manner he imitated in his own earlier efforts, but whom he preceded as a satirist. It is in the latter capacity only that Oldham is memorable among our poets; for his panegyrical and other odes are laboured without being effective; his paraphrases have the flatness too common to their kind; and the rest of his verse, though occasionally pleasing, has no peculiar value. But on the roll of our later poetic satirists, which begins with Donne and ends with Gifford, Oldham occupies a far from insignificant place. Both Johnson and Pope may have owed something to him; but by Dryden he was valued and acknowledged as to him the most congenial of his fellow-authors. At the time of Oldham's death Dryden, though a supporter of the Court, was not yet a Roman Catholic; and there was accordingly no stint in the praise which, with his usual magnanimity, he offered on the early death of his younger predecessor. He had but one exception to take, and even this he was ready himself to overrule. Had Oldham lived longer, Dryden wrote, advancing age

'might (what Nature never gives the young)
Have taught the numbers of thy native tongue;
But satire needs not those, and wit will shine
Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.'

To us there is much besides defects of form to overlook or forgive in Oldham. His most famous satires have the reek of an essentially grosser flame than that in which the greatest masters of poetic satire, ancient or modern, forged their darts. But he was capable of productions tempered with nicer art if with less expenditure of vigour than those by which he is best known. His Imitations of Horace, Juvenal, and Boileau are all more or less felicitous; and in a few shorter original pieces of the same cast he shows occasional lightness as well as his habitual strength of touch. It should certainly not be forgotten that he died at thirty-one, and that the species of poetry in which he was chiefly gifted for excelling was one more especially suited to matured powers. And to have been the foremost English writer of satire at a time when Dryden was already famous, though not in this branch of poetry, was to have secured a fair title to remembrance.

A. W. WARD.

VOL. 11.

Ff

THE JESUITS.

[From the Second of the Satires upon the Jesuits. 1679.]

These are the Janissaries of the cause,

The life-guard of the Roman Sultan, chose
To break the force of Huguenots and foes;
The Church's hawkers in divinity,

Who, 'stead of lace and ribbons, doctrine cry;
Rome's strollers, who survey each continent,
Its trinkets and commodities to vent;
Export the Gospel, like mere ware, for sale,
And truck 't for indigo, or cochineal,

As the known factors here, the brethren, once
Swopped Christ about for bodkins, rings, and spoons.

And shall these great Apostles be contemned,

And thus by scoffing heretics defamed?

They, by whose means both Indies now enjoy

The two choice blessings, lust and Popery?
Which buried else in ignorance had been,
Nor known the worth of beads and Bellarmine1?
It pitied holy Mother Church to see
A world so drowned in gross idolatry;
It grieved to see such goodly nations hold
Bad errors and unpardonable gold.
Strange! what a fervent zeal can coin infuse,
What charity pieces of eight produce!
So were you chosen the fittest to reclaim
The pagan world, and give't a Christian name.
And great was the success: whole myriads stood
At font, and were baptized in their own blood;
Millions of souls were hurled from hence to burn
Before their time, be damned in their own turn.

Yet these were in compassion sent to Hell,
The rest reserved in spite, and, worse to feel,

' Cardinal Bellarmin, the great Jesuit controversialist, opposed by James I. The Spanish pieza de à ocho, a dollar, or eight silver reals.

་

Compelled instead of fiends to worship you,
The more inhuman devils of the two.
Rare way and method of conversion this,
To make your votaries your sacrifice!

If to destroy be Reformation thought,

A plague as well might the good work have wrought.
Now see we why your founder, weary grown,
Would lay his former trade of killing down1:
He found 'twas dull; he found a crown would be
A fitter case, and badge of cruelty.

