Doctor Johnson was disposed to dismiss with contempt.* Heretofore that form of verse had been appropriated almost exclusively to the expression of love or some tender emotion; but Milton showed that it could be made a high heroic utterance, as in that one on the massacre of the Piedmontese, which is a solemn cry to Heaven for vengeance that seems to echo over the Alps. This service in disclosing the hidden powers of the sonnet has been acknowledged by Wordsworth: "When a damp Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand The Thing became a trumpet, whence he blew And Landor has finely put this page of literary history into three lines, (so much can a few words do in a master's hand!) when speaking of Milton, he says, "Few his words, but strong, And sounding through all ages and all climes; He caught the sonnet from the dainty hand Of Love, who cried to lose it; and he gave the notes To Glory." Within the same twelve months in which Milton died, occurred the death of the Earl of Clarendon, who, like Milton in this, that in a season of political adversity he sought employment in letters, gave to English prose what may be considered the first of the great English histories that wondrous portrait gallery, the "History of the Rebellion." To the English prose of the same period belongs a very "They deserve not any particular criticism, for of the best it can only be said they are not bad." Life of Milton, p. 234. W. B. R. + Wordsworth's Miscellaneous Sonnets, p. 187. different work-associated also with the calamities of authors-the "Pilgrim's Progress," the great sacred prose fiction of our literature, which justifies the title given to John Bunyan by D'Israeli, who calls him "the Spenser of the people." It is one of the few books which, translated into the various languages of Europe, has gained an audience as large as Christendom. In his own country, he caught the ear of the people by using the people's own speech-genuine, homely, hearty English-at the time when the language was becoming vitiated, his simple rhetoric being as he describes it in rude verse: "Thine only way, Before them all, is to say out thy say In thine own native language, which no man But the author who is most truly to be looked on as the representative of the latter part of the seventeenth century is Dryden, the laureate of the court of Charles the Second. That degenerate era is reflected both in the character of Dryden's writings and in their quick-earned popularity. Content to write for his own age alone, rather than for all after-time, a brief popularity has been followed by the utter neglect-a wise neglectof a very large portion of his voluminous productions. His genius did not raise itself above his times, but dwelling there, a habitation steaming with a thousand vices, his garland and singing-robes were polluted by the contagion. For wellnigh fifty years Dryden was contemporary with Milton, living in the same city much of that time, and * Quoted in Southey's Life of Bunyan, prefixed to his edition of the Pilgrim's Progress, p. 29. How in occasional intercourse; and I cannot but picture to myself how different might have been the career of the young poet, how much purer and nobler the issues of his imagination, how much happier and more genial his life, and how far more honoured his memory, if, instead of setting himself in sympathy with the dominant influences and fashions of the day, and serving them, he had sought communion with the solemn solitude of Milton! noble a spectacle it would have been for after ages to contemplate the older bard, blind, poor, neglected, and with a grieved but unconquered spirit, the younger poet seated at the old man's feet, making himself a partner in his fallen fortunes, honouring and cherishing him, and at the same time fortifying his own heart, and enriching his own imagination! It would have been a filial piety, such as Milton gladly would have rendered to Spenser-homage such as Spenser would have paid to Chaucer. But the soul of Dryden was not cast in heroic mould, nor was it susceptible of that purity, and innocence, and ardour of affection which is often associated with heroism. Dazzled by the prize of a speedy popularity, and losing sight of the poet's high spiritual ministry of "allaying the perturbations of the mind, and setting the affections in right tune," he turned to the base office of pampering the vices of an adulterate generation. Even when his youthful enthusiasm was fired with the ambition of composing an epic poem on King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, (the same subject which had attracted Milton's young imagination,) the high design was swept from his thoughts by the corruption of the times-sacrificed to the ignominious thraldom he was held in by patrons who, exacting unworthy service, would not suffer him to put on the incorruption of a great poet's glory.* In Walter Scott's indignant lines: "Dryden, in immortal strain, Had raised the table-round again, Fit for their souls, a looser lay, The world defrauded of the high design, Profaned the God-given strength, and marred the lofty line."† When we look at Dryden's vigorous command of language, partments in which his genius moved most freely, we may well conceive that a higher region of authorship was in his reach, had he united with intellectual cultivation that moral discipline, which no endowment can dispense with, without grievous peril to its powers. In the following passage from his Edipus, there is a certain tone of reflection and imagery which is not without resemblance to the thought and language of Shakspeare: in prose and verse, the poetic energy in those de * Dryden's intended epic was not a mere vision of youth, but, according to his best biographers, was in his mind at different periods of life, though always deferred by the low influences around him. At one time, King Arthur was the theme; at another, it was Edward the Black Prince subduing Spain. (Mitford's Life, Aldine Poets, p. 78.) Milton's young vision appears in his Epistle to Mansus: "O mihi si mea sors talem concedat amicum Frangam Saxonicas Britonum sub Marte phalanges!" W. B. R. "Ha! again that scream of woe! Thrice have I heard, thrice since the morning dawn'd, Called from some vaulted mansion, Edipus !' When the sun sets, shadows that showed at noon So when we think fate hovers o'er our heads, That one fine stanza in the Ode for St. Cecelia's Day, shows what lyric grandeur Dryden might have attained to: "What passion cannot Music raise and quell? When Tubal struck the chorded shell, His listening brethren stood around, And wondering, on their faces fell, To worship that celestial sound; Less than a god they thought there could not dwell, That spoke so sweetly and so well." In no respect did Dryden more rashly and fatally abandon the authority of his great predecessors, than in his attempt to introduce rhymed tragedies. The introduction of rhyme into the dramatic poetry was a false substitute for that exquisite blank-verse which, in the hand of a great master, is at once so imaginative and natural, that it sounds like an ordinary speech idealized-the dialect of daily life in its highest perfection. But the rhymed dra |