While Dryden was engaged with his great translation, he found two months' leisure to execute a prose version of Fresnoy's "Art of Painting," to which he added an ingenious Preface, the work of twelve mornings, containing a parallel between that art and poetry; of which Mason has said, that though too superficial to stand the test of strict criticism, yet it will always give pleasure to readers of taste, even when it fails to convince their judgment. This version appeared in 1695. Mr. Malone conjectures that our author was engaged in this task by his friends Closterman, and Sir Godfrey Kneller, artists, who had been active in procuring subscriptions for his Virgil. He also wrote a "Life of Lucian," for a translation of his works, by Mr. Walter Moyle, Sir Henry Shere, and other gentlemen of pretension to learning. This version, although it did not appear till after his death, and although he executed no part of the translation, still retains the title of "Dryden's Lucian."

There was one event of political importance which occurred in December 1695, and which the public seem to have expected should have employed the pen of Dryden;—this was the death of Mary, wife of William the Third. It is difficult to conceive in what manner the poet laureate of the unfortunate James could have treated the memory of his daughter. Satire was dangerous, and had indeed been renounced by the poet; and panegyric was contrary to the principles for which he was suffering. Yet, among the swarm of rhymers who thrust themselves upon the nation on that mournful occasion, there are few who do not call, with friendly or unfriendly voice, upon our poet to break silence.[23] But the voice of praise and censure was heard in vain, and Dryden's only interference was, in character of the first judge of his time, to award the prize to the Duke of Devonshire, as author of the best poem composed on occasion of the Queen's death.[24]

Virgil was hardly finished, when our author distinguished himself by the immortal Ode to Saint Cecilia, commonly called "Alexander's Feast." There is some difference of evidence concerning the time occupied in this splendid task. He had been solicited to undertake it by the stewards of the Musical Meeting, which had for several years met to celebrate the feast of St. Cecilia, their patroness, and whom he had formerly gratified by a similar performance. In September 1697, Dryden writes to his son:—"In the meantime, I am writing a song for St. Cecilia's feast; who, you know, is the patroness of music. This is troublesome, and no way beneficial; but I could not deny the stewards, who came in a body to my house to desire that kindness, one of them being Mr. Bridgeman, whose parents are your mother's friends." This account seems to imply, that the Ode was a work of some time; which is countenanced by Dr. Birch's expression, that Dryden himself "observes, in an original letter of his, that he was employed for almost a fortnight in composing and correcting it."[25] On the other hand, the following anecdote is told upon very respectable authority. "Mr. St. John, afterwards Lord Bolingbroke, happening to pay a morning visit to Dryden, whom he always respected, found him in an unusual agitation of spirits, even to a trembling. On inquiring the cause, 'I have been up all night,' replied the old bard: 'my musical friends made me promise to write them an Ode for their feast of St. Cecilia: I have been so struck with the subject which occurred to me, that I could not leave it till I had completed it; here it is, finished at one sitting.' And immediately he showed him this Ode, which places the British lyric poetry above that of any other nation."[26] These accounts are not, however, so contradictory as they may at first sight appear. It is possible that Dryden may have completed, at one sitting, the whole Ode, and yet have employed a fortnight, or much more, in correction. There is strong internal evidence to show that the poem was, speaking with reference to its general structure, wrought off at once. A halt or pause, even of a day, would perhaps have injured that continuous flow of poetical language and description which argues the whole scene to have arisen at once upon the author's imagination. It seems possible, more especially in lyrical poetry, to discover where the author has paused for any length of time; for the union of the parts is rarely so perfect as not to show a different strain of thought and feeling. There may be something fanciful, however, in this reasoning, which I therefore abandon to the reader's mercy; only begging him to observe, that we have no mode of estimating the exertions of a quality so capricious as a poetic imagination; so that it is very possible, that the Ode to St. Cecilia may have been the work of twenty-four hours, whilst correction and emendations, perhaps of no very great consequence, occupied the author as many days. Derrick, in his "Life of Dryden," tells us, upon the authority of Walter Moyle, that the society paid Dryden L40 for this sublime Ode, which, from the passage in his letter above quoted, seems to have been more than the bard expected at commencing his labour. The music for this celebrated poem was originally composed by Jeremiah Clarke,[27] one of the stewards of the festival, whose productions where more remarkable for deep pathos and delicacy than for fire and energy. It is probable that, with such a turn of mind and taste, he may have failed in setting the sublime, lofty, and daring flights of the Ode to St. Cecilia. Indeed his composition was not judged worthy of publication. The Ode, after some impertinent alterations, made by Hughes, at the request of Sir Richard Steele, was set to music by Clayton, who, with Steele, managed a public concert in 1711; but neither was this a successful essay to connect the poem with the art it celebrated. At length, in 1736, "Alexander's Feast" was set by Handel, and performed in the Theatre-Royal, Covent Garden, with the full success which the combined talents of the poet and the musician seemed to insure.[28] Indeed, although the music was at first less successful, the poetry received, even in the author's time, all the applause which its unrivalled excellence demanded. "I am glad to hear from all hands," says Dryden, in a letter to Tonson, "that my Ode is esteemed the best of all my poetry, by all the town. I thought so myself when I writ it; but, being old, I mistrusted my own judgment." Mr. Malone has preserved a tradition, that the father of Lord Chief-Justice Marlay, then a Templar, and frequenter of Will's coffeehouse, took an opportunity to pay his court to Dryden, on the publication of "Alexander's Feast;" and, happening to sit next him, congratulated him on having produced the finest and noblest Ode that had ever been written in any language. "You are right, young gentleman (replied Dryden), a nobler Ode never was produced, nor ever will." This singularly strong expression cannot be placed to the score of vanity. It was an inward consciousness of merit, which burst forth, probably almost involuntarily, and I fear must be admitted as prophetic.

The preparation of a new edition of the Virgil, which appeared in 1698, occupied nine days only, after which Dryden began seriously to consider to what he should next address his pen. The state of his circumstances rendered constant literary labour indispensable to the support of his family, although the exertion, and particularly the confinement, occasioned by his studies, considerably impaired his health. His son Charles had met with an accident at Rome, which was attended with a train of consequences perilous to his health; and Dryden, anxious to recall him to Britain, was obliged to make extraordinary exertions to provide against this additional expense. "If it please God," he writes to Tonson, "that I must die of over-study, I cannot spend my life better than in preserving his." It is affecting to read such a passage in the life of such a man; yet the necessities of the poet, like the afflictions of the virtuous, smooth the road to immortality. While Milton and Dryden were favoured by the rulers of the day, they were involved in the religious and political controversies which raged around them; it is to hours of seclusion, neglect, and even penury, that we owe the Paradise Lost, the Virgil, and the Fables.

Among other projects, Dryden seems to have had thoughts of altering and revising a tragedy called the "Conquest of China by the Tartars," written by his ancient friend and brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard. The unkindness which had arisen between them upon the subject of blank verse and rhyme, seems to have long since passed away; and we observe, with pleasure, that Dryden, in the course of the pecuniary transactions about Virgil, reckons upon the assistance of Sir Robert Howard, and consults his taste also in the revisal of the version.[29] But Dryden never altered the "Conquest of China," being first interrupted by the necessity of revising Virgil, and afterwards, perhaps, by a sort of quarrel which took place between him and the players, of whom he speaks most resentfully in his "Epistle to Granville," upon his tragedy of "Heroic Love," acted in the beginning of 1698.[30]

The success of Virgil encouraged Dryden about this time to turn his eyes upon Homer; and the general voice of the literary world called upon him to do the venerable Grecian the same service which the Roman had received from him. It was even believed that he had fixed upon the mode of translation, and that he was, as he elsewhere expresses it, to "fight unarmed, without his rhyme."[31] A dubious anecdote bears, that he even regretted he had not rendered Virgil into blank verse, and shows at the same time, if genuine, how far he must now have disapproved of his own attempt to turn into rhyme the Paradise Lost. The story is told by the elder Richardson, in his remarks on the tardy progress of Milton's great work in the public opinion.[32] When Dryden did translate the First Book of Homer, which he published with the Fables, he rendered it into rhyme; nor have we sufficient ground to believe that he ever seriously intended, in so large a work, to renounce the advantages which he possessed, by his unequalled command of versification. That in other respects the task was consonant to his temper, as well as talents, he has himself informed us. "My thoughts," he says, in a letter to Halifax, in 1699, "are at present fixed on Homer; and by my translation of the first Iliad, I find him a poet more according to my genius than Virgil, and consequently hope I may do him more justice, in his fiery way of writing; which, as it is liable to more faults, so it is capable of more beauties than the exactness and sobriety of Virgil. Since it is for my country's honour, as well as for my own, that I am willing to undertake this task, I despair not of being encouraged in it by your favour." But this task Dryden was not destined to accomplish, although he had it so much at heart as to speak of resuming it only three months before his death.[33]

In the meanwhile, our author had engaged himself in making those imitations of Boccacio and Chaucer, which have been since called the "Fables;" and in spring 1699, he was in such forwardness, as to put into Tonson's hands "seven thousand five hundred verses, more or less," as the contract bears, being a partial delivery to account of ten thousand verses, which by that deed he agreed to furnish, for the sum of two hundred and fifty guineas, to be made up three hundred pounds upon publication of the second edition. This second payment Dryden lived not to receive. With the contents of this miscellaneous volume we are to suppose him engaged, from the revisal of the Virgil, in 1697, to the publication of the Fables, in March 1699-1700. This was the last period of his labours, and of his life; and, like all the others, it did not pass undisturbed by acrimonious criticism, and controversy. The dispute with Milbourne we noticed, before dismissing the subject of Virgil; but there were two other persons who, in their zeal for morality and religion, chose to disturb the last years of the life of Dryden.

