whole extent of its beauty and power. The respect which the translators felt for the origianal prevented them from adding any of the hideous decorations then in fashion. The groundwork of the version, indeed, was of an earlier age. The familiarity with which the Puritans, on almost every occasion, used the scriptural phrases, was no doubt very ridiculous; but it produced good effects. It was a cant; but it drove out a cant far more offensive.

against their will, been forced to flatter-of
which the tragedy of Bayes is a very favour.
able specimen. What Lord Dorset observed
to Edward Howard, might have been address-
ed to almost all his contemporaries :-
"As skilful divers to the bottom fall,

Swifter than those who cannot swim at all; So, in this way of writing without thinking, Thou hast a strange alacrity in sinking." From this reproach some clever men of the world must be expected, and among them The highest kind of poetry is, in a great Dorset himself. Though by no means great measure, independent of those circumstances poets, or even good versifiers, they always which regulate the style of composition in wrote with meaning, and sometimes with wit. prose. But with that inferior species of poe-Nothing indeed more strongly shows to what try which succeeds to it, the case is widely a miserable state literature had fallen, than different. In a few years, the good sense and the immense superiority which the occasional good taste which had weeded out affectation rhymes, carelessly thrown on paper by men from moral and political treatises would, in of this class, possess over the elaborate prothe natural course of things, have effected a ductions of almost all the professed authors. similar reform in the sonnet and the ode. The The reigning taste was so bad, that the success rigour of the victorious sectaries had relaxed. of a writer was in inverse proportion to his A dominant religion is never ascetic. The labour, and to his desire of excellence. An government connived at theatrical representa- exception must be made for Butler, who had as tions. The influence of Shakspeare was once much wit and learning as Cowley, and who more felt. But darker days were approaching. knew, what Cowley never knew, how to use A foreign yoke was to be imposed on our lite-them. A great command of good homely rature. Charles, surrounded by the compa- English distinguishes him still more from the nions of his long exile, returned to govern a other writers of the time. As for Gondibert, nation which ought never to have cast him out, those may criticise it who can read it. Imaor never to have received him back. Every gination was extinct. Taste was depraved. year which he had passed among strangers Poetry, driven from palaces, colleges, and thehad rendered him more unfit to rule his coun-atres, had found an asylum in the obscure trymen. In France he had seen the refractory | dwelling, where a great man, born out of due magistracy humbled, and royal prerogative. season, in disgrace, penury, pain, and blind though exercised by a foreign priest in the ness, still kept uncontaminated a character name of a child, victorious over all opposition. and a genius worthy of a better age. This spectacle naturally gratified a prince to whose family the opposition of parliaments had been so fatal. Politeness was his solitary good quality. The insults which he had suf-duced the greatest of modern epic poems fered in Scotland had taught him to prize it. The effeminacy and apathy of his disposition fitted him to excel in it. The elegance and vivacity of the French manners fascinated him. With the political maxims and the social habits of his favourite people, he adopted their taste in composition; and, when seated on the throne, soon rendered it fashionable, partly by direct patronage, but still more by that contemptible policy which, for a time, made England the last of the nations, and raised Louis the Fourteenth to a height of power and fame, such as no French sovereign had ever before attained.

Every thing about Milton is wonderful; bu nothing is so wonderful as that, in an age so unfavourable to poetry, he should have pro

We are not sure that this is not in some degree to be attributed to his want of sight. The imagination is notoriously most active when the external world is shut out. In sleep its illusions are perfect. They produce all the effect of realities. In darkness its visions are always more distinct than in the light. Every person who amuses himself with what is called. building castles in the air, must have experienced this. We know artists, who, before they attempt to draw a face from memory, close their eyes, that they may recall a more perfect image of the features and the expression. We are therefore inclined to believe, It was to please Charles that rhyme was that the genius of Milton may have been prefirst introduced into our plays. Thus, a rising served from the influence of times so unfablow, which would at any time have been vourable to it, by his infirmity. Be this as it mortal, was dealt to the English drama, then may, his works at first enjoyed a very small just recovering from its languishing condition. share of popularity. To be neglected by his Two detestable manners, the indigenous and contemporaries was the penalty which he paid the imported, were now in a state of alternate for surpassing them. His great poem was Conflict and amalgamation. The bombastic not generally studied or admired, till writers meanness of the new style was blended with the far inferior to him had, by obsequiously cringingenious absurdity of the old; and the mix-ing to the public taste, acquired sufficient fature produced something which the world had vour to reform it. never before seen, and which, we hope, it will never see again-something, by the side of which the worst nonsense of all other ages appears to advantage-something, which those who have attempted to caricature it, have,

