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Made of the blackest fleece of night,

And close wrought to keep in the powerful light ;
Yet wrought so fine, it hindered not his flight,
But thro' the keyholes and the chinks of doors,
And thro' the narrowest walks of crooked pores,1
He passed more swift and free

Than in wide air the wanton swallows flee.
He took a pointed Pestilence in his hand;
The spirits of thousand mortal poisons made
The strongly tempered blade;

The sharpest sword that e'er was laid

Up in the magazines of God to scourge a wicked land.
Thro' Egypt's wicked land his march he took,
And as he marched the sacred2 first-born strook
Of every womb; none did he spare,

None from the meanest beast to Cenchre's3 purple heir.

XVI.

The swift approach of endless night
Breaks ope the wounded sleepers' rolling eyes.
They wake the rest with dying cries,
And darkness doubles the affright.

The mixed sounds of scattered deaths they hear;
And lose their parted souls 'twixt grief and fear:
Louder than all, the shrieking women's voice
Pierces this chaos of confused noise;

As brighter lightning cuts a way
Clear and distinguished thro' the day:
With less complaints the Zoan temples sound
When the adoréd heifer's drowned,

And no true marked successor to be found.*
While health, and strength, and gladness does possess
The festal Hebrew cottages;

The blest destroyer comes not there,
To interrupt the sacred cheer

That new begins their well reformed year."
Upon their doors he read and understood
God's protection writ in blood.

Well was he skilled i' th' character divine;
And tho' he passed by it in haste,

He bowed and worshipped as he pass'd,
The mighty mystery thro' its humble sign.

1 These lines exemplify the tedious and often vulgar minuteness of the imagery of Cowley and his school. It is difficult to extract a passage of any length from his finest odes

free from these blemishes.

2" We are assured by Diodorus, that when a sacred animal died in a house, the affliction was greater and the lamentation louder than at the death of a child."-Pict. Bib., Ex. xi. 6. 3 The tenth monarch in the fourth dynasty of Egypt is named Acenchris (B. C. 1452). See Encyc. Brit., Art. Egypt. The princes of the Byzantine empire were termed Porphyrogennetoi (born in the purple).

See note 2.-See also Pict. Bib. note on Ex. xxxii. 4.

The sacred year of the Israelites was made to commence about the spring equinox, with the month Abib, in commemoration of the Exodus from Egypt.

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Above the subtle foldings of the sky,
Above the well set orbs' soft harmony,
Above those petty lamps that gild the night,
There is a place, o'erflown with hallow'd light,
Where Heaven, as if it left itself behind,

Is stretched out far, nor its own bounds confined;
Here peaceful flames swell up the sacred place,
Nor can the glory contain itself in th' endless space :1
For there no twilight of the sun's dull ray
Glimmers upon the pure and native day;

No pale-faced moon does in stolen beams appear,
Or with dim taper scatters darkness there:
On no smooth sphere the restless seasons slide,
No circling ocean doth swift time divide.
Nothing is there to come, and nothing past,
But an eternal Now does always last.
There sits the Almighty, first of all, and end,
Whom nothing but himself can comprehend:
Who with his word commanded all to be,
And all obeyed Him, for that word was He.
Only He spoke, and every thing that is
From out the womb of fertile Nothing rise.3
Oh who shall teil, who shall describe thy throne,
Thou great Three-One ?*

There thou thyself dost in full presence show,
Not absent from these meaner worlds below:

No; if thou wert, the Elements' league would cease,
And all thy creatures break thy nature's peace.

JOHN DRYDEN.

(1631-1700.)

THE taste and tendencies of the age of Charles II. gave a new tone to English literature; and the writer in whom this feature was embodied, both in its good and evil attributes, was John Dryden. This great poet was born at Aldwinkle in Northamptonshire. He was descended of a knightly family originally of the county of Huntingdon. Having passed with distinction through the curriculum of Westminster School, under the celebrated Busby, he was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of nineteen. He

1 Cowley intends this irregular line as an example of an echo to the sense.

2 This expression has often been plundered from Cowley.

Used as a past tense; retained in the vulgar dialect.