The indelicacy of the stage, being, in its earliest period, merely the coarse gross raillery of a barbarous age, was probably of no greater injury to the morals of the audience, than it is to those of the lower ranks of society, with whom similar language is everywhere admitted as wit and humour. During the reigns of James I. and Charles I. this licence was gradually disappearing. In the domination of the fanatics, which succeeded, matters were so much changed, that, far from permitting the use of indelicate or profane allusions, they wrapped up not only their most common temporal affairs, but even their very crimes and vices, in the language of their spiritual concerns. Luxury was using the creature; avarice was seeking experiences; insurrection was putting the hand to the plough; actual rebellion, fighting the good fight; and regicide, doing the great work of the Lord. This vocabulary became grievously unfashionable at the Reformation, and was at once swept away by the torrent of irreligion, blasphemy, and indecency, which were at that period deemed necessary to secure conversation against the imputation of disloyalty and fanaticism. The court of Cromwell, if lampoons can be believed, was not much less vicious than that of Charles II., but it was less scandalous; and, as Dryden himself expresses it,

"The sin was of our native growth, 'tis true; The scandal of the sin was wholly new. Misses there were, but modestly concealed, Whitehall the naked Goddess first revealed; Who standing, as at Cyprus, in her shrine, The strumpet was adored with rites divine."

This torrent of licentiousness had begun in some degree to abate, even upon the accession of James II., whose manners did not encourage the same general licence as those of Charles. But after the Revolution, when an affectation of profligacy was no longer deemed a necessary attribute of loyalty, and when it began to be thought possible that a man might have some respect for religion without being a republican, or even a fanatic, the licence of the stage was generally esteemed a nuisance. It then happened, as is not uncommon, that those, most bustling and active to correct public abuses, were men whose intentions may, without doing them injury, be estimated more highly than their talents. Thus, Sir Richard Blackmore, a grave physician, residing and practising on the sober side of Temple-Bar, was the first who professed to reform the spreading pest of poetical licentiousness, and to correct such men as Dryden, Congreve, and Wycherly. This worthy person, compassionating the state to which poetry was reduced by his contemporaries, who used their wit "in opposition to religion, and to the destruction of virtue and good manners in the world," resolved to rescue the Muses from this unworthy thraldom, "to restore them to their sweet and chaste mansions, and to engage them in an employment suited to their dignity." With this laudable view he wrote "Prince Arthur, an Epic Poem," published in 1695. The preface contained a furious, though just, diatribe, against the licence of modern comedy, with some personal reflections aimed at Dry den directly.[34] This the poet felt more unkindly, as Sir Richard had, without acknowledgment, availed himself of the hints he had thrown out in the "Essay upon Satire," for the management of an epic poem on the subject of King Arthur. He bore, however, the attack, without resenting it, until he was again assailed by Sir Richard in his "Satire upon Wit," written expressly to correct the dissolute and immoral performances of the writers of his time. With a ponderous attempt at humour, the good knight proposes, that a bank for wit should be established, and that all which had hitherto passed as current, should be called in, purified in the mint, re-coined, and issued forth anew, freed from alloy.

This satire was published in 1700, as the title-page bears; but Mr. Luttrell marks his copy 23rd November 1699.[35] It contains more than one attack upon our author. Thus, we are told (wit being previously described as a malady),

"Vanine, that looked on all the danger past, Because he 'scaped so long, is seized at last; By p——, by hunger, and by Dryden bit, He grins and snarls, and, in his dogged fit, Froths at the mouth, a certain sign of wit."

Elsewhere the poet complains, that the universities,

"debauched by Dryden and his crew, Turn bawds to vice, and wicked aims pursue."

Again, p. 14—

"Dryden condemn, who taught men how to make, Of dunces wits, an angel of a rake."

But the main offence lies in the following passage:—

"Set forth your edict; let it be enjoined, That all defective species be recoined; St. E—m—t and R—r both are fit To oversee the coining of our wit. Let these be made the masters of essay, They'll every piece of metal touch and weigh, And tell which is too light, which has too much allay. 'Tis true, that when the coarse and worthless dross Is purged away, there will be mighty loss. E'en Congreve, Southerne, manly Wycherly, When thus refined, will grievous sufferers be. Into the melting-pot when Dryden comes, What horrid stench will rise, what noisome fumes! How will he shrink, when all his lewd allay, And wicked mixture, shall be purged away? When once his boasted heaps are melted down, A chest-full scarce will yield one sterling crown. Those who will D—n—s melt, and think to find A goodly mass of bullion left behind, Do, as the Hibernian wit, who, as 'tis told, Burnt his gilt feather, to collect the gold. * * * * * But what remains will be so pure, 'twill bear The examination of the most severe; 'Twill S—r's scales, and Talbot's test abide, And with their mark please all the world beside."

These repeated attacks at length called down the vengeance of Dryden. who thus retorted upon him in the preface to the Fables:—

"As for the City Bard, or Knight Physician, I hear his quarrel to me is, that I was the author of 'Absalom and Achitophel,' which he thinks, is a little hard on his fanatic patrons in London.

"But I will deal the more civilly with his two poems, because nothing ill is to be spoken of the dead; and, therefore, peace be to the manes of his 'Arthurs.' I will only say, that it was not for this noble knight that I drew the plan of an epic poem on King Arthur, in my preface to the translation of Juvenal. The guardian angels of kingdoms were machines too ponderous for him to manage; and therefore he rejected them, as Dares did the whirl bats of Eryx, when they were thrown before him by Entellus: yet from that preface, he plainly took his hint; for he began immediately upon the story, though he had the baseness not to acknowledge his benefactor, but, instead of it, to traduce me in a libel."

Blackmore, who had perhaps thought the praise contained in his two last couplets ought to have allayed Dryden's resentment, finding that they failed in producing this effect, very unhandsomely omitted them in his next edition, and received, as will presently be noticed, another flagellation, in the last verses Dryden ever wrote.

But a more formidable champion than Blackmore had arisen, to scourge the profligacy of the theatre. This was no other than the celebrated Jeremy Collier, a nonjuring clergyman, who published, in 1698, "A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the Stage." His qualities as a reformer are described by Dr. Johnson in language never to be amended. "He was formed for a controvertist; with sufficient learning; with diction vehement and pointed, though often vulgar and incorrect; with unconquerable pertinacity; with wit in the highest degree keen and sarcastic; and with all those powers exalted and invigorated by the just confidence in his cause.

"Thus qualified, and thus incited, he walked out to battle, and assailed at once most of the living writers, from Dryden to Durfey. His onset was violent: those passages, which while they stood single, had passed with little notice, when they were accumulated and exposed together caught the alarm, and the nation wondered why it had so long suffered irreligion and licentiousness charge."

Notwithstanding the justice of this description, there is a strange mixture of sense and nonsense in Collier's celebrated treatise. Not contented with resting his objections to dramatic immorality and religion, Jeremy labours to confute the poets of the 17th century, by drawing them into comparison with Plautus and Aristophanes, which is certainly judging of one crooked line by another. Neither does he omit, like his predecessor Prynne, to marshal against the British stage those fulminations directed by the fathers of the Church against the Pagan theatres; although Collier could not but know, that it was the performance of the heathen ritual, and not merely the action of the drama, which rendered it sinful for the early Christians to attend the theatre. The book was, however, of great service to dramatic poetry, which, from that time, was less degraded by licence and indelicacy.

