There were not three poets then living who could have written the best lines of the “Heroic Stanzas,” and what is more, those lines were not in the particular manner of either of the poets who, as far as general poetical merit goes, might have written them.

Astræa Redux, 1662

  Is well versified; the lines are seldom weak; the couplets have that pointed manner which Cowley and Denham had taught the world to require; they are harmonious, but not so varied as the style he afterwards adopted.

Annus Mirabilis, 1667

  I am very well pleased this night with reading a poem I brought home with me last night from Westminster Hall, of Dryden’s upon the present war; a very good poem.

  This poem is written with great diligence, yet does not fully answer the expectation raised by such subjects and such a writer. With the stanza of Davenant he has sometimes his vein of parenthesis, and incidental disquisition, and stops his narrative for a wise remark. The general fault is, that he affords more sentiment than description, and does not so much impress scenes upon the fancy, as deduce consequences and make comparisons.

  Dryden fails in the power of elegant expression, till he ventures upon something which it is impossible to express. The love of conceit and point, that inveterate though decaying disease of the literature of the time, has not failed to infect the “Annus Mirabilis.”

  The “Annus Mirabilis” is a tedious performance; it is a tissue of far-fetched, heavy, lumbering conceits, and in the worst style of what has been denominated metaphysical poetry.

  The “Annus Mirabilis” shows great command of expression, and a fine ear for heroic rhyme. Here its merits end. Not only has it no claim to be called poetry; but it seems to be the work of a man who could never, by any possibility, write poetry. Its affected similes are the best part of it. Gaudy weeds present a more encouraging spectacle than utter barrenness. There is scarcely a single stanza in this long work, to which the imagination seems to have contributed any thing. It is produced, not by creation, but by construction. It is made up, not of pictures, but of inferences.

  A very good poem, in some sort, it continues to be, in spite of its amazing blemishes.

  Both in its merits and in its defects it bears a close resemblance to the “Pharsalia” of Lucan. It is enriched with some fine touches of natural description, and, if the moonlight night at sea and the simile of the bees were borrowed from Virgil, the pictures of the dying hare, of the baffled falcon, of the herded beasts lying on the dewy grass, and of the moon “blunting its crescent on the edge of day,” show that Dryden had the eye of an artist as he wandered about the park at Charlton. The work is disfigured with many “metaphysical” extravagances, but the King’s prayer, as well as the concluding stanzas, must rank among the most majestic passages in English rhetorical poetry.

  The fire and spirit of “Annus Mirabilis” are nothing short of amazing, when the difficulties which beset the author (though partly by his own choosing) are remembered. There was, first, the difficulty of his subject, which, as a perusal of the poem cannot fail to reveal the most unsuspecting reader, was by no means made up altogether of materials for congratulation. Yet the “Annus Mirabilis” must really have “done good” to the public; even at the present day it agreeably warms the John Bull sentiment, compounded of patriotism and prejudice, in the corner of an Englishman’s heart.

  Dryden’s poem is distinguished by masterly execution and dignity of style, but it has been justly pointed out that the subject lacks variety. Indeed, the feeling with which we read it is not wholly that of pleasure; but some admiration must be given to the viguor of the writer and to his skilful manipulation of a difficult stanza. A curious feature of the poem is the pious prayer which Charles is made to offer up for his afflicted subjects, and the answer it received.

  There are good lines here and there,—flashes of genius to lighten the way for one who will plod doggedly through. Few read it once; none read it a second time.

Religio Laici, 1682

  Is almost the only work of Dryden which can be considered as a voluntary effusion; in this, therefore, it might be hoped, that the full effulgence of his genius would be found. But unhappily the subject is rather argumentative than poetical; he intended only a specimen of metrical disputation:

  Took a walk, with Wordsworth, under Loughrigg. His conversation has been remarkably agreeable. To-day he talked of Poetry. He held Pope to be a greater poet than Dryden; but Dryden to have most talent, and the strongest understanding. Landor once said to me: “Nothing was ever written in hymn equal to the beginning of Dryden’s ‘Religio Laici,’—the first eleven lines.”

  If in point of style the “Religio Laici” has none of that lightness of touch, and none of that felicitous grace, which throw such charm over the “Epistles” of Horace, on which it was, he says, modelled, it may, short though it be, challenge comparison with any didactic writing in verse since Lucretius vindicated the tenets of Epicurus. The opening verses of this poem are among the most majestic passages in our poetry.