The poet used imperfect lines, on the supposition that Virgil's imperfect lines were intended to remain so.

had already by publication manifested his poetical tendencies. His father's death, in 1654, procured to him the possession of a small estate of some sixty pounds a-year. On quitting the university, he enjoyed the protection of his relation Sir Gilbert Pickering, a distinguished Parliamentarian, and high in favour in the court of Cromwell. Educated among puritan relatives, Dryden's career begins in a sphere very different from that in which it termi⚫nated. One of the first trophies of his muse was a Eulogy of the deceased Protector. On the Restoration, the poet appears with his " Astraea Redux," to hail the return of right and royalty. Dryden's veerings in religion, politics, criticism, and taste, over his whole life, exhibit a mind owning, with true poetical fidelity, the dominion of impulse. His scholarship was various and undigested; his opinions the product of circumstances or passion; his taste too often the reflection of his interest or his prejudices; and his religion, in his youth, that of a mind borne about by every wind of doctrine. On this last subject, he himself thus speaks in the" Hind and Panther”—

My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires,

My manhood, long misled by wandering fires,

Follow'd false lights; and, when their glimpse was gone,
My pride struck out new sparkles of her own.
Such was I, such by nature still I am.

With all this there is in Dryden's writings so much hearty earnestness in whatever he asserts, such an English manliness in the expression of apology or gratitude, that we cannot believe him to have been one who coolly calculated how much inconsistency or adulation was worth. For the latter he is not more to blame than many of that age whose honesty has been much less a subject of question.

From the period of "Astraea Redux," Dryden is a court poet. Like Milton, he had early conceived the idea of a great Epic, of which the subject was to have been the British Arthur: but necessity, and the taste of the court and the public, hurried him into the drama, the popular revival of which, but on an unhappy French model, was one of the conspicuous results of the Restoration. It was the great misfortune of Dryden's genius that circumstances compelled it from the course of its own native action. Even his long poems may all be termed occasional; and he himself has confessed that "All for Love" is the only drama he wrote for himself, the others are sacrifices to the taste of the times.

A ribald king and court

Bade him toil on to make them sport,
Demanded for their niggard pay
Fit for their souls a looser lay,
Licentious satire, song, and play,

The world, defrauded of the high design,

Profaned the God-given strength, and marr'd the lofty line.

It seems to have been long before Dryden formed his style. His early poetry exhibits the conceits of Donne and Cowley without their warmth of feeling. The first piece in which his genius exhibited many of its proper characteristics was the "Annus Mirabilis," commemorative of the Dutch war and the fire of London. From this period he held the highest rank in English poetical literature, while Milton in obscurity was lamenting the evil days on which he had fallen. In 1665, he married Lady Elizabeth Howard, a daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. Though his marriage allied him to nobility, it did not materially contribute to the increase of his for

1 Scott. Introduction to Marmion, Canto 1.

tune. Dryden's married life, in addition to the subsequent pinchings of penury, was, from the temper of his lady, not a happy one, though his mind seems to have been warmly susceptible of family affections.

"In 1668 he succeeded Sir William Davenant as poet laureate." This was the prosperous period of Dryden's life. But, though extravagance was not his fault, economy does not seem to have been among his virtues; the Revolution accordingly threw him subsequently into the depths of poverty. Dryden's life, Sir Walter Scott remarks, is the history of the literature of his age. His eminence procured him numberless enemies, some of whom his castigations alone have immortalized, and the weight of his satire perpetuated the hostility of rivals. Among his literary foes were Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the author or part author of the "Rehearsal," a farce intended to ridicule Dryden's dramatic writings; and the witty Earl of Rochester, from whose bravos the acerbity of Dryden's pen drew down on the poet a midnight cudgelling. Settle, Shadwell (Mac-Flecknoe), &c. are among the victims of Dryden's vigorous arm.

Literary controversy was not the only field on which the poet exercised his satiric muse. The latter portion of the reign of Charles II. was agitated by the struggle, excited by the recent terrors of the Popish plot and the prospect of a Popish successor to the throne in the person of the Duke of York. The party that espoused the Exclusion Bill, headed by Shaftesbury, naturally rallied itself round the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, and encouraged the idea that he was the legitimate son of the king. Each faction used the press as a powerful engine in the promotion of its objects, and Dryden's nervous pen was invoked to the aid of the court party. Hence sprung the satire "Absalom and Achitophel," which some term the most masterly in any language. It is a portrait gallery of all the characters of the time, and a history of the political movements of these years.