Dryden, it may be believed, had, as his comedies well deserved, a liberal share of the general censure; but, however he might have felt the smart of Collier's severity, he had the magnanimity to acknowledge its justice. In the preface to the Fables, he makes the amende honorable. "I shall say the less of Mr. Collier, because in many things he has taxed me justly; and I have pleaded guilty to all thoughts and expressions of mine, which can be truly argued of obscenity, profaneness, or immorality, and retract them. If he be my enemy, let him triumph; if he be my friend, as I have given him no personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance. It becomes me not to draw my pen in the defence of a bad cause, when I have so often drawn it for a good one." To this manly and liberal admission, he has indeed tacked a complaint, that Collier had sometimes, by a strained interpretation, made the evil sense of which he complained; that he had too much "horse-play in his raillery;" and that, "if the zeal for God's house had not eaten him up, it had at least devoured some part of his good manners and civility." Collier seems to have been somewhat pacified by this qualified acknowledgment, and, during the rest of the controversy, turned his arms chiefly against Congreve, who resisted, and spared, comparatively at least, the sullen submission of Dryden.[36]

While these controversies were raging, Dryden's time was occupied with the translations or imitations of Chaucer and Boccacio. Among these, the "Character of the Good Parson" is introduced, probably to confute Milbourne, Blackmore, and Collier, who had severally charged our author with the wilful and premeditated contumely thrown upon the clergy in many passages of his satirical writings. This too seems to have inflamed the hatred of Swift, who, with all his levities, was strictly attached to his order, and keenly jealous of its honours.[37] Dryden himself seems to have been conscious of his propensity to assail churchmen. "I remember," he writes to his sons, "the counsel you gave me in your letter; but dissembling, although lawful in some cases, is not my talent; yet, for your sake, I will struggle with the plain openness of my nature, and keep in my just resentments against that degenerate order."[38] Milbourne, and other enemies of our author, imputed this resentment against the clergy, to his being refused orders when he wished to take them, in the reign of Charles, with a view to the Provostship of Eton, or some Irish preferment.[39] But Dryden assures us, that he never had any thoughts of entering the Church. Indeed, his original offences of this kind may be safely ascribed to the fashionable practice, after the Restoration, of laughing at all that was accounted serious before that period.

And when Dryden became a convert to the Catholic faith, he was, we have seen, involved in an immediate and furious controversy with the clergy of the Church of England. Thus, an unbeseeming strain of raillery, adopted in wantonness, became aggravated, by controversy, into real dislike and animosity. But Dryden, in the "Character of a Good Parson," seems determined to show that he could estimate the virtue of the clerical order. He undertook the task at the instigation of Mr. Pepys, the founder of the Library in Magdalen College, which bears his name;[40] and has accomplished it with equal spirit and elegance; not forgetting, however, to make his pattern of clerical merit of his own jacobitical principles.

Another very pleasing performance, which entered [into] the Miscellany called "The Fables," is the epistle to John Driden of Chesterton, the poet's cousin. The letters to Mrs. Steward show the friendly intimacy in which the relations had lived, since the opposition of the Whigs to King William's government in some degree united that party in conduct, though not in motive, with the favourers of King James. Yet our author's strain of politics, as at first expressed in the epistle, was too severe for his cousin's digestion. Some reflections upon the Dutch allies, and their behaviour in the war, were omitted, as tending to reflect upon King William; and the whole piece, to avoid the least chance of giving offence, was subjected to the revision of Montague, with a deprecation of his displeasure, an entreaty of his patronage, and the humiliating offer, that, although repeated correction had already purged the spirit out of the poem, nothing should stand in it relating to public affairs. without Mr. Montague's permission. What answer "full-blown Bufo" returned to Dryden's petition, does not appear; but the author's opposition principles were so deeply woven in with the piece, that they could not be obliterated without tearing it to pieces. His model of an English member of parliament votes in opposition, as his Good Parson is a nonjuror, and the Fox in the fable of Old Chaucer is translated into a puritan.[41] The epistle was highly acceptable to Mr. Driden of Chesterton, who acknowledged the immortality conferred on him, by "a noble present," which family tradition states to have amounted to L500.[42] Neither did Dryden neglect so fair an opportunity to avenge himself on his personal, as well as his political adversaries. Milbourne and Blackmore receive in the epistle severe chastisement for their assaults upon his poetry and private character:

"What help from art's endeavours can we have? Guibbons but guesses, nor is sure to save; But Maurus sweeps whole parishes, and peoples every grave, And no more mercy to mankind will use Than when he robbed and murdered Maro's muse. Wouldst thou be soon despatched, and perish whole, Trust Maurus with thy life, and Milbourne with thy soul"

Referring to another place, what occurs upon the style and execution of the Fables, I have only to add, that they were published early in spring 1700, in a large folio, and with the "Ode to Saint Cecilia." The epistle to Driden of Chesterton, and a translation of the first Iliad, must have move than satisfied the mercantile calculations of Tonson, since they contained seventeen hundred verses above the quantity which Dryden had contracted to deliver. In the preface, the author vindicates himself with great spirit against his literary adversaries; makes his usual strong and forcible remarks on the genius of the authors whom he had imitated; and, in this his last critical work, shows all the acumen which had so long distinguished his powers. The Fables were dedicated to the last Duke of Ormond, the grandson of the Barzillai of "Absalom and Achitophel," and the son of the heroic Earl of Ossory; friends both, and patrons of Dryden's earlier essays. There is something affecting in a connection so honourably maintained; and the sentiment, as touched by Dryden, is simply pathetic. "I am not vain enough to boast, that I have deserved the value of so illustrious a line; but my fortune is the greater, that for three descents they have been pleased to distinguish my poems from those of other men; and have accordingly made me their peculiar care. May it be permitted me to say, that as your grandfather and father were cherished monarchs, so I have been esteemed and patronised by the grandfather, the father, and the son, descended from one of the most ancient, most conspicuous, and most deserving families in Europe."

There were also prefixed to the "Fables," those introductory verses addressed to the beautiful Duchess of Ormond,[43] which have all the easy, felicitous, and sprightly gallantry, demanded on such occasions. The incense, it is said, was acknowledged by a present of L500; a donation worthy of the splendid house of Ormond. The sale of the "Fables" was surprisingly slow: even the death of the author, which has often sped away a lingering impression, does not seem to have increased the demand; and the second edition was not printed till 1713, when, Dryden and all his immediate descendants being no more, the sum stipulated upon that event was paid by Tonson to Lady Sylvius, daughter of one of Lady Elizabeth Dryden's brothers, for the benefit of his widow, then in a state of lunacy.—See Appendix, vol. xviii.

The end of Dryden's labours was now fast approaching; and, as his career began upon the stage, it was in some degree doomed to terminate there. It is true, he never recalled his resolution to write no more plays; but Vanbrugh having about this time revised and altered for the Drury-lane theatre, Fletcher's lively comedy of "The Pilgrim," it was agreed that Dryden, or, as one account says, his son Charles,[44] should have the profits of a third night on condition of adding to the piece a Secular Masque, adapted to the supposed termination of the seventeenth century;[45] a Dialogue in the Madhouse between two Distracted Lovers; and a Prologue and Epilogue. The Secular Masque contains a beautiful and spirited delineation of the reigns of James I., Charles I., and Charles II., in which the influence of Diana, Mars, and Venus, are supposed to have respectively predominated. Our author did not venture to assign a patron to the last years of the century, though the expulsion of Saturn might have given a hint for it. The music of the Masque is said to have been good; at least it is admired by the eccentric author of John Buncle.[46] The Prologue and Epilogue to "The Pilgrim," were written within twenty days of Dryden's death; [47] and their spirit equals that of any of his satirical compositions. They afford us the less pleasing conviction, that even the last fortnight of Dryden's life was occupied in repelling or retorting the venomed attacks of his literary foes. In the Prologue, he gives Blackmore a drubbing which would have annihilated any author of ordinary modesty; but the knight[48] was as remarkable for his powers of endurance, as some modern pugilists are said to be, for the quality technically called bottom. After having been "brayed in a mortar," as Solomon expresses it, by every wit of his time, Sir Richard not only survived to commit new offences against ink and paper, but had his faction, his admirers, and his panegyrists, among that numerous and sober class of readers, who think that genius consists in good intention.[49] In the Epilogue, Dryden attacks Collier, but with more courteous weapons: it is rather a palliation than a defence of dramatic immorality, and contains nothing personally offensive to Collier. Thus so dearly was Dryden's preeminent reputation purchased, that even his last hours were embittered with controversy; and nature, over-watched and worn out, was, like a besieged garrison, forced to obey the call to arms, and defend reputation even with the very last exertion of the vital spirit.

The approach of death was not, however, so gradual as might have been expected from the poet's chronic diseases. He had long suffered both by the gout and gravel, and more lately the erysipelas seized one of his legs. To a shattered frame and a corpulent habit, the most trifling accident is often fatal. A slight inflammation in one of his toes, became, from neglect, a gangrene. Mr. Hobbes, an eminent surgeon, to prevent mortification, proposed to amputate the limb; but Dryden, who had no reason to be in love with life, refused the chance of prolonging it by a doubtful and painful operation.[50] After a short interval, the catastrophe expected by Mr. Hobbes took place, and, Dryden not long surviving the consequences, left life on Wednesday morning, 1st May 1700, at three o'clock. He seems to have been sensible till nearly his last moments, and died in the Roman Catholic faith, with submission and entire resignation to the divine will; "taking of his friends," says Mrs. Creed, one of the sorrowful number, "so tender and obliging a farewell, as none but he himself could have expressed."

