and many slips, he shows a mind constantly upright, bending rather from conventionality than from nature, with a dash and afflatus, occupied with grave thoughts, and subjecting his conduct to his convictions. He was converted loyally and by conviction to the Roman Catholic creed, persevered in it after the fall of James II., lost his post of historiographer and poet-laureate, and though poor, burdened with a family, and infirm, refused to dedicate his Virgil to King William. He wrote to his sons:

'Dissembling, though lawful in some cases, is not my talent: yet, for your sake, I will struggle with the plain openness of my nature. . . . In the mean time, I flatter not myself with any manner of hopes, but do my duty, and suffer for God's sake. . . . You know the profits (of Virgil) might have been more; but neither my conscience nor my honour would suffer me to take them; but I can never repent of my constancy, since I am thoroughly persuaded of the justice of the cause for which I suffer.'1

One of his sons having been expelled from school, he wrote to the master, Dr. Busby, his own old teacher, with extreme gravity and nobleness, asking without humiliation, disagreeing without giving offence, in a sustained and proud style, which is calculated to please, seeking again his favour, if not as a debt to the father, at least as a gift to the son, and concluding, I have done something, so far to conquer my own spirit as to ask it.' He was a good father to his children, as well as liberal, and sometimes even generous, to the tenant of his little estate. He says:

3

'More libels have been written against me than almost any man now living. ..... I have seldom answered any scurrilous lampoon, . . . and, being naturally vindictive, have suffered in silence, and possessed my soul in quiet.' 3 Insulted by Collier as a corrupter of morals, he endured this coarse reproof, and nobly confessed the faults of his youth:

'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.' 4

There is some wit in what follows:

'He (Collier) is too much given to horseplay in his raillery, and comes to battle like a dictator from the plough. I will not say "the zeal of God's house has eaten him up," but I am sure it has devoured some part of his good manners and civility."5 Such a repentance raises a man; to humble oneself thus, one must be a great man. He was so in mind and in heart, full of solid arguments and individual opinions, above the petty mannerism of rhetoric and

1 Letter 23, 'to his sons at Rome,' xviii. 133.

2 Scott's Life of Dryden, i. 449.

3 Essay on Satire, xiii. 80.

4 Preface to the Fables, xi. 238.

5 Ibid.

affectations of style, a master of verse, a slave to his idea, with that abundance of thoughts which is the sign of true genius:

"Thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only difficulty is to chuse or to reject, to run them into verses, or to give them the other harmony of prose: 1 have so long studied and practised both, that they are grown into a habit, and become familiar to me.' '

With these powers he entered upon his second career; the English constitution and genius opened it to him.

VII.

'A man,' says La Bruyère, 'born a Frenchman and a Christian finds himself constrained in satire; great subjects are forbidden to him; he essays them sometimes, and then turns aside to small things, which he elevates by the beauty of his genius and his style.' It was not so in England. Great subjects were given up to vehement discussion; politics and religion, like two arenas, invited to boldness and to battle, every talent and every passion. The king, at first popular, had roused opposition by his vices and errors, and bent before public discontent as before the intrigue of parties. It was known that he had sold the interests of England to France; it was believed that he would deliver up the consciences of Protestants to the Papists. The lies of Oates, the murder of the magistrate Godfrey, his corpse solemnly paraded in the streets of London, had inflamed the imagination and prejudices of the people; the judges, blind or intimidated, sent innocent Roman Catholics to the scaffold, and the mob received with insults and curses their protestations of innocence. The king's brother had been excluded from his offices, it was endeavoured to exclude him from the throne. The pulpit, the theatres, the press, the hustings, resounded with discussions and recriminations. The names of Whigs and Tories arose, and the deepest debates of political philosophy were carried on, nursed by sentiments of present and practical interests, embittered by the rancour of old as well as of freshly roused passions. Dryden plunged in; and his poem of Absalom and Achitophel was a political pamphlet. They who can criticise so weakly,' he says in the preface, 'as to imagine that I have done my worst, may be convinced at their own cost that I can write severely with more ease than I can gently.' A biblical allegory, suited to the taste of the time, hardly concealed the names, and did not hide the men. He describes the tranquil old age and incontestable right of King David; the charm, pliant humour, popularity of his natural son Absalom; the genius and treachery of Achitophel, who stirs up the

3

2

1 Preface to the Fables, xi. 209.
2 Charles II.

The Earl of Shaftesbury :

3 The Duke of Monmouth.

Of these the false Achitophel was first,
A name to all succeeding ages curst:

son against the father, unites the clashing ambitions, and reanimates the conquered factions. There is hardly any wit here; there is no time to be witty in such contests; think of the roused people who listened, men in prison or exile who heard him; fortune, liberty, life was at stake. The thing is to strike the nail on the head and hard, not gracefully. The public must recognise the characters, shout their names as they recognise the portraits, applaud the attacks which are made upon them, rail at them, hurl them from the high rank which they covet. Dryden passes them all in review:

VOL. II.