Each snivelling hero seas of blood can spill,

When wrongs provoke, and honour bids him kill ;—
Give me your through-paced rogue, who scorns to be
Prompted by poor revenge, or injury,

But does it of true inbred cruelty;

Your cool and sober murderer, who prays

And stabs at the same time, who one hand has
Stretched up to Heaven, the other to make the pass.
So the late saints of blessèd memory,

Cut-throats in godly pure sincerity,

So they with lifted hands, and eyes devout,

Said grace, and carved a slaughtered monarch out.
When the first traitor Cain (too good to be
Thought patron of this black fraternity)
His bloody tragedy of old designed,

One death alone quenched his revengeful mind,
Content with but a quarter of mankind:
Had he been Jesuit, and but put on

Their savage cruelty, the rest had gone;
His hand had sent old Adam after too,

And forced the Godhead to create anew.

THE DOMESTIC CHAPLAIN.

[From A Satire addressed to a Friend that is about to leave the University, and come abroad in the world.]

Some think themselves exalted to the sky,

If they light in some noble family.

1 Loyola ceased to be a soldier after the siege of Pampeluna.

Diet, a horse, and thirty pounds a year,
Besides the advantage of his lordship's ear,
The credit of the business, and the state,

Are things that in a youngster's sense sound great.
Little the inexperienced wretch does know,
What slavery he oft must undergo,

Who, though in silken scarf and cassock dressed,
Wears but a gayer livery at best.

When dinner calls, the implement must wait,
With holy words to consecrate the meat,
But hold it for a favour seldom known,
If he be deigned the honour to sit down--
Soon as the tarts appear, Sir Crape, withdraw !
Those dainties are not for a spiritual maw.
Observe your distance, and be sure to stand
Hard by the cistern with your cap in hand;
There for diversion you may pick your teeth,
Till the kind voider1 comes for your relief.
For mere board wages such their freedom sell,
Slaves to an hour, and vassals to a bell;
And if the enjoyment of one day be stole,
They are but prisoners out on parole:
Always the marks of slavery remain,

And they, though loose, still drag about their chain
And where's the mighty prospect after all,

A chaplainship served up, and seven years' thrall ? The menial thing, perhaps, for a reward

Is to some slender benefice preferred,

With this proviso bound: that he must wed
My lady's antiquated waiting-maid

In dressing only skilled, and marmalade.

1 Basket for the scraps of dinner.

}

JOHN DRYDEN.

[BORN in 1631, at Aldwincle All Saints, in the valley of the Nen in Northamptonshire, of Puritan parentage; and educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He appears to have become a Londoner about the middle of the year 1657. At the Restoration he changed into an ardent royalist; and towards the close of 1663 married the daughter of a royalist nobleman, the Earl of Berkshire. In 1670 he was appointed Historiographer-Royal and Poet-Laureate. After having hitherto been conspicuous as a dramatist and a panegyrical poet, he in 1681, by the publication of the First Part of Absalom and Achitophel, sprang into fame as a writer of satirical verse. In December 1683 he was appointed Collector of Customs in the port of London. His offices were renewed to him on the accession of King James II, but his pension of 100l. was not renewed till rather more than a year later. About the same time Dryden became a Roman Catholic; and in April 1687, he published The Hind and the Panther. Deprived of both offices and pension by the Revolution of 1688, he again for a time wrote for the stage, but after a few years finally abandoned dramatic composition for translation. Some of his greatest lyrics likewise belong to his later years. He died at his house in Gerard Street, Soho, May 1, 1700, and was buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey.]

Dryden has been called the greatest writer of a little age; but it may well be doubted whether he for one would have cared to accept either limb of the antithesis. None of his moral qualities better consorted with his magnificent genius than the real modesty which underlay his buoyant self-assertion. His attitude towards the great literary representative of an age earlier than that to which his own maturity belonged was from first to last one of reverent recognition; and though the lines written by Dryden under Milton's portrait have more sound than point, they should not be forgotten as testifying to the spirit which dictated them. Of Oldham, in both the species of verse to which he owed his reputation infinitely Dryden's inferior, the elder poet wrote that their souls were near allied, and cast in the same poetic mould. To Congreve, his junior by full forty years, he declared that he would