The death of a man like Dryden, especially in narrow and neglected circumstances, is usually an alarum-bell to the public. Unavailing and mutual reproaches, for unthankful and pitiless negligence, waste themselves in newspaper paragraphs, elegies, and funeral processions; the debt to genius is then deemed discharged, and a new account of neglect and commemoration is opened between the public and the next who rises to supply his room. It was thus with Dryden: His family were preparing to bury him with the decency becoming their limited circumstances, when Charles Montague, Lord Jefferies, and other men of quality, made a subscription for a public funeral. The body of the poet was then removed to the Physicians' Hall, where it was embalmed, and lay in state till the 13th day of May, twelve days after the decease. On that day, the celebrated Dr. Garth pronounced a Latin oration over the remains of his departed friend; which were then, with considerable state, preceded by a band of music, and attended by a numerous procession of carriages, transported to Westminster Abbey, and deposited between the graves of Chaucer and Cowley.

The malice of Dryden's contemporaries, which he had experienced through life, attempted to turn into burlesque these funeral honours. Farquhar, the comic dramatist, wrote a letter containing a ludicrous account of the funeral;[51] in which, as Mr. Malone most justly remarks, he only sought to amuse his fair correspondent by an assemblage of ludicrous and antithetical expressions and ideas, which, when accurately examined, express little more than the bustle and confusion which attends every funeral procession of uncommon splendour. Upon this ground-work, Mrs. Thomas (the Corinna of Pope and Cromwell) raised, at the distance of thirty years, the marvellous structure of fable, which has been copied by all Dryden's biographers, till the industry of Mr. Malone has sent it, with other figments of the same lady, to "the grave of all the Capulets."[52] She appears to have been something assisted by a burlesque account of the funeral, imputed by Mr. Malone to Tom Brown, who certainly continued to insult Dryden's memory whenever an opportunity offered.[53] Indeed, Mrs. Thomas herself quotes this last respectable authority. It must be a well-conducted and uncommon public ceremony, where the philosopher can find nothing to condemn, nor the satirist to ridicule; yet, to our imagination, what can be more striking, than the procession of talent and rank, which escorted the remains of DRYDEN to the tomb of CHAUCER!

The private character of the individual, his personal appearance, and rank in society, are the circumstances which generally interest the public most immediately upon his decease.

We are enabled, from the various paintings and engravings of Dryden, as well as from the less flattering delineations of the satirists of his time, to form a tolerable idea of his face and person. In youth, he appears to have been handsome,[54] and of a pleasing countenance: when his age was more advanced, he was corpulent and florid, which procured him the nickname attached to him by Rochester.[55] In his latter days, distress and disappointment probably chilled the fire of his eye, and the advance of age destroyed the animation of his countenance.[56] Still, however, his portraits bespeak the look and features of genius; especially that in which he is drawn with his waving grey hairs.

In disposition and moral character, Dryden is represented as most amiable, by all who had access to know him; and his works, as well as letters, bear evidence to the justice of their panegyric. Congreve's character of the poet was drawn doubtless favourably, yet it contains points which demonstrate its fidelity.

"Whoever shall censure me, I dare be confident, you, my lord, will excuse me for anything that I shall say with due regard to a gentleman, for whose person I had as just an affection as I have an admiration of his writings. And indeed Mr. Dryden had personal qualities to challenge both love and esteem from all who were truly acquainted with him.

"He was of a nature exceedingly humane and compassionate; easily forgiving injuries, and capable of a prompt and sincere reconciliation with them who had offended him.

"Such a temperament is the only solid foundation of all moral virtues and sociable endowments. His friendship, where he professed it, went much beyond his professions; and I have been told of strong and generous instances of it by the persons themselves who received them, though his hereditary income was little more than a bare competency.

"As his reading had been very extensive, so was he very happy in a memory, tenacious of everything that he had read. He was not more possessed of knowledge, than he was communicative of it. But then his communication of it was by no means pedantic, or imposed upon the conversation; but just such, and went so far, as, by the natural turns of the discourse in which he was engaged, it was necessarily promoted or required. He was extreme ready and gentle in his correction of the errors of any writer, who thought fit to consult him: and full as ready and patient to admit of the reprehension of others, in respect of his own oversight or mistakes. He was of very easy, I may say, of very pleasing access; but something slow, and, as it were, diffident in his advances to others. He had something in his nature, that abhorred intrusion into any society whatsoever. Indeed, it is to be regretted, that he was rather blameable in the other extreme; for, by that means, he was personally less known, and, consequently, his character might become liable both to misapprehensions and misrepresentations.

"To the best of my knowledge and observation, he was, of all the men that I ever knew, one of the most modest, and the most easily to be discountenanced in his approaches either to his superiors or his equals."

This portrait is from the pen of friendship; yet, if we consider all the circumstances of Dryden's life, we cannot deem it much exaggerated. For about forty years, his character, personal and literary, was the object of assault by every subaltern scribbler, titled or untitled, laureated or pilloried. "My morals," he himself has said, "have been sufficiently aspersed; that only sort of reputation, which ought to be dear to every honest man, and is to me." In such an assault, no weapon would remain unhandled, no charge, true or false, unurged; and what qualities we do not there find excepted against, must surely be admitted to pass to the credit of Dryden. His change of political opinion, from the time he entered life under the protection of a favourite of Cromwell, might have argued instability, if he had changed a second time, when the current of power and popular opinion set against the doctrines of the Reformation. As it is, we must hold Dryden to have acted from conviction, since personal interest, had that been the ruling motive of his political conduct, would have operated as strongly in 1688 as in 1660. The change of his religion we have elsewhere discussed; and endeavoured to show that, although Dryden was unfortunate in adopting the more corrupted form of our religion, yet, considered relatively, it was a fortunate and laudable conviction which led him from the mazes of scepticism to become a catholic of the communion of Rome.[57] It would be vain to maintain, that in his early career he was free from the follies and vices of a dissolute period; but the absence of every positive charge, and the silence of numerous accusers, may be admitted to prove, that he partook in them more from general example than inclination, and with a moderate, rather than voracious or undistinguishing appetite. It must be admitted, that he sacrificed to the Belial or Asmodeus of the age, in his writings; and that he formed his taste upon the licentious and gay society with which he mingled. But we have the testimony of one who knew him well, that, however loose his comedies, the temper of the author was modest;[58] his indelicacy was like the forced impudence of a bashful man; and Rochester has accordingly upbraided him, that his licentiousness was neither natural nor seductive. Dryden had unfortunately conformed enough to the taste of his age, to attempt that "nice mode of wit," as it is termed by the said noble author, whose name has become inseparably connected with it; but it sate awkwardly upon his natural modesty, and in general sounds impertinent, as well as disgusting. The clumsy phraseology of Burnet, in passing censure on the immorality of the stage, after the Restoration, terms "Dryden, the greatest master of dramatic poesy, a monster of immodesty and of impurity of all sorts." The expression called forth the animated defence of Granville, Lord Lansdowne, our author's noble friend. "All who knew him," said Lansdowne, "can testify this was not his character. He was so much a stranger to immodesty, that modesty in too great a degree was his failing: he hurt his fortune by it, he complained of it, and never could overcome it. He was," adds he, "esteemed, courted, and admired, by all the great men of the age in which he lived, who would certainly not have received into friendship a monster abandoned to all sorts of vice and impurity. His writings will do immortal honour to his name and country, and his poems last as long, if I may have leave to say it, as the Bishop's sermons, supposing them to be equally excellent in their kind."[59]

The Bishop's youngest son, Thomas Burnet, in replying to Lord Lansdowne, explained his father's last expressions as limited to Dryden's plays, and showed, by doing so, that there was no foundation for fixing this gross and dubious charge upon his private moral character.

Dryden's conduct as a father, husband, and master of a family, seems to have been affectionate, faithful, and, so far as his circumstances admitted, liberal and benevolent. The whole tenor of his correspondence bears witness to his paternal feelings; and even when he was obliged to have recourse to Tonson's immediate assistance to pay for the presents he sent them, his affection vented itself in that manner. As a husband, if Lady Elizabeth's peculiarities of temper precluded the idea of a warm attachment, he is not upbraided with neglect or infidelity by any of his thousand assailants. As a landlord, Mr. Malone has informed us, on the authority of Lady Dryden, that "his little estate at Blakesley is at this day occupied by one Harriots, grandson of the tenant who held it in Dryden's time; and he relates, that his grandfather was used to take great pleasure in talking of our poet. He was, he said, the easiest and the kindest landlord in the world, and never raised the rent during the whole time he possessed the estate."

Some circumstances, however, may seem to degrade so amiable a private, so sublime a poetical character. The licence of his comedy, as we have seen, had for it only the apology of universal example, and must be lamented, though not excused. Let us, however, remember, that if in the hey-day of the merry monarch's reign, Dryden ventured to maintain, that, the prime end of poetry being pleasure, the muses ought not to be fettered by the chains of strict decorum; yet in his more advanced and sober mood, he evinced sincere repentance for his trespass, by patient and unresisting submission to the coarse and rigorous chastisement of Collier. If it is alleged, that, in the fury of his loyal satire, he was not always solicitous concerning its justice, let us make allowance for the prejudice of party, and consider at what advantage, after the laps of more than a century, and through the medium of impartial history, we now view characters, who were only known to their contemporaries as zealous partisans of an opposite and detested faction. The moderation of Dryden's reprisals, when provoked by the grossest calumny and personal insult, ought also to plead in his favour. Of the hundreds who thus assailed, not only his literary, but his moral reputation, he has distinguished Settle and Shadwell alone by an elaborate retort. Those who look into Mr. Luttrell's collections, will at once see the extent of Dryden's sufferance, and the limited nature of his retaliation.

