66 NOTES. THE ESSAY ON SATIRE. P. 1. This essay, published in 1692, is addressed to the Earl of Dorset, to whom Dryden also dedicated his translation of the 'Satires' of Juvenal, which evidently led to its composition. He had previously dedicated his Essay on Dramatic Poesy,' to the same nobleman, whom, indeed, he makes one of the interlocutors in it, under the name of Eugeneus. The fulsome adulation with which, in both essays, he extols the Earl's literary abilities and performances, display a meanness of spirit which the warmest admirers of the poet cannot contemplate without shame; even though it may in some degree be palliated, if it be regarded as the effusion of gratitude, since to quote the language of Macaulay's (Hist. of Eng. c. viii.), Dryden owned that he had been saved from ruin by Dorset's princely generosity." The extravagance of his flattery, which puts him "in satire, and Shakespeare in tragedy," as it were on a level, as establishing the claim of our countrymen to a superiority over the best authors of antiquity, and which calls his lyric poems"the delight and wonder of this age, as they will be the envy of the next," deservedly provokes the sneering comment of Johnson: Would it be imagined that, of this rival to antiquity, all the satires were little personal invectives, and that his longest composition was a song of eleven stanzas ?" (Life of Dorset.') Yet, Lord Dorset's real merits are such that no man of his age could have better dispensed with such overstrained panegyric. Macaulay describes him as a man qualified by natural endowments to "have risen to the highest posts in the state, had he been driven by necessity to exert himself," or to have been "the rival of those men of letters of whom he was content to be the benefactor," while "of painting, of sculpture, of architecture, he was allowed to be the best judge that the court could show-on questions of polite learning his decisions were regarded at all the coffee-houses as without appeal. The delicacy of his taste in French composition was extolled by St. Evremond and La Fontaine." He died in 1705, and some years afterwards Pope wrote an epitaph, to be placed over his tomb at Withyam, in Sussex, which, without forgetting to pay at least their due honour to his abilities and 66 *Dorset was Lord Chamberlain, and when, in consequence of his conversion to the Roman Catholic religion, Dryden was deprived of his office of l'eet Laureate, Dorset is said to have settled on him an annuity of equal value. liberal patronage of genius, selects, as his crowning quality, his power of inspiring general regard and esteem "Blest courtier who could king and country please, Yet sacred keep his friendships and his ease." Ib. Titus Vespasian. Tacitus, too discerning and too honest a writer to be suspected of flattery, gives Titus the praise of qualities moral and intellectual, suited for any future, however brilliant, with a dignified beauty and grace of person and demeanour. Hist. ii. 1. P. 2. Descartes, a great French mathematician and philosopher, who lived in the first half of the seventeenth century. After serving for some years in the army of Maurice, Prince of Orange, he settled at Amsterdam, where he was persecuted for his metaphysical opinions, was accused of atheism, and ran some danger of being burnt alive. 66 P. 3. Shakespeare had rather written happily than knowingly and justly. This remark is a repetition of what Dryden had said in that admirable character which he had drawn of Shakespeare in his Essay on Dramatic Poesy.' All the images of Nature were present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily," and he quotes a saying of the very learned John Hales, a Fellow of Eton, That there was no subject of which any poet ever wrote, but he would produce it much better done in Shakespeare." 66 P. 3. Jonson, by studying Horace, had been acquainted with the rules. Disraeli, in his Curiosities of Literature,' quotes Fuller's Worthies of England,' where the writer says of Jonson: "He was paramount in the dramatic part of poetry. and taught the stage an exact conformity to the laws of comedians." P. 4. Longo proximi intervallo, a quotation from the footrace in Æneid V., translated by Dryden— "The next, but, though the next, yet far disjoined." P. 5. The best good man, etc. This is a quotation from one of Lord Rochester's poems, where Dorset is extolled as a satirist "For pointed satire, I would Buckhurst choose, The best good man, with the worst-natur'd Muse." Ib. Jonson's verses to the memory of Shakespeare; an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric. Jonson was certainly a man of arrogant, conceited temper, and was generally accused of being envious of all his contemporaries. But his verses to Shakespeare's memory seem hardly to deserve Dryden's He addresses Shakespeare in these words censure. "While I confess thy writings to be such As neither man nor Muse can praise too much." He says indeed, that Shakespeare "had small Latin and less Greek," which is certainly true, but, in spite of this want of classical scholarship, he says he must "call forth thundering Eschylus" 66 Euripides and Sophocles to us, Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead, To live again to hear thy buskin tread And shake a stage, or when thy socks were on Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome (The buskin, the cothurnus of the Roman stage, was the tragic shoe. The soccus, a low-heeled slipper, here translated sock, was worn by the comic actor who was not required to look tall and dignified.) P. 5. Donne, Dean of St. Paul's in the reign of James I., the earliest of those whom Johnson, in his 'Life of Cowley,' calls the metaphysical poets-a school whose poetry was a collection of forced conceits-many of his poems were satires, for which class of composition he is said to have been the first to adopt the rhyming couplet, which, however, in his hands, was sadly destitute of the harmonious rhythm that Dryden and Pope subsequently gave it. P. 6. Cowley: Throws his Mistress infinitely below his Pindariques. Pope, perhaps, may be thought to imply a different opinion when he says of this poet 66 Forget his Epic, nay Pindaric art, Yet still I love the language of his heart." His Pindarics were a translation of Pindar's Odes into what he intended to be exactly the same metre as that of the originals. P. 7. Fame, as Virgil tells us, etc. Dryden is here referring to a passage in the fourth Eneid,' in which, however, Virgil speaks of "Fame as being far from a real good: what he is describing, moreover, is not "Fame" but "Rumour." " "Extemplo Libyæ magnas it Fama per urbes,- En. iv. 173. Which Dryden himself translates treating "report" and "fame" as synonymous— "The loud report through Libyan cities goes, N |