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Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call to-day his own,
He who, secure within, can say

To-morrow do thy worst, for I have lived to-day.
Be fair or foul, or rain or shine,

The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,

But, what has been, has been, and I've had my hour,

is acknowledged to be both vigorous and faithful; and Catullus's translation of Sappho's ode on the happiness of the lover sitting opposite to his mistress may be taken as another example of the possibility, to a great extent, of infusing the spirit of a short lyric into another language. But that, it may be feared, must be the limit of successful translations.

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Dryden did not confine himself, even in this line, to translations from the dead languages. He regarded the language of Chaucer's time as having become so obsolete that, in order to make the 'Canterbury Tales' intelligible to the existing age, they required "translation" as much as if they had been written in Greek or Latin; and, accordingly, he now occupied himself in modernising some of the more spirited of the tales; the Knight's Tale,' which from its principal characters he entitled 'Palamon and Arcite,' and others: to which he added one or two poetical versions of tales from the Decameron' of Boccaccio. They have been highly extolled by the majority of critics, and severely disparaged by Mr. Hallam. But no one, we believe, has ever denied the pre-eminent merit of his "Ode on St. Cecilia's Day," better known perhaps by the title derived from its subject of "Alexander's Feast." The poet himself was so confident of its merits that, according to a story related by Malone, and repeated

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by Sir W. Scott, he affirmed on one occasion to a young friend, who had expressed his admiration of it, that “a nobler ode never had been produced, nor ever would be." And even Mr. Hallam, a generally cold critic, though he denies that the admiration generally bestowed on it is due either to "the sublimity of its conceptions or the richness of its language," yet admits that its "rapid transitions, its mastery of language, and the springiness of the whole manner, hurries the reader away, and leaves so little room for minute criticism, that no one has ever qualified his admiration of that noble poem."

The present occasion, however, is not one for discussing Dryden's poetical merits. It is as a prosewriter that we have to speak of him in this volume, and of his prose critics have agreed to speak in praise not less unanimous than they have bestowed on his poetry; indeed, the quality which Johnson selects as the peculiar characteristic of his poetry,

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good sense," is, wherever it exists, both more conspicuous in, and more essential to, prose than to poetry, inasmuch as prose is destitute of that metrical rhythm and variegated embellishment with which verse can often conceal or disguise poverty or incorrectness of thought. And, in like manner, Scott's description of his powers form a panegyric at least as suitable to a prose writer as to a poet. As he regards it, "the distinguishing characteristic of Dryden's genius seems to have been the power of reasoning, and of expressing the result in appropriate language." (Life,' c. viii.) Applying these descriptions of his predominant qualities to his general prose style, we find a very close agreement between the praises which Johnson

and Hallam bestow upon it. The elder writer says of his prefaces or essays (in fact, all his essays, with the exception of his "Parallel between Poetry and Painting," are prefaces), "None of them were ever thought tedious. They have not the formality of a settled style, in which the first half of the sentence betrays the other. The clauses are never balanced, nor the periods modelled. Every word seems to drop by chance, though it falls into its proper place. Nothing is cold or languid; the whole is airy, animated, and vigorous; what is little is gay; what is great is splendid. . . . Though all is easy, nothing is feeble; though all seems careless, there is nothing harsh; and though, since his earlier works, more than a century has passed, they have nothing yet uncouth or obsolete." Hallam's criticism is: "Its excellence is an ease and apparent negligence of phrase, which shows, as it were, a powerful mind en déshabille, as it were, and free from the fetters of study." And he proceeds to extol its "variety and copiousness of English idiom." While a greater than either, Walter Scott, puts his merits still higher, saying: "The prose of Dryden may rank with the best in the English language: it is no less of his own formation than his versification; is equally spirited, and equally harmonious;" and proceeding to contrast it with the style of the most illustrious of his contemporaries, he adds, "Without the lengthened and pedantic sentences of Clarendon, it is dignified where dignity is becoming, and is lively without the accumulation of strained and absurd allusions and metaphors, which were unfortunately mistaken for wit by many of the author's contemporaries."

If from this general survey we descend to a more minute investigation of each particular essay, we shall find more of natural acuteness and judicious observation, than of deep or accurate learning. As a scholar, Johnson rightly places him below Milton or Cowley, but he bids us remember that "critical principles were then in the hands of a few, who had gathered them partly from the ancients, and partly from the Italians and French;" and that, "he at least imported his science, and gave it what it wanted before; or rather he imported only the materials, and manufactured them by his own skill." And this remark points out the qualities for which we are to look in the following essays, and the standard by which we are to judge of them. We are not to expect to find in them any discussion of minute or verbal niceties of expression; for, though Dryden himself, in his "Parallel between Poetry and Painting," claims credit for "understanding Latin as well as most Englishmen," we may, without doing him any injustice, surely regard his proficiency in the classical languages as at best that of an accomplished gentleman, rather than of a professed scholar. But we may reasonably hope to find judgement founded on sound principles, and guided by acute discrimination; correctness of taste; sensibility to excellence of various kinds; candour to appreciate beauties; penetration to discern and to warn against defects; and for these qualities we shall not look in vain. We may perhaps think him a little too lenient in his references to such writers as Lucian, Statius, and Claudian; and we may be somewhat surprised or amused with the difference of the advantages which he conceives himself to

derive from the study of Horace and of Juvenal; owing, as he expresses himself, more to the earlier writer for his instruction, to the later poet for his pleasure. But we cannot fail to see criticism of the highest class in the differences which he points out between the powers and style of Virgil and Ovid, and, among our own writers, to his comments on Spenser, Waller, and Milton, showing, in his remarks on all, whether ancient or modern, his keen and unvarying sense of the superiority of Homer to all, though it did not lie within his plan to discuss the points in which that superiority consists. He even proposed, after he had completed his Virgil, and perhaps encouraged by the praises bestowed on that performance, to have followed it up by a translation of the ‘Iliad ;' and in the last volume he ever published he inserted a translation of the first book, and of one of the most exquisite passages in the whole poem, the parting of Hector and Andromache in the sixth. In this latter, few probably will deny his inferiority to Pope (though Pope falls miserably short of the delicacy and pathos of the great original). In the first book, and especially in the speeches of Achilles and Agamemnon, that inferiority is perhaps not so clear; though we may suppose that Johnson saw it, since he only honours it with the passing remark that, "Considering into whose hands Homer was to fall, the reader cannot but rejoice that Dryden's project went no further."

The prefaces, and prefatory essays of Dryden are so numerous and so generally valuable, that it is not very easy to make a selection. The principle which has guided the present editor has been, to select such as were the most characteristic of the

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