The extreme flattery of Dryden's dedications has been objected to him, as a fault of an opposite description; and perhaps no writer has equalled him in the profusion and elegance of his adulation. "Of this kind of meanness," says Johnson, "he never seems to decline the practice, or lament the necessity. He considers the great as entitled to encomiastic homage, and brings praise rather as a tribute than a gift; more delighted with the fertility of his invention than mortified by the prostitution of his judgment." It may be noticed, in palliation of this heavy charge, that the form of address to superiors must be judged of by the manners of the times; and that the adulation contained in dedications was then as much a matter of course, as the words of submissive style which still precede the subscription Dryden considered his panegyrics as merely conforming with the fashion of the day, and rendering unto Caesar the things which were Caesar's,—attended with no more degradation than the payment of any other tribute to the forms of politeness and usage of the world.

Of Dryden's general habits of life we can form a distinct idea, from the evidence assembled by Mr. Malone. His mornings were spent in study; he dined with his family, probably about two o'clock. After dinner he went usually to Will's Coffeehouse, the famous rendezvous of the wits of the time, where he had his established chair by the chimney in winter, and near the balcony in summer, whence he pronounced, ex cathedra, his opinion upon new publications, and, in general, upon all matters of dubious criticism.[60] Latterly, all who had occasion to ridicule or attack him, represent him as presiding in this little senate.[61] His opinions, however, were not maintained with dogmatism; and we have an instance, in a pleasing anecdote told by Dr. Lockier,[62] that Dryden readily listened to criticism, provided it was just, from whatever unexpected and undignified quarter it happened to come. In general, however, it may be supposed, that few ventured to dispute his opinion, or place themselves of his censure. He was most falsely accused of carrying literary jealousy to such a length, as feloniously to encourage Creech to venture on a translation of Horace, that he might lose the character he had gained by a version of Lucretius. But this is positively contradicted, upon the authority of Southerne.[63]

We have so often stopped in our narrative of Dryden's life, to notice the respectability of his general society, that little need here be said on the subject. Although no enemy to conviviality, he is pronounced by Pope to have been regular in his hours in comparison with Addison, who otherwise lived the same coffee-house course of life. He has himself told us, that he was "saturnine and reserved, and not one of those who endeavour to entertain company by lively sallies of merriment and wit;" and an adversary has put into his mouth this couplet—

"Nor wine nor love could ever see me gay; To writing bred, I knew not what to say."

Dryden's Satire to his Muse.

But the admission of the author, and the censure of the satirist, must be received with some limitation. Dryden was thirty years old before he was freed from the fetters of puritanism; and if the habits of lively expression in society are not acquired before that age, they are seldom gained afterward. But this applies only to the deficiency of repartee, in the sharp encounter of wit which was fashionable at the court of Charles, and cannot be understood to exclude Dryden's possessing the more solid qualities of agreeable conversation, arising from a memory profoundly stocked with knowledge, and a fancy which supplied modes of illustration faster than the author could use them.[64] Some few sayings of Dryden have been, however, preserved; which, if not witty, are at least jocose. He is said to have been the original author of the repartee to the Duke of Buckingham, who, in bowling, offered to lay "his soul to a turnip," or something still more vile. "Give me the odds," said Dryden, "and I take the bet." When his wife wished to be a book, that she might enjoy more of his company, "Be an almanac then, my dear," said the poet, "that I may change you once a year."[65] Another time, a friend expressing his astonishment that even D'Urfey could write such stuff as a play they had just witnessed, "Ah, sir," replied Dryden, "you do not know my friend Tom so well as I do; I'll answer for him, he can write worse yet." None of these anecdotes intimate great brilliancy of repartee; but that Dryden, possessed of such a fund of imagination, and acquired learning, should be dull in conversation, is impossible. He is known frequently to have regaled his friends, by communicating to them a part of his labours; but his poetry suffered by his recitation. He read his productions very ill;[66] owing, perhaps, to the modest reserve of his temper, which prevented his showing an animation in which he feared his audience might not participate. The same circumstance may have repressed the liveliness of his conversation. I know not, however, whether we are, with Mr. Malone, to impute to diffidence his general habit of consulting his literary friends upon his poems, before they became public, since it might as well arise from a wish to anticipate and soften criticism.[67]

Of Dryden's learning, his works form the best proof. He had read Polybius before he was ten years of age;[68] and was doubtless well acquainted with the Greek and Roman classics. But from these studies he could descend to read romances: and the present editor records with pride, that Dryden was a decided admirer of old ballads and popular tales.[69] His researches sometimes extended into the vain province of judicial astrology, in which he was a firm believer; and there is reason to think that he also credited divination by dreams. In the country, he delighted in the pastime of fishing, and used, says Mr. Malone, to spend some time with Mr. Jones of Ramsden, in Wiltshire. D'Urfey was sometimes of this party; but Dryden appears to have undervalued his skill in fishing, as much as his attempts at poetry. Hence Fenton, in his Epistle to Mr. Lambard:

"By long experience, D'Urfey may no doubt Ensnare a gudgeon, or sometimes a trout; Yet Dryden once exclaimed, in partial spite, 'He fish!'—because the man attempts to write."

I may conclude this notice of Dryden's habits, which I have been enabled to give chiefly by the researches of Mr. Malone, with two notices of a minute nature. Dryden was a great taker of snuff, which he made himself. Moreover, as a preparation to a course of study, he usually took medicine, and observed a cooling diet.[70]

Dryden's house, which he appears to have resided in from the period of his marriage till his death, was in Gerrard Street, the fifth on the left hand coming from Little Newport Street.[71] The back windows looked upon the gardens of Leicester House, of which circumstance our poet availed himself to pay a handsome compliment to the noble owner.[72] His excursions to the country seem to have been frequent; perhaps the more so, as Lady Elizabeth always remained in town. In his latter days, the friendship of his relations, John Driden of Chesterton, and Mrs. Steward of Cotterstock, rendered their houses agreeable places of abode to the aged poet. They appear also to have had a kind solicitude about his little comforts, of value infinitely beyond aiding them. And thus concludes all that we have learned of the private life of Dryden.

The fate of Dryden's family must necessarily interest the admirers of English literature. It consisted of his wife, Lady Elizabeth Dryden, and three sons, John, Charles, and Erasmus Henry. Upon the poet's death, it may be believed, they felt themselves slenderly provided for, since all his efforts, while alive, were necessary to secure them from the gripe of penury.

Yet their situation was not very distressing. John and Erasmus Henry were abroad; and each had an office at Rome, in which he was able to support himself. Charles had for some time been entirely dependent on his father, and administered to his effects, as he died without a will. The liberality of the Duchess of Ormond, and of Driden of Chesterton, had been lately received, and probably was not expended. There was, besides, the poet's little patrimonial estate, and a small property in Wiltshire, which the Earl of Berkshire settled upon Lady Elizabeth at her marriage, and which yielded L50 or L60 annually. There was therefore an income of about L100 a year, to maintain the poet's widow and children; enough in these times to support them in decent frugality.

Lady Elizabeth Dryden's temper had long disturbed her husband's domestic happiness. "His invectives," says Mr. Malone, "against the married state are frequent and bitter, and were continued to the latest period of his life;" and he adds, from most respectable authority, that the family of the poet held no intimacy with his lady, confining their intercourse to mere visits of ceremony.[73] A similar alienation seems to have taken place between her and her own relations, Sir Robert Howard, perhaps, being excepted; for her brother, the Honourable Edward Howard, talks of Virgil, as a thing he had learned merely by common report.[74] Her wayward disposition was, however, the effect of a disordered imagination which, shortly after Dryden's death, degenerated into absolute insanity, in which state she remained until her death in summer 1714, probably, says Mr. Malone, in the seventy-ninth year of her life.