Of these Dryden was the most eminent. Amidst the crowd of authors, who, during the earlier years of Charles the Second, courted notoriety by every species of absurdity and affectation, he speedily became conspicuous

No man exercised so much influence on the age. The reason is obvious. On no man did the age exercise so much influence. He was perhaps the greatest of those whom we have designated as the critical poets; and his literary career exhibited, on a reduced scale, the whole history of the school to which he belonged, the rudeness and extravagance of its infancy, the propriety, the grace, the dignified good sense, the temperate splendour of its maturity. His imagination was torpid, till it was awakened by his judgment. He began with quaint parallels and empty mouthing. He gradually acquired the energy of the satirist, the gravity of the moralist, the rapture of the lyric poet. The revolution through which English literature has been passing, from the time of Cowley to that of Scott, may be seen in miniature within the compass of his volumes.

His life divides itself into two parts. There is some debatable ground on the common frontier; but the line may be drawn with tolerable accuracy. The year 1678 is that on which we should be inclined to fix as the date of a great change in his manner. During the preceding period appeared some of his courtly panegyrics-his Annus Mirabilis, and most of his plays; indeed, all his rhyming tragedies. To the subsequent period belong his best dramas-All for Love, The Spanish Friar, and Sebastian-his satires, his translations, his didactic poems, his fables, and his odes.

and his versification were already far
rior to theirs.

The Annus Mirabilis shows great comma
of expression and a fine ear for heroic rhy
Here its merits end. Not only has it no cla
to be called poetry; but it seems to be the w
of a man who could never, by any possibili
write poetry. Its affected similes are the be
part of it. Gaudy weeds present a more e
couraging spectacle than utter barrennes
There is scarcely a single stanza in this lor
work, to which the imagination seems to hav
contributed any thing. It is produced, not b
creation, but by construction. It is made u
not of pictures, but of inferences.
We wi
give a single instance, and certainly a favour
able instance-a quatrain which Johnson ha
praised. Dryden is describing the sea-figh
with the Dutch.

"Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball; And now their odours armed against them fly Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall, And some by aromatic splinters die." The poet should place his readers, as nearly as possible, in the situation of the sufferers or the spectators. His narration ought to produce feelings similar to those which would be excited by the event itself. Is this the case here? Who, in a sea-fight, ever thought of the price of the china which beats out the brains of a sailor; or of the odour of the splinter which shatters his leg? It is not by an act of the imagination, at once calling up the scene beOf the small pieces which were presented fore the interior eye, but by painful meditation to chancellors and princes, it would scarcely-by turning the subject round and round-by be fair to speak. The greatest advantage which the fine arts derive from the extension of knowledge is, that the patronage of individuals becomes 'unnecessary. Some writers still affect to regret the age of patronage. None but bad writers have reason to regret it. It is always an age of general ignorance. Where ten thousand readers are eager for the appearance of a book, a small contribution from each makes up a splendid remuneration for the author. Where literature is a luxury, confined to few, each of them must pay high. If the Empress Catherine, for example, wanted an epic poem, she must have wholly supported the poet-just as, in a remote country village, a man who wants a mutton-chop is sometimes forced to take the whole sheep ;-a thing which never happens where the demand is large. But men who pay largely for the gratification of their taste, will expect to have it united with some gratification to their vanity. Flattery is carried to a shameless extent; and the habit of flattery almost inevitably introduces a false taste into composition. Its language is made up of hyperbolical commonplacesoffensive from their triteness-and still more offensive from their extravagance. In no school is the trick of overstepping the modesty of nature so speedily acquired. The writer, accustomed to find exaggeration acceptable and necessary on one subject, uses it on all. It is not strange, therefore, that the early panegyrical verses of Dryden should be made up of meanness and bombast. They abound with the conceits which his immediate predecessors bad brought into fashion. But his language