  In one respect this takes the highest place among the works of Dryden, for it is the most perfect example he has given of that reasoning in rhyme of which he was so great a master. There is not and could not be any originality in the reasonings themselves, but Pope’s famous couplet was never so finely illustrated, except by Pope himself:

Threnodia Augustalis, 1685

  The pindaric measure, in which the “Threnodia Augustalis” is written, contains nothing pleasing to modern ears. The rhymes are occasionally so far disjoined, that, like a fashionable married couple, they have nothing of union but the name. The inequalities of the verse are also violent, and remind us of ascending a broken and unequal staircase. But the age had been accustomed to this rhythm, which, however improperly, was considered as a genuine imitation of the style of Pindar. It must also be owned that, wherever, for a little way, Dryden uses a more regular measure, he displays all his usual command of harmony.

  Nothing which Dryden wrote with deliberation in his mature years could be wholly worthless, but it would be difficult to name another of his poems which contains fewer beauties, more prolixity, less merit. It is perhaps the best example to be found in our poetry of what the Greeks called parenthyrsus.

  Even the most willing and the most fluent muse must rapidly exhaust such a theme as the virtues of King Charles II., and in his “Threnodia Augustalis,” written on the King’s death, Dryden found little to add to what he had sung in the “Astræa Redux,” composed in honour of the Restoration,—except that his Majesty died hard.

  His “Threnodia Augustalis,” or funeral poem on Charles the Second, may be taken as the chief official production of his laureateship. The difficulties of such performances are well known, and the reproaches brought against their faults are pretty well stereotyped. “Threnodia Augustalis” is not exempt from the faults of its kind; but it has merits which for that kind are decidedly unusual. The stanza which so adroitly at once praises and satirizes Charles’s patronage of literary men is perhaps the best, and certainly the best known; but the termination is also fine.

The Hind and the Panther, 1687

  If he did it well or handsomely, he might deserve some pardon; but alas! how ridiculously doth he appear in print for any religion, who hath made it his business to laugh at all! How can he stand up for any mode of worship, who hath been accustomed to bite, and spit his venom against the very name thereof?

  Mr. Wynne has sent me “The Hind and the Panther,” by which I find John Dryden has a noble ambition to restore poetry to its ancient dignity in wrapping up the mysteries of religion in verse. What a shame it is to me to see him a saint, and remain still the same devil (myself).

  As if by being Laureat, he were as Infallible as St. Peter’s Successor; and had as large a Despotick Power as Pope Stephanus the Sixth to damn his Predecessors; he has assaulted with all the Bitterness imaginable not only the Church of England, but also ridicul’d the several Professions of the Lutherans, Calvinists, Socinians, Presbyterians, Hugonots, Anabaptists, Independents, Quakers, &c., tho’ I must observe by the way, that some people among the Perswasions here mention’d might justly have expected better usage from him on Account of old Acquaintance in the Year 1659.

  The verse in which these doctrines, polemical and political, are delivered, is among the finest specimens of the English heroic stanza. The introductory verses, in particular, are lofty and dignified in the highest degree: as are those in which the splendour and majesty of the Church of Rome are set forth, in all the glowing colours of rich imagery and magnificent language. But the same praise extends to the versification of the whole poem. It never falls, never becomes rugged; rises with the dignified strain of the poetry; sinks into quaint familiarity, where sarcasm and humour are employed; and winds through all the mazes of theological argument without becoming either obscure or prosaic.

  Is every way an extraordinary poem…. The first lines in the “Hind and Panther” are justly reputed among the most musical in our language; and perhaps we observe their rhythm the better because it does not gain much by the sense…. The wit in the “Hind and Panther” is sharp, ready, and pleasant; the reasoning is sometimes admirably close and strong; it is the energy of Bossuet in verse. I do not know that the main argument of the Roman Church could be better stated; all that has been well said for tradition and authority, all that serves to expose the inconsistencies of a vacillating Protestantism, is in the Hind’s mouth.

  Criticism of this kind, involving, as it does, inquiry into the heart and the conscience, is always attended with a measure of uncertainty. But it appears to me that Dryden’s subsequent career attests the sincerity of his change of faith. The internal evidence of “The Hind and Panther” cannot be disregarded. “The Hind and Panther” is the work of an honest Roman Catholic. Whatever might have been the original and exciting cause of the change, there can be no doubt that, while engaged in the composition of that remarkable poem, the writer earnestly believed that he had done his duty. He educated his younger sons in the Catholic faith: spite of solicitation, spite of menace, he never wavered in his allegiance. He had made his choice, and he did not flinch. He was true to his religion and to his king.