Dryden's three sons, says the inscription by Mrs. Creed, were ingenious and accomplished gentlemen. Charles, the eldest, and favourite son of the poet, was born at Charlton, Wiltshire, in 1666. He received a classical education under Dr. Busby, his father's preceptor, and was chosen King's Scholar in 1680. Being elected to Trinity College in Cambridge, he was admitted a member in 1683. It would have been difficult to conceive that the son of Dryden should not have attempted poetry; but though Charles Dryden escaped the fate of Icarus, he was very, very far from emulating his father's soaring flight. Mr. Malone has furnished a list of his compositions in Latin and English.[75] About 1692, he went to Italy, and through the interest of Cardinal Howard, to whom he was related by the mother's side, he became Chamberlain of the Household; not, as Corinna pretends, "to that remarkably fine gentleman, Pope Clement XI.," but to Pope Innocent XII. His way to this preferment was smoothed by a pedigree drawn up in Latin by his father, of the families of Dryden and Howard, which is said to have been deposited in the Vatican. Dryden, whose turn for judicial astrology we have noticed, had calculated the nativity of his son Charles; and it would seem that a part of his predictions were fortuitously fulfilled. Charles, however, having suffered, while at Rome, by a fall, and his health, in consequence, being much injured, his father prognosticated he would begin to recover in the month of September 1697. The issue did no great credit to the prediction; for young Dryden returned to England in 1698 in the same indifferent state of health, as is obvious from the anxious solicitude with which his father always mentions Charles in his correspondence. Upon the poet's death, Charles, we have seen, administered to his effects on 10th June 1700, Lady Elizabeth, his mother, renouncing the succession. In the next year, Granville conferred on him the profits arising from the author's night of an alteration of Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice;" and his liberality to the son of one great bard may be admitted to balance his presumption in manufacturing a new drama out of the labours of another.[76] Upon the 20th August 1704, Charles Dryden was drowned, in an attempt to swim across the Thames, at Datchet, near Windsor. I have degraded into the Appendix, the romantic narrative of Corinna, concerning his father's prediction, already mentioned. It contains, like her account of the funeral of the poet, much positive falsehood, and gross improbability, with some slight scantling of foundation in fact.

John Dryden, the poet's second son, was born in 1667, or 1668, was admitted a King's Scholar in Westminster in 1682, and elected to Oxford in 1685. Here he became a private pupil of the celebrated Obadiah Walker, Master of University College, a Roman Catholic. It seems probable that young Dryden became a convert to that faith before his father. His religion making it impossible for him to succeed in England, he followed his brother Charles to Rome, where he officiated as his deputy in the Pope's household. John Dryden translated the fourteenth Satire of Juvenal, published in his father's version, and wrote a comedy entitled, "The Husband his own Cuckold," acted in Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1696; Dryden, the father, furnishing a prologue, and Congreve an epilogue. In 1700-1, he made a tour through Sicily and Malta, and his journal was published in 1706. It seems odd, that in the whole course of his journal, he never mentions his father's name, nor makes the least allusion to his very recent death. John Dryden, the younger, died at Rome soon after this excursion.

Erasmus Henry, Dryden's third son, was born 2d May 1669, and educated in the Charterhouse, to which he was nominated by Charles II., shortly after the publication of "Absalom and Achitophel."[77] He does not appear to have been at any university; probably his religion was the obstacle. Like his brothers, he went to Rome; and as both his father and mother request his prayers, we are to suppose he was originally destined for the Church. But he became a Captain in the Pope's guards, and remained at Rome till John Dryden, his elder brother's death. After this event, he seems to have returned to England, and in 1708 succeeded to the title of Baronet, as representative of Sir Erasmus Driden. the author's grandfather. But the estate of Canons-Ashby, which should have accompanied the title, had been devised by Sir Robert Driden, the poet's first cousin, to Edward Dryden, the eldest son of Erasmus, the younger brother of the poet. Thus, if the author had lived a few years longer, his pecuniary embarrassments would have been embittered by his succeeding to the honours of his family, without any means of sustaining the rank they gave him. With this Edward Dryden, Sir Erasmus Henry seems to have resided until his death, which took place at the family mansion of Canons-Ashby in 1710. Edward acted as a manager of his cousin's affairs; and Mr. Malone sees reason to think, from their mode of accounting, that Sir Erasmus Henry had, like his mother, been visited with mental derangement before his death, and had resigned into Edward's hands the whole management of his concerns. Thus ended the poet's family, none of his sons surviving him above ten years. The estate of Canons-Ashby became again united to the title, in the person of John Dryden, the surviving brother.[78]

FOOTNOTES

[1] Such, I understand, is the general purport of some letters of Dryden's, in possession of the Dorset family, which contain certain particulars rendering them unfit for publication. Our author himself commemorates Dorset's generosity in the Essay on Satire, in the following affecting passage: "Though I must ever acknowledge to the honour of your lordship, and the eternal memory of your charity, that since this Revolution, wherein I have patiently suffered the ruin of my small fortune, and the loss of that poor subsistence which I had from two kings, whom I had served more faithfully than profitably to myself— then your lordship was pleased, out of no other motive but your own nobleness, without any desert of mine, or the least solicitation from me, to make me a most bountiful present, which at that time, when I was most in want of it, came most seasonably and unexpectedly to my relief. That favour, my lord, is of itself sufficient to bind any grateful man to a perpetual acknowledgment, and to all the future service which one of my mean condition can be ever able to perform. May the Almighty God return it for me, both in blessing you here, and rewarding you hereafter!"—Essay on Satire, vol. xiii.

[2] So says Ward, in the London Spy.

[3] "Dryden, though my near relation," says Swift, "is one whom I have often blamed, as well as pitied." Mr. Malone traces their consanguinity to Swift's grandmother, Elizabeth Dryden, being the daughter of a brother of Sir Erasmus Driden, the poet's grandfather; so that the Dean of St. Patrick's was the son of Dryden's second cousin, which, in Scotland, would even yet be deemed a near relation. The passages in prose and verse, in which Swift reflects on Dryden, are various. He mentions, in his best poem, "The Rhapsody,"

"The prefaces of Dryden, For these our cities much confide in, Though merely writ at first for filling, To raise the volume's price a shilling."

He introduces Dryden in "The Battle of the Books," with a most irreverent description; and many of the brilliant touches in the following assumed character of a hack author, are directed against our poet. The malignant allusions to merits, to sufferings, to changes of opinion, to political controversies, and a peaceful consciences, cannot be mistaken. The piece was probably composed flagrante odio, for it occurs in the Introduction to "The Tale of a Tub," which was written about 1692. "These notices may serve to give the learned reader an idea, as well as taste, of what the whole work is likely to produce, wherein I have now altogether circumscribed my thoughts and my studies; and, if I can bring it to a perfection before I die, I shall reckon I have well employed the poor remains of an unfortunate life. This indeed is more than I can justly expect, from a quill worn to the pith in the service of the state, in pros and cons upon popish plots, and meal tubs, and exclusion bills, and passive obedience, and addresses of lives and fortunes, and prerogative, and property and liberty of conscience, and letters to a friend: from an understanding and a conscience, threadbare and ragged with perpetual turning; from a head broken in a hundred places by the malignants of the opposite factions; and from a body spent with poxes ill cured, by trusting to bawds and surgeons, who, as it afterwards appeared, were professed enemies to me and the government, and revenged their party's quarrel upon my nose and shins. Fourscore and eleven pamphlets have I written under three reigns, and for the service of six and thirty factions. But finding the state has no farther occasion for me and my ink, I retire willingly to draw it out into speculations more becoming a philosopher; having, to my unspeakable comfort, passed a long life with a conscience void of offence." [See Appendix, vol. xviii., art. "Dryden and Swift."—ED.]

[4] [The exact sentence seems to have been "a Pindaric poet." But as Swift had tried nothing but Pindarics, it was nearly if not quite as severe as the more usually quoted and more sweeping verdict.—ED.]

[5] Robert Gould, author of that scandalous lampoon against Dryden, entitled "The Laureat," inscribes his collection of poems, printed 1688-9, to the Earl of Abingdon; and it contains some pieces addressed to him and to his lady. He survived also to compose, on the Earl's death, in 1700, "The Mourning Swan," an eclogue to his memory, in which a shepherd gives the following account of the proximate cause of that event:

"Menaleus. To tell you true (whoe'er it may displease), He died of the Physician—a disease That long has reigned, and eager of renown, More than a plague depopulates the town. Inflamed with wine, and blasting at a breath, All its prescriptions are receipts for death. Millions of mischiefs by its rage are wrought, Safe where 'tis fled, but barbarous where 'tis sought; A cursed ingrateful ill, that called to aid, Is still most fatal where it best is paid."

[6] How far this was necessary, the reader may judge from Mirana, a funeral eclogue; sacred to the memory of that excellent lady, Eleonora, late Countess of Abingdon, 1691, 4th Aug., which concludes with the following singular imprecation:

"Hear, friend, my sacred imprecation hear, And let both of us kneel, and both be bare. Doom me (ye powers) to misery and shame, Let mine be the most ignominious name, Let me, each day, be with new griefs perplext, Curst in this life, nor blessed in the next, If I believe the like of her survives, Or if I think her not the best of mothers, and of wives."

[7] 30th August 1693, Dryden writes to Tonson, "I am sure you thought my Lord Radclyffe would have done something; I guessed more truly, that he could not."—Vol. xviii. The expression perhaps applies rather to his lordship's want of ability than inclination; and Dryden says indeed, in the dedication, that it is in his nature to be an encourager of good poets, though fortune has not yet put into his hands the power of expressing it. In a letter to Mrs. Steward, Dryden speaks of Ratcliffe as a poet, "and none of the best."—Vol. xviii.

[8] Vol. xviii.

[9] Copied from the Chandos picture. Kneller's copy is now at Wentworth House, the seat of Earl Fitzwilliam.

[10] The antiquary may now search in vain for this frail memorial; for the house of Chesterton was, 1807, pulled down for the sake of the materials.