tracing out facts into remote consequences,
that these incongruous topics are introduced
into the description. Homer, it is true, per-
petually uses epithets which are not peculiarly
appropriate. Achilles is the swift-footed, when
he is sitting still. Ulysses is the much-endur-
ing, when he has nothing to endure. Every
spear casts a long shadow; every ox has
crooked horns; and every woman a high bosom,
though these particulars may be quite beside
the purpose. In our old ballads a similar
practice prevails. The gold is always red, and
the ladies always gay, though nothing whatever
may depend on the hue of gold, or the temper
of the ladies. But these adjectives are mere
customary additions. They merge in the sub-
stantives to which they are attached. If they
at all colour the idea, it is with a tinge so slight
as in no respect to alter the general effect. In
the passage which we have quoted from Dry-
den, the case is very different. Preciously and
aromatic divert our whole attention to them-
selves, and dissolve the image of the battle in
a moment. The whole poem reminds us of
Lucan, and of the worst parts of Lucan, the
sea-fight in the bay of Marseilles, for example.
The description of the two fleets during the
night is perhaps the only passage which ought
to be exempted from this censure. If it was
from the Annus Mirabilis that Milton formed
his opinion, when he pronounced Dryden a
good rhymer, but no poet, he certainly judged
correctly. But Dryden was, as we have said,
one of those writers, in whom the period of
imagination does not precede, but follow, the
period of observation and reflection.

E

aters

D

We will give a few instances:-In Aurengzebe, Arimant, governor of Agra, falls in love with his prisoner Indamora. She rejects his suit with scorn; but assures him that she shall make great use of her power over him. He threatens to be angry. She answers, very coolly:

His plays, his rhyming plays in particular, rested emotion-a loyalty extending to passive are admirable subjects for those who wish to obedience-a religion like that of the Quietists, Andy the morbid anatomy of the drama. He unsupported by any sanction of hope or fear. as utterly destitute of the power of exhibiting We see nothing but despotism without power, real human beings. Even in the far inferior and sacrifices without compensation. aleat of composing characters out of those elements into which the imperfect process of our breason can resolve them, he was very deficient. Hs 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 up, ota likeness, but a strong caricature, in which a single peculiarity is protruded, and every eving else neglected; like the Marquis of Granby at an inndoor, whom we know by nothing but his baldness; or Wilkes, who is Wilkes only his squint. These are the best specimens of his skill. For most of his pictures seem, ke Turkey carpets, to have been expressly designed not to resemble any thing in the heaabove, in the earth beneath, or in the wa

not

dem

es under the earth.

"Do not your anger, like your love, is vain:
Whene'er I please, you must be pleased again.
Knowing what power I have your will to bend,
I'll use it; for I need just such a friend."

This is no idle menace. She soon brings a
letter, addressed to his rival, orders him to read
it, asks him whether he thinks it sufficiently
tender, and finally commands him to carry it
himself. Such tyranny as this, it may be
does indeed venture to remonstrate :
thought, would justify resistance.

"This fatal paper rather let me tear,

Arimant

The latter manner he practises most fre-
quently in his tragedies, the former in his
medies. The comic characters are, without
mirture, loathsome and despicable. The men
Etherege and Vanbrugh are bad enough.
Those of Smollet are perhaps worse. But they
o not approach to the Celadons, the Wild-
loods, the Woodalls, and the Rhodophils of
Dryden. The vices of these last are set off by
certain fierce, hard impudence, to which we
how nothing comparable. Their love is the
petite of beasts; their friendship the con-
racy of knaves. The ladies seem to have
expressly created to form helps meet for
th gentlemen. In deceiving and insulting
eir old fathers, they do not perhaps exceed
license which, by immemorial prescription,
been allowed to heroines. But they also
eat at cards, rob strong boxes, put up their
rears to auction, betray their friends, abuse
eir rivals in a style of Billingsgate, and invite
eir lovers in the language of the Piazza,
These, it must be remembered, are not the
lets and waiting-women, the Mascarilles and
rines, but the recognised heroes and hero-
who appear as the representatives of good
cety, and who, at the end of the fifth act,
y and live very happily ever after. The
ality, baseness, and malice of their na-
are unredeemed by any quality of a differ-
description, by any touch of kindness, or
by an honest burst of hearty hatred and
ge. We are in a world where there is That these passages violate all historical
manity, no veracity, no sense of shame propriety; that sentiments, to which nothing
world for which any good-natured man similar was ever even affected except by the
gladly take in exchange the society of cavaliers of Europe, are transferred to Mexico
's devils. But as soon as we enter the and Agra, is a light accusation. We have no
of Tragedy, we find a great change. objection to a conventional world, an Illyrian
There
is no lack of the fine sentiment there. puritan, or a Bohemian seaport. While the
Mestasio is surpassed in his own department. faces are good, we care little about the back-
Sederi is out-scuderied. We are introduced ground. Sir Joshua Reynolds says, that the
to people whose proceedings we can trace to curtains and hangings in an historical painting
motive-of whose feelings we can form no ought to be, not velvet or cotton, but merely
ore idea than of a sixth sense. We have drapery. The same principle should be ap
eft a race of creatures, whose love is as deli-plied to poetry and romance. The truth of
tate and affectionate as the passion which an character is the first object; the truth of place
erman feels for a turtle. We find ourselves and time is to be considered only in the second
mong beings, whose love is purely disinte- place. Puff himself could tell the actor to turn