  Dryden’s conversion to Romanism has been commonly taken for granted as insincere, and has therefore left an abiding stain on his character, though the other mud thrown at him by angry opponents or rivals brushed off so soon as it was dry. But I think his change of faith susceptible of several explanations, none of them in any way discreditable to him. Where Church and State are habitually associated, it is natural that minds even of a high order should unconsciously come to regard religion as only a subtler mode of police. Dryden, conservative by nature, had discovered before Joseph de Maistre, that Protestantism, so long as it justified its name by continuing to be an active principle, was the abettor of Republicanism, perhaps the vanguard of Anarchy. I think this is hinted in more than one passage in his preface to “The Hind and Panther.” He may very well have preferred Romanism because of its elder claim to authority in all matters of doctrine, but I think he had a deeper reason in the constitution of his own mind. That he was “naturally inclined to scepticism in philosophy,” he tells us of himself in the preface to the “Religio Laici;” but he was a sceptic with an imaginative side, and in such characters scepticism and superstition play into each other’s hands…. Have we forgotten Montaigne’s votive offerings at the shrine of Loreto?

  The plot is singular, and in the highest degree absurd, but it contains passages of as rich imagery and fancy as, perhaps, any other of his works.

  The production of its entirety is remarkable for the skill which its author displayed in carrying on an argument in verse. In this he certainly had no superior among poets, perhaps no equal.

Britannia Rediviva, 1688

  The luckiess “Britannia Rediviva” written on the birth of the most ill-starred of all princes of Wales, born in the purple. It is in couplets, and as no work of Dryden’s written at this time could be worthless, it contains some vigorous verse, but on the whole it is by far the worst of his serious poems; and it was no misfortune for his fame that the Revolution left it out of print for the rest of the author’s life.

Alexander’s Feast, 1697

  I am writing a song for St. Cecilia’s feast, who, you know, is the patroness of music. This is troublesome, and no way beneficial; but I could not deny the stewards, who came in a body to my house to desire that kindness, one of them being Mr. Bridgeman, whose parents are your mother’s friends.

  This ode has been more applauded, perhaps, than it has been felt; however, it is a very fine one, and gives its beauties rather at a third or fourth than at a first perusal.

  One composition must however be distinguished. The ode to “St. Cecilia’s Day,” perhaps the last effort of his poetry, has been always considered as exhibiting the highest flight of fancy, and the exactest nicety of art. This is allowed to stand without a rival. If indeed there is any excellence beyond it in some other of Dryden’s works, that excellence must be found.

  Dryden’s wonderful ode; which is of itself worth all that Pindar has written, as a large diamond is worth a vast heap of gold, because that master-piece is a dithyrambic poem, not a lyric one. And that as well for its want of regularity, as for its subject, which, being perfectly convivial as its title speaks, falls with much propriety into that class which the ancients called dithyrambic, and which were most commonly sacred to Bacchus.

  The language, lofty and striking as the ideas are, is equally simple and harmonious; without far-fetched allusions, or epithets, or metaphors, the story is told as intelligibly as if it had been in the most humble prose.

  Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast” is a magnificent composition, and has high poetical beauties; but to a refined judgment there is something intrinsically unpoetical in the end to which it is devoted, the praises of revel and sensuality. It corresponds to a process of clever reasoning erected on an untrue foundation—the one is a fallacy, the other is out of taste.

  Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast” is undoubtedly the lyric master-piece of English poetry, in respect to versification; exemplifying as it does, all the capabilities of our language in the use of iambics, trochees, anapæsts, dactyls, and spondees.

  A masterpiece of rapture and of art, which Victor Hugo alone has come up to.

  His best lyric composition, “Alexander’s Feast” was once thought the finest thing of the kind in English literature, but time has been gradually, and surely and justly, diminishing its reputation.

Virgil, 1697

  I am informed Mr. Dryden is now translating of Virgil; and although I must own it is a fault to forestall or anticipate the praise of a man in his labours, yet, big with the greatness of the work, and the vast capacity of the author, I cannot here forbear saying, that Mr. Dryden, in the translating of Virgil, will of a certain make Maro speak better than ever Maro thought.