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Dryden's Threnodia Augustalis" illuminated the grave of Charles II., and James ascended the throne. The poet now appears as a Roman Catholic convert. Johnson pauses on the question of the honesty of his conversion. Sir W. Scott is inclined to believe the account Dryden gives of his own state of mind in the "Hind and Panther;" that he had possessed previously no settled religious opinions, and that the calm examination of maturity of age, with the spectacle of the distracted condition of Protestant sects, had urged him for shelter into the bosom of an infallible church. Whatever were Dryden's motives, he adhered unflinchingly during the rest of his life, through good report and bad report, to the church he professed finally to have chosen. Meantime his conversion reaped for him reward, distinction, and the employment of his pen from a smiling king. "The Hind and the Panther," personifying the Roman and Anglican churches, was written in defence of the unconstitutional powers assumed by James in his dispensation with acts of parliament, and, as Johnson remarks, " to comprize and to decide the controversy between the Romanists and Protestants." A theological argument conducted by beasts forms an unhappy plan of a poem ; but the piece is characterized by vigorous elegance of style, and, with all its sophistry of reasoning, impresses the reader with a feeling of the writer's sincerity. Montague and Prior's "City Mouse and Country Mouse" was written in ridicule of the "Hind and the Panther." Dryden's leaning to Roman Catholicism is seen in the “Religio Laici," published in 1682, before the death of Charles II. He was severely handled for the difference of opinion advocated in the two poems.

The "Britannia Rediviva" had hailed as the omen of a golden age the birth of a Prince of Wales; but the Revolution of 1688 brought with it

Dryden's" evil days." He was "no longer the court poet." Necessity called forth his energies, while age did not seem to have diminished their vigour. Between that period and his death, his fertile mind poured forth translations (his celebrated Eneid among others) and fables in thousands of lines without symptom of exhaustion. The Ode on St Cecilia's day" is one of the products of this autumn of his genius. He struggled with penury and with the rapacity of his bookseller Jacob Tonson. The chronic diseases with which he had long been afflicted terminated his life on the first of May 1700. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, between the graves of Chaucer and Cowley.

Dryden's mind contained many of the features which we associate peculiarly with the English character. But these seem to have been distorted by a vanity that was the result of his literary success. Though licentious in his compliance with the profligate taste of the times, Scott exempts him from the charge of actual impurity of mind, and praises his character in its social and family relations. The delicate machinery of mind which is inferred in the phrase "poetical temperament" Dryden did not possess. He is the poet of books, of learning, and of the world, rather than of nature. The classical school, as it may be termed, of poetry was not new in England, but Dryden was its most distinguished apostle. He and his immediate successors reared that system of phraseology which, in the poetry of the nineteenth century, has united the classical graces of language with the elegant and passionate conceptions of romantic feeling. Johnson alleges, though we conceive with somewhat of exaggeration, that he found the language of brick and left it of marble. His pieces, struck suddenly from the impetuous coinage of his brain, are seldom perfect, but always vigorous. Of his rhyming plays it may be said they are monstrosities sprinkled with gems. He had the manliness to submit with meekness to Collier's severe criticism of their moral defects. In his satire, in the language of Scott, his arrow is always drawn to the head, and flies directly and mercilessly to its object. Dryden's poetical works consist of twenty-eight dramas, many of them heroic rhyming tragedies, whose interest was bombasted with the auxiliaries of scenery and dress (see Scott's Edition, vol. i. p. 118 et seq.): latterly he abandoned, apparently from the study of Shakespeare, his theory of dramatic perfection. Another series of his labours are his Translations from Virgil, Juvenal, &c. His Epistles, miscellaneous pieces, and the Fables, containing adaptations from Chaucer and Bocaccio, constitute a great body of his verse. We have already mentioned some of his larger original poems. He produced an immense series of prologues and epilogues, for no play was reckoned complete without an addition of this kind from his pen. Not only the honour of founder of the modern school of English poetry belongs to Dryden; he may be called also the father of English literary criticism. His prose style partakes of the "long-resounding pace" of his poetry.

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THE RE-EDIFICATION OF LONDON.

Methinks already from this chymic flame,1
I see a city of more precious mould :
Rich as the town2 which gives the Indies name,
With silver pav'd, and all divine with gold.

1 The great fire of 1666.

2 Mexico.-Scott.

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