Than, like Bellerophon, my sentence bear."
The answer of the lady is incomparable:

"You may; but 'twill not be your best advice;
"Twill only give me pains of writing twice.
You know you must obey me, soon or late.
Why should you vainly struggle with your fate 1"

Poor Arimant seems to be of the same opinion. He mutters something about fate and freewill, and walks off with the billet-doux.

In the Indian Emperor, Montezuma presents Almeria with a garland as a token of his love, and offers to make her his queen. She replies: "I take this garland, not as given by you; But as my merit's and my beauty's due As for the crown which you, my slave, possess, To share it with you would but make me less.'

In return for such proofs of tenderness as these, her admirer consents to murder his two sons, and a benefactor, to whom he feels the warmest gratitude. Lyndaraxa, in the Conquest of Granada, assumes the same lofty tone He complains that she

and thear

the it

the

ought

with Abdelmelech.
smiles upon his rival.

"Lynd.
Abdel.
Lynd.

And when did I my power so far resign,
That you should regulate each look of mine
Then, when you gave your love, you gave that
power.

'Twas during pleasure-'tis revoked this hour. Abdel. I'll hate you, and this visit is my last. Lynd. Do, if you can: you know I hold you fast."

out his toes, and remind him that Keeper Hat- |considered as his best, are in blank verse. 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 the rhyming tragedies contains good descr tion and magnificent rhetoric. But, even wh we forget that they are plays, and, passing their dramatic improprieties, consider th with reference to the language, we are per tually disgusted by passages which it is d cult to conceive how any author could ha written, or any audience have tolerated; ra in which the raving violence of the man forms a strange contrast with the abject tan

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 wh rage, their generosity, their pride, are on the fault on the audience, and declared, that wh same colossal scale. Justice and prudence he wrote them, he considered them bad enou are virtues which can exist only in a moderate to please. This defence is unworthy of a m degree, and which change their nature and of genius, and, after all, is no defence. their name if pushed to excess. Of justice and way pleased without rant; and so might D prudence, therefore, Dryden leaves his favour- den have done, if he had possessed the powe ites destitute. He did not care to give them of Otway. The fact is, that he had a tenden what he could not give without measure. The to bombast, which, though subsequently c tyrants and ruffians are merely the heroes al-rected by time and thought, was never who tered by a few touches, similar to those which removed, and which showed itself in perfor transformed the honest face of Sir Roger de ances not designed to please the rude mob Coverley into the Saracen's head. Through the theatre. the grin and frown, the original features are still perceptible.

It is in the tragicomedies that these absurdities strike us most. The two races of men, or rather the angels and the baboons, are there presented to us together. We meet in one scene with nothing but gross, selfish, unblushing, lying libertines of both sexes, who, as a punishment, we suppose, for their depravity, are condemned to talk nothing but prose. But as soon as we meet with people who speak in | verse, we know that we are in society which would have enraptured the Cathos and Madelon of Molière, in society for which Oroondates would have too little of the lover, Clelia too much of the coquette.

Some indulgent critics have represented th failing as an indication of genius, as the pr fusion of unlimited wealth, the wantonness exuberant vigour. To us it seems to bear nearer affinity to the tawdriness of poverty, the spasms and convulsions of weakness. Dr den surely had not more imagination tha Homer, Dante, or Milton, who never fall in this vice. The swelling diction of Eschyl and Isaiah resembles that of Almanzor ar Maximin no more than the tumidity of a mu cle resembles the tumidity of a boil. TH former is symptomatic of health and strengt the latter of debility and disease. If ev Shakspeare rants, it is not when his imagin tion is hurrying him along, but when he is hu rying his imagination along-when his min is for a moment jaded-when, as was said o Euripides, he resembles a lion, who excite his own fury by lashing himself with his ta What happened to Shakspeare from the occ sional suspension of his powers, happened Dryden from constant impotence. He, lik his confederate Lee, had judgment enough appreciate the great poets of the precedin age, but not judgment enough to shun comp tition with them. He felt and admired the

