominations, glimmer. ing through the everlasting shade, the silent wilderness of verdure and fragrance where armed angels kept watch over the sleep of the first lovers, the portico of diamond, the sea of jasper, the sapphire pavement empurpled with celestial roses, and the infinite ranks of the Cherubim, blazing with adamant and gold. The council, the tournament, the procession, the crowded cathedral, the camp, the guardroom, the chase, were the proper scenes for Dryden. Macflecnoe is inferior to Absalom and Achitophel, only in the subject. In the execution it is even superior. But the greatest work of Dryden was the last, the Ode on Saint Cecilia's day. It is the masterpiece of the second class of poetry, and ranks but just below the great models of the first. It reminds us of the Pedasus of Achilles, ος, και θνητος εων, επεθ' ιπποις αθανάτοισι. By comparing it with the impotent ravings of the heroic tragedies, we may measure the progress which the mind of Dryden had made. He had learned to avoid a too audacious competition with higher natures, to keep at a distance from the verge of bombast or nonsense, to venture on no expression which did not convey a distinct idea to his own mind. There is none of that "darkness visible" of style which he had formerly affected, and in which the greatest poets only can succeed. Every thing is definite, significant, and picturesque. His early writings resembled the gigantic works of those Chinese gardeners who attempt to rival nature herself, to form cataracts of terrific height and sound, to raise precipitous ridges of mountains, and to imitate in artificial plantations the vastness and the gloom of some primeval forest. This manner he abandoned; nor did he ever adopt the Dutch taste which Pope affected, the trim But we have not space to pass in review all the works which Dryden wrote. We, therefore, will not speculate longer on those which he might possibly have written. He may, on the whole, be pronounced to have been a man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who, in that department, succeeded pre-eminently; and who, with a more independent spirit, a more anxious desire of excellence, and more respect for himself, would, in his own walk, have attained to absolute per fection |