'In the first rank of these did Zimri1 stand,

A man so various that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome:
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
Was everything by starts and nothing long;
But in the course of one revolving moon
Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon;
Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.
Blest madman, who could every hour employ
With something new to wish or to enjoy!
Railing and praising were his usual themes;
And both, to show his judgment, in extremes:
So over-violent, or over-civil,

That every man with him was God or devil.

For close designs and crooked counsels fit,
Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit-
Restless, unfixed in principles and place,
In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace;
A fiery soul, which working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy body to decay
And o'er-informed the tenement of clay.
A daring pilot in extremity,

Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high,

He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit,

Would steer too nigh the sands to boast his wit.

Great wits are sure to madness near allied

And thin partitions do their bounds divide;

Else, why should he, with wealth and honour blest,
Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?
Punish a body which he could not please,
Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease?
And all to leave what with his toil he won,
To that unfeathered two-legged thing, a son,
Got, while his soul did huddled notions try,
And born a shapeless lump, like anarchy.
In friendship false, implacable in hate,
Resolved to ruin or to rule the state.'

1 The Duke of Buckingham.

C

Against these attacks their chief Shaftesbury made a stand: when accused of high treason he was declared guiltless by the grand jury, in spite of all the efforts of the court, amidst the applause of a vast multitude; and his partisans caused a medal to be struck, bearing his face, and boldly showing on the reverse the Tower obscured by a cloud. Dryden replied by his poem of the Medal, and the violent diatribe overwhelmed the open provocation:

'Oh, could the style that copied every grace
And plow'd such furrows for an eunuch face,
Could it have formed his ever-changing will,
The various piece had tired the graver's skill!
A martial hero first, with early care,
Blown, like a pigmy by the winds, to war ;
A beardless chief, a rebel ere a man,
So young his hatred to his Prince began.
Next this, (how wildly will ambition steer!)
A vermin wriggling in the usurper's ear;
Bartering his venal wit for sums of gold,
He cast himself into the saint-like mould,
Groaned, sighed, and prayed, while godliness was gain,
The loudest bag-pipe of the squeaking train.'

The same bitterness envenomed religious controversy. Disputes on dogma, for a moment cast into the shade by debauched and sceptical manners, had broken out again, inflamed by the bigoted Catholicism of the prince, and by the just fears of the nation. The poet who in Religio Laici was still an Anglican, though lukewarm and hesitating, drawn on gradually by his absolutist inclinations, had become a convert to Romanism, and in his poem of The Hind and the Panther fought for his new creed. 'The nation,' he says in the preface, 'is in too high. a ferment for me to expect either fair war or even so much as fair quarter from a reader of the opposite party.' And then, making use

1 Slingsby Bethel.

of the medieval allegories, he represents all the heretical sects as beasts of prey, worrying a white hind of heavenly origin; he spares neither coarse comparisons, nor gross sarcasms, nor open objurgations. The argument is close and theological throughout. His hearers were not wits, who cared to see how a dry subject could be adorned, theologians accidentally and for a moment, with mistrust and reserve, like Boileau in his Amour de Dieu. They were oppressed men, barely recovered from a secular persecution, attached to their faith by their sufferings, ill at ease under the visible menaces and ominous hatred of their restrained foes. Their poet must be a dialectician and a schoolman; he needs all the sternness of logic; he is immeshed in it, like a recent convert, saturated with the proofs which have separated him from the national faith, and which support him against public reprobation, fertile in distinctions, putting his finger on the weaknesses of an argument, subdividing replies, bringing back his adversary to the question, thorny and unpleasing to a modern reader, but the more praised and loved in his own time. In all English minds there is a basis of gravity and vehemence; hate rises tragic, with a gloomy outbreak, like the breakers in the North Sea. In the midst of his public strife Dryden attacks a private enemy, Shadwell, and overwhelms him with immortal scorn. A great epic style and solemn rhyme gave weight to his sarcasm, and the unlucky rhymester was drawn in a ridiculous triumph on the poetic car, whereon the muse sets the heroes and the gods. Dryden represented the Irishman Mac Flecknoe, an old king of folly, deliberating on the choice of a worthy successor, and choosing Shadwell as an heir to his gabble, a propagator of nonsense, a boastful conqueror of common sense. From all sides, through the streets littered with paper, the nations assembled to look upon the young hero, standing near the throne of his father, his brow surrounded with fogs, the vacant smile of satisfied imbecility floating over his countenance:

'The hoary prince in majesty appear'd,
High on a throne of his own labours rear'd.
At his right hand our young Ascanius sate,
Rome's other hope, and pillar of the state;
His brows thick fogs instead of glories grace,
And lambent dulness play'd around his face.
As Hannibal did to the altars come,
Sworn by his sire, a mortal foe to Rome;
So Shadwell swore, nor should his vow be vain,
That he, till death, true dulness would maintain;
And, in his father's right and realm's defence,
Ne'er to have peace with wit nor truce with sense.
The king himself the sacred unction made,
As king by office and as priest by trade.

In his sinister hand, instead of ball,

He placed a mighty mug of potent ale.'

1 Mac Flecknoe.