As Dryden was unable to render his plays interesting by means of that which is the peculiar and appropriate excellence of the drama, it was necessary that he should find some substitute for it. In his comedies he supplied its place, sometimes by wit, but more frequently by intrigue, by disguises, mistakes of persons, dialogues at cross purposes, hairbreadth escapes, perplexing concealments, and surprising disclosures. He thus succeeded at least in making these pieces very amusing. In his tragedies he trusted, and not alto-wild and daring sublimity. That it belonge gether 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 it is. worthy of observation, that though Dryden 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

to another age than that in which he йved, an required other talents than those which h possessed; that, in aspiring to emulate it, h was wasting, in a hopeless attempt, power which might render him pre-eminent in a di ferent career, was a lesson which he did no learn till late. As those knavish enthusiasts the French prophets, courted inspiration, b mimicking the writhings, swoonings, and gas ings, which they considered as its symptoms he attempted, by affected fits of poetical fury to bring on a real paroxysm; and, like them he got nothing but his distortions for his pains

Horace very happily compares those who in his time, imitated Pindar, to the youth wh attempted to fly to heaven on waxen wings and who experienced so fatal and ignominiou:

"Shakspeare's magic could not copied be; Within the circle none durst walk but he."

a fall. His own admirable good sense pre- | flowers with the bee; or the little bower-women served him from this error, and taught him to of Titania, driving the spiders from the couch cultivate a style in which excellence was of the Queen! Dryden truly said, that within his reach. Dryden had not the same self-knowledge. He saw that the greatest poets were never so successful as when they rashed 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.

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 know that he was secure in the privileges of a superhuman nature. The attitude of Faust, on the contrary, is the perfection of horsemanship. Poets of the first order might safely write as desperately as Mephistopheles rode. 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.

It would have been well if he had not himself
dared to step within the enchanted line, and
drawn on himself a fate similar to that which,
according to the old superstition, punished
such presumptuous interferences. The follow-
ing lines are parts of the song of his fairies:
"Merry, merry, merry, we sail from the East,
Half-tippled at a rainbow feast.

In the bright moonshine, while winds whistle loud,
Tivy, tivy, tivy, we mount and we fly,
All racking along in a downy white cloud;
And lest our leap from the sky prove too far,
We slide on the back of a new falling star,
And drop from above

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.

If Dryden had died before the expiration of the first of the periods into which we have divided his literary life, he would have left a reputation, at best, little higher than that of Lee or Davenant. He would have been known only to men of letters; and by them he would have 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 What daring expressions! Yet how signi- and there passages occur worthy of the best feant! How picturesque! Hector seems to rise up in his strength and fury. The gloom drama requires changes with every change of ages of the British stage. The style which the of night in his frown-the fire burning in his character and situation. He who can vary his eyes-the javelins and the blazing armour-manner to suit the variation is the great dramathe mighty rush through the gates and down tist; but he who excels in one manner only, the battlements--the trampling and the infinite will, when that manner happens to be approrear of the multitude-every thing is with us; priate, appear to be a great dramatist; as the every thing is real. hands of a watch, which does not go, point right once in the twelve hours. Sometimes

ο δ' αρ' εσθορε φαίδιμος Έκτωρ,
Νυκτι νοη αταλαντος υπωπια λαμπε δε χαλκω
Σμερδαλεω, τον εεστο περι χροι· δοια δε χερσιν
Δουρ' έχεν ουκ αν τις μιν ερυκακοι αντιβολήσας,
Νόσφι θεων, οτ' εσαλτο πυλας" πυρι δ' οσσε δεδηει
Αντίκα δ' οι μεν τειχος υπερβασαν, οι δε κατ' αυτας
Ποιητάς εσέχυντο πυλας. Δαναοι δ' εφοβηθεν
Ντας ανα γλαφυρας" ομάδος δ' αλιαστος ετύχθη.

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:

"There with a forest of their darts he strove, And stood like Capaneus defying Jove; With his broad sword the boldest beating down, Till Fate grew pale, lest he should win the town, And turned the iron leaves of its dark book To make new dooms, or mend what it mistook." How exquisite is the imagery of the fairysongs in the Tempest and the Midsummer Night's Dream; Ariel riding through the twilight on the bat, or sucking in the bells of

rhetorician may write as well as the greatest tragedian that ever lived. We confess that to us the speech of Sempronius in Cato seems very nearly as good as Shakspeare could have made it. But when the senate breaks up, and we find that the lovers and their mistresses, the hero, the villain, and the deputy-villain, all continue to harangue in the same style, we perceive the difference between a man who can write a play and a man who car