[11] The exact pecuniary arrangements for the Virgil are a matter of much dispute, almost every biographer taking a different view. It seems most probable that the payment was fifty pounds per two books, not fifty for each. The point will be more fully discussed on the letters dealing with the subject.—Ed.

[12] This gave rise to a good epigram:

"Old Jacob, by deep judgment swayed, To please the wise beholders, Has placed old Nassau's hook-nosed head On poor Aeneas' shoulders.

To make the parallel hold tack, Methinks there's little lacking; One took his father pick-a-pack, And t'other sent his packing."

[13] "I am of your opinion," says the poet to his son Charles, "that, by Tonson's means, almost all our letters have miscarried for this last year. But, however, he has missed of his design in the dedication, though he had prepared the book for it; for, in every figure of Aeneas, he has caused him to be drawn, like King William, with a hooked nose." Dryden hints to Tonson himself his suspicion of this unworthy device, desiring him to forward a letter to his son Charles, but not by post. "Being satisfied, that Ferrand will do by this as he did by two letters which I sent my sons, about my dedicating to the king, of which they received neither."—Vol. xviii.

[14] Johnson's "Life of Dryden."

[15] [Professor Masson calculates, apparently on good grounds, that Simmons probably made about five or six times what he paid. This, in not much more than a year, cannot be considered a bad trade return; but the sale price of "Paradise Lost" seems to provoke unfounded commonplaces from even the most unexpected sources.—ED.]

[16] "I confess to have been somewhat liberal in the business of titles, having observed the humour of multiplying them, to bear great vogue among certain writers, whom I exceedingly reverence. And indeed it seems not unreasonable that books, the children of the brain, should have the honour to be christened with variety of names, as well as other infants of quality. Our famous Dryden has ventured to proceed a point farther, endeavouring to introduce also a multiplicity of godfathers; which is an improvement of much more advantage, upon a very obvious account. It is a pity this admirable invention has not been better cultivated, so as to grow by this time into general imitation, when such an authority serves it for a precedent. Nor have my endeavours been wanting to second so useful an example: but, it seems, there is an unhappy expense usually annexed to the calling of a godfather, which was clearly out of my head, as it is very reasonable to believe. Where the pinch lay, I cannot certainly affirm; but, having employed a world of thoughts and pains to split my treatise into forty sections, and having entreated forty lords of my acquaintance, that they would do me the honour to stand, they all made it a matter of conscience, and sent me their excuses."

[17] Besides the notes on Virgil, he wrote many single sermons, and a metrical version of the psalms, and died in 1720.

[18] He is described as a rake in "The Pacificator," a poem bought by Mr. Luttrell, 15th Feb. 1699-1700, which gives an account of a supposed battle between the men of wit and men of sense, as the poet calls them:

"M——n, a renegade from wit, came on, And made a false attack, and next to none; The hypocrite, in sense, could not conceal What pride, and want of brains, obliged him to reveal. In him, the critic's ruined by the poet, And Virgil gives his testimony to it. The troops of wit were so enraged to see This priest invade his own fraternity, They sent a party out, by silence led, And, without answer, shot the turn-coat dead. The priest, the rake, the wit, strove all in vain, For there, alas! he lies among the slain. Memento mori; see the consequence, When rakes and wits set up for men of sense."

[19] This, Mr. Malone has proved by the following extract from Motteux's "Gentleman's Journal." "That best of poets (says Motteux) having so long continued a stranger to tolerable English, Mr. Milbourne pitied his hard fate; and seeing that several great men had undertaken some episodes of his Aeneis, without any design of Englishing the whole, he gave us the first book of it some years ago, with a design to go through the poem. It was the misfortune of that first attempt to appear just about the time of the late Revolution, when few had leisure to mind such books; yet, though by reason of his absence, it was printed with a world of faults, those that are sufficient judges have done it the justice to esteem it a very successful attempt, and cannot but wish that he would complete the entire translation."—Gent. Journ. for August 1692.

[20] See the Preface to "A Funeral Idyll, sacred to the glorious Memory of King William III.," by Mr. Oldmixon.

"In the Idyll on the peace, I made the first essay to throw off rhymes, and the kind reception that poem met with, has encouraged me to attempt it again. I have not been persuaded by my friends to change the Idyll into Idyllium; for having an English word set me by Mr. Dryden, which he uses indifferently with the Greek, I thought it might be as proper in an English poem. I shall not be solicitous to justify myself to those who except against his authority, till they produce me a better: I have heard him blamed for his innovations and coining of words, even by persons who have already been sufficiently guilty of the fault they lay to his charge; and shown us what we are to expect from them, were their names as well settled as his. If I had qualifications enough to do it successfully, I should advise them to write more naturally, delicately, and reasonably themselves, before they attack Mr. Dryden's reputation; and to think there is something more necessary to make a man write well, than the favour of the great, or the success of a faction. We have every year seen how fickle Fortune has been to her declared favourites; and men of merit, as well as he who has none, have suffered by her inconstancy, as much as they got by her smiles. This should alarm such as are eminently indebted to her, and may be of use to them in their future reflections on others' productions, not to assume too much to themselves from her partiality to them, lest, when they are left like their predecessor, it should only serve to render them the more ridiculous."

[21] "Homer in a Nutshell," (16th Feb.) 1700-9, by Samuel Parker, Gent.

"Preface.—Ever since I caught some termagant ones in a club, undervaluing our new translation of Virgil, I've known both what opinion I ought to harbour, and what use to make of them; and since the opportunity of a digression so luckily presents itself, I shall make bold to ask the gentlemen their sentiments of two or three lines (to pass over a thousand other instances) which they may meet with in that work. The fourth Aeneid says of Dido, after certain effects of her taking shelter with Aeneas in the cave appear,

Conjuijium vocat, hoc proetexit lomine culpam, V. 172,

which Mr. Dryden renders thus:

She called it marriage, by that specious name To veil the crime, and sanctify the shame.

Nor had he before less happily rendered the 39th verse of the second Aeneid:

Scinditur in certum studia in contraria vulgus.

The giddy vulgar, as their fancies guide, With noise, say nothing, and in parts divide.

"If these are the lines which they call flat and spiritless, I wish mine could be flat and spiritless too! And, therefore, to make short work, I shall only beg Mr. Dryden's leave to congratulate him upon his admirable flatness, and dulness, in a rapture of poetical indignation:

Then dares the poring critic snarl? And dare The[21a] puny brats of Momus threaten war? And can't the proud perverse Arachne's fate Deter the[21a] mongrels e'er it prove too late? In vain, alas! we warn the[21a] hardened brood; In vain expect they'll ever come to good. No: they'd conceive more venom if they could. But let each[21a] viper at his peril bite, While you defy the most ingenious spite. So Parian columns, raised with costly care, [21a] Vile snails and worms may daub, yet not impair, While the tough titles, and obdurate rhyme, Fatigue the busy grinders of old Time. Not but your Maro justly may complain, Since your translation ends his ancient reign, And but by your officious muse outvied, That vast immortal name had never died.

"[21a] I desire these appellations may not seem to affect the parties concerned, any otherwise than as to their character of critics."

[22] Preface to the Fables, vol. xi.

[23] See several extracts from these poems in the Appendix, vol. xviii., which I have thrown together to show how much Dryden was considered as sovereign among the poets of the time.

[24] This I learn from Honori Sacellum, a Funeral Poem, to the Memory of William, Duke of Devonshire, 1707:

"'Twas so, when the destroyer's dreadful dart Once pierced through ours, to fair Maria's heart. From his state-helm then some short hours he stole, T'indulge his melting eyes, and bleeding soul: Whilst his bent knees, to those remains divine, Paid their last offering to that royal shrine."

On which lines occurs this explanatory note:—"An Ode, composed by His Grace, on the death of the late Queen Mary, justly adjudged by the ingenious Mr. Dryden to have exceeded all that had been written on that occasion."

[25] Dr. Birch refers to the authority of Richard Graham, junior; but no such letter has been recovered.

[26] The authority, however respectable, has a very long chain of links. Warton heard it from A, who heard it from B, who heard it from Pope, who heard it from Bolingbroke.—Ed.

[27] This discovery was made by the researches of Mr. Malone. Dr. Burney describes Clarke as excelling in the tender and plaintive, to which he was prompted by a temperament of natural melancholy. In the agonies which arose from an unfortunate attachment, he committed suicide in July 1707. See a full account of the catastrophe in Malone's "Life of Dryden," p. 299.

[28] It was first performed on February 19, 1735-6, at opera prices. "The public expectations and the effects of this representation (says Dr. Burney) seem to have been correspondent, for the next day we are told in the public papers [London Daily Post, and General Advertiser, Feb. 20,] that 'there never was, upon the like occasion, so numerous and splendid an audience at any theatre in London, there being at least thirteen hundred persons present; and it is judged that the receipts of the house could not amount to less than L450. It met with general applause, though attended with the inconvenience of having the performers placed at too great a distance from the audience, which we hear will be rectified the next time of performance."—Hist. of Music, iv. 391.

[29] See vol. xviii.

[30] "Thine be the laurel, then; thy blooming age Can best, if any can, support the stage, Which to declines, that shortly we may see Players and plays reduced to second infancy. Sharp to the world, but thoughtless of renown, They plot not on the stage, but on the town; And in despair their empty pit to fill, Set up some foreign monster in a bill: Thus they jog on, still tricking, never thriving, And murth'ring plays, which they miscall—reviving. Our sense is nonsense, through their pipes conveyed; Scarce can a poet know the play he made, 'Tis so disguised in death; nor thinks 'tis he That suffers in the mangled tragedy: Thus Itys first was killed, and after dressed For his own sire, the chief invited guest."

This gave great offence to the players; one of whom (Powell) made a petulant retort, which the reader will find in a note upon the Epistle itself, vol. xi.

[31] Milbourne, in a note on that passage in the dedication to the Aeneid—"He who can write well in rhyme, may write better in blank verse," says,—"We shall know that, when we see how much better Dryden's Homer will be than his Virgil."

[32] "Much the same character he gave of it (i.e. Paradise Lost) to a north-country gentleman, to whom I mentioned the book, he being a great reader, but not in a right train, coming to town seldom, and keeping little company. Dryden amazed him with speaking so loftily of it. 'Why, Mr. Dryden, says he (Sir W.L. told me the thing himself), 'tis not in rhyme.' 'No, [replied Dryden;] nor would I have done Virgil in rhyme, if I was to begin it again.'"—This conversation is supposed by Mr. Malone to have been held with Sir Wilfrid Lawson, of Isell in Cumberland.

[33] See a letter to Mrs. Thomas, vol. xviii.

[34] "Some of these poets, to excuse their guilt, allege for themselves, that the degeneracy of the age makes their lewd way of writing necessary: they pretend the auditors will not be pleased, unless they are thus entertained from the stage; and to please, they say, is the chief business of the poet. But this is by no means a just apology: it is not true, as was said before, that the poet's chief business is to please. His chief business is to instruct, to make mankind wiser and better; and in order to this, his care should be to please and entertain the audience with all the wit and art he is master of. Aristotle and Horace, and all their critics and commentators all men of wit and sense agree, that this is the end of poetry. But they say, it is their profession to write for the stage; and that poets must starve, if they will not in this way humour the audience: the theatre will be as unfrequented as the churches, and the poet and the parson equally neglected. Let the poet then abandon his profession, and take up some honest lawful calling, where, joining industry to his great wit, he may soon get above the complaints of poverty, so common among these ingenious men, and lie under no necessity of prostituting his wit to any such vile purposes as are here censured. This will-be a course of life more profitable and honourable to himself, and more useful to others. And there are among these writers some, who think they might have risen to the highest dignities in other professions, had they employed their wit in those ways. It is a mighty dishonour and reproach to any man that is capable of being useful to the world in any liberal and virtuous profession, to lavish out his life and wit in propagating vice and corruption of manners, and in battering from the stage the strongest entrenchments and best works of religion and virtue. Whoever makes this his choice, when the other was in his power, may he go off the stage unpitied, complaining of neglect and poverty, the just punishments of his irreligion and folly!"

[35] Mr. Malone conceives, that the Fables were published before the "Satire upon Wit;" but he had not this evidence of the contrary before him. It is therefore clear, that Dryden endured a second attack from Blackmore, before making any reply.

[36] Since Scott wrote, the Collier-Congreve controversy has been the subject of well-known essays by Lamb, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Macaulay. Very recently a fresh and excellent account of Collier's book has appeared in M.A. Beljame's Le Public et les Hommes de Lettres en Angleterre au xviiieme siecle (Paris: Hachette, 1881), a remarkable volume, to which, and to its author, I owe much.—Ed.

[37] In his apology for "The Tale of a Tub," he points out to the resentment of the clergy, "those heavy illiterate scribblers, prostitute in their reputations, vicious in their lives, and ruined in their fortunes, who, to the shame of good sense, as well as piety, are greedily read, merely upon the strength of bold, false, impious assertions, mixed with unmannerly reflections on the priesthood." And, after no great interval, he mentions the passage quoted, p. 375 "in which Dryden, L'Estrange, and some others I shall not name, are levelled at; who, having spent their lives in faction, and apostasies, and all manner of vice, pretended to be sufferers for loyalty and religion. So Dryden tells us, in one of his prefaces, of his merits and sufferings, and thanks God that he possesses his soul in patience. In other places he talks at the same rate."

[38] Vol. xviii.

[39] Thus in a lampoon already quoted (footnote 29, Section VI)

"Quitting my duller hopes, the poor renown Of Eton College, or a Dublin gown."

Tom Brown makes the charge more directly. "But, prithee, why so severe always on the priesthood, Mr. Bayes? What have they merited to pull down your indignation? I thought the ridiculing men of that character upon the stage, was by this time a topic as much worn out with you, as love and honour in the play, or good fulsome flattery in the dedication. But you, I find, still continue your old humour, to date from the year of Hegira, the loss of Eton, or since orders were refused you. Whatever hangs out, either black or green colours is presently your prize: and you would, by your good will, be as mortifying a vexation to the whole tribe, as an unbegetting year, a concatenation of briefs, or a voracious visitor; so that I am of opinion, you had much better have written in your title-page,

Manet alta mente repostum Judicium Cleri, spretaeque injuria Musoe."

The same reproach is urged by Settle. See vol. ix.

[40] Vol. xviii. [The Diary had not been deciphered when Scott wrote. —ED.]

[41] There was, to be sure, in the provoking scruples of that rigid sect, something peculiarly tempting to a satirist. How is it possible to forgive Baxter, for the affectation with which he records the enormities of his childhood?

"Though my conscience," says he, "would trouble me when I sinned, yet divers sins I was addicted to, and oft committed against my conscience, which, for the warning of others, I will here confess to my shame. I was much addicted to the excessive gluttonous eating of apples and pears, which I think laid the foundation of the imbecility and flatulency of my stomach, which caused the bodily calamities of my life. To this end, and to concur with naughty boys that gloried in evil, I have oft gone into other men's orchards, and stolen the fruit, when I had enough at home." There are six other retractions of similar enormities, when he concludes: "These were my sins in my childhood, as to which, conscience troubled me for a great while before they were overcome." Baxter was a pious and worthy man; but can any one read this confession without thinking of Tartuffe, who subjected himself to penance for killing a flea, with too much anger?

[42] See vol. xviii. Mr. Malone thinks tradition has confounded a present made to the poet himself probably of L100, with a legacy bequeathed to his son Charles, which last did amount to L500, but which Charles lived not to receive.

[43] She is distinguished for beauty and virtue, by the author of "The Court at Kensington." 1699-1700.

"So Ormond's graceful mien attracts all eyes, And nature needs not ask from art supplies; An heir of grandeur shines through every part, And in her beauteous form is placed the noblest heart: In vain mankind adore, unless she were By Heaven made less virtuous, or less fair."

[44] Gildon, in his "Comparison between the Stages."—"Nay then," says the whole party at Drury-lane, "we'll even put 'The Pilgrim' upon him." "Ay, 'faith, so we will," says Dryden: "and if you'll let my son have the profits of the third night, I'll give you a Secular Masque." "Done," says the House; and so the bargain was struck.

[45] i.e. Upon the 25th March 1700; it being supposed (as by many in our own time) that the century was concluded so soon as the hundredth year commenced; as if a play was ended at the beginning of the fifth act.

[46] It was again set by Dr. Boyce, and in 1749 performed in the Drury-lane theatre, with great success.

[47] By a letter to Mrs. Steward, dated the 11th April 1700, it appears they were then only in his contemplation, and the poet died upon the first of the succeeding month. Vol. xviii.

[48] "Quick Maurus, though he never took degrees In either of our universities, Yet to be shown by Rome kind wit he looks, Because he played the fool, and writ three books. But if he would be worth a poet's pen, He must be more a fool, and write again: For all the former fustian stuff he wrote Was dead-born doggrel, or is quite forgot; His man of Uz, stript of his Hebrew robe, Is just the proverb, and 'As poor as Job.' One would have thought he could no longer jog; But Arthur was a level, Job's a bog. There though he crept, yet still he kept in sight; But here he founders in, and sinks downright. Had he prepared us, and been dull by rule, Tobit had first been turned to ridicule; But our bold Briton, without fear or awe, O'erleaps at once the whole Apocrypha; Invades the Psalms with rhymes, and leaves no room For any Vandal Hopkins yet to come. But when, if, after all, this godly gear Is not so senseless as it would appear, Our mountebank has laid a deeper train; His cant, like Merry Andrew's noble vein, Cat-calls the sects to draw them in again. At leisure hours in epic song he deals, Writes to the rumbling of his coach's wheels; Prescribes in haste, and seldom kills by rule, But rides triumphant between stool and stool. Well, let him go,—'tis yet too early day To get himself a place in farce or play; We know not by what name we should arraign him, For no one category can contain him. A pedant,—canting preacher,—and a quack, Are load enough to break an ass's back. At last, grown wanton, he presumed to write, Traduced two kings, their kindness to requite; One made the doctor, and one dubbed the knight."