  The Works of Virgil; containing his Pastorals, Georgics, and Eneis, translated into English verse, by Mr. Dryden, and adorned with one hundred cuts, will be finished this week, and be ready next week to be delivered, as subscribed for, in quires, upon bringing the receipt for the first payment, and paying the second. Printed for Jacob Tonson, etc.

  Dryden, in a long harangue, soothed up the good ancient; called him father, and, by a large deduction of genealogies, made it plainly appear that they were nearly related. Then he humbly proposed an exchange of armour, as a lasting mark of hospitality between them. Virgil consented, (for the goddess Diffidence came unseen, and cast a mist before his eyes,) though his was of gold, and cost a hundred beeves, the other’s but of rusty iron. However, this glittering armour became the modern yet worse than his own. Then they agreed to exchange horses; but, when it came to the trial, Dryden was afraid, and utterly unable to mount.

  Had he translated the whole work, I would no more have attempted Homer after him than Virgil: his version of whom (notwithstanding some human errors) is the most noble and spirited translation I know in any language.

  His Virgil abounds in lines and couplets of the most perfect beauty; but these are mixed with others of a different stamp: nor can they who judge of the original by this translation, ever receive any tolerable idea of that uniform magnificence of sound and language, that exquisite choice of words and figures, and that sweet pathos of expression and of sentiment, which characterise the Mauntan Poet.

  That his cannot be the language of imagination, must have necessarily followed from this,—that there is not a single image from nature in the whole body of his works; and in his translation from Virgil, wherever Virgil can be fairly said to have his eye upon his object, Dryden always spoils the passage.

  He who sits down to Dryden’s translation of Virgil, with the original text spread before him, will be at no loss to point out many passages that are faulty, many indifferently understood, many imperfectly translated, some in which dignity is lost, others in which bombast is substituted in its stead. But the unabated vigour and spirit of the version more than overbalance these and all its other deficiencies. A sedulous scholar might often approach more nearly to the dead letter of Virgil, and give an exact, distinct, sober-minded idea of the meaning and scope of particular passages.

  His Virgil is, in my apprehension, the least successful of his chief works. Lines of consummate excellence are frequently shot, like threads of gold, through the web; but the general texture is of an ordinary material. Dryden was little fitted for a translator of Virgil: his mind was more rapid and vehement than that of his original, but by far less elegant and judicious. This translation seems to have been made in haste; it is more negligent than any of his own poetry; and the style is often almost studiously, and, as it were, spitefully vulgar.

  Dryden’s “Virgil” is, on the whole, a failure; but I am not sure that it does not exhibit the best specimens of his versification: in that work he had not to tax his invention; he had only to think of the expression and versification.

  He had dashed it off with the utmost freedom and fire, and no work was ever more thoroughly identified with its translator. It is Dryden’s “Virgel,” every line of it. A great and almost national interest was felt in the undertaking, such as would be felt now, were it announced that Tennyson was engaged in a translation of Goethe.

  The verses of the Latin poet have the velvet bloom, the dewy softness, the delicate odour of a flower; the version of the Englishman has the hardness and brilliance of a gem: and, when we find only flowers cut in stone, where we expect to see flowers blooming in sweet reality—no matter how skilful the lapidary, how rich the colouring, or pure the water of the jewel—admiring the triumph of art, we miss the sweetness of nature, and long to exchange the rainbow play of coloured light for the stealing fragrance and tender hues of the living blossom.

  Previous to the present century, the extant translations of the Æneid outnumbered those of the Iliad and Odyssey in the proportion of nearly three to one: now, while the press is sending forth version after version of one or both of the Homeric poems, scarcely any one thinks it worth his while to attempt a translation of the Roman epic. But it may be fairly doubted whether Dryden did not close the question a hundred and seventy years ago for any one not, like himself, a poet of commanding original power.

  One need only compare the best known version, Dryden’s, with the Latin, to see the lamentable transformations the old Roman bard has suffered (even when piloted by a poet) at the hands of that seductive siren, Rhyme.

  Marred by coarseness, marred by miserable inequalities, marred by errors of ignorance and errors of inadvertancy, it is still a noble achievement. It is a work instinct with genius, but it is instinct not with the placid and majestic genius of the most patient of artists, but with the impetuous energy of the prince of English rhetorical poets. The tender grace, the pathetic cadences, the subtle verbal mechanism of the most exquisite poet of antiquity will be sought in vain in its vehement and facile diction, in the rushing and somewhat turbid torrent of its narrative. It is indeed one of those works which will never cease to offend the taste and never fail to captivate the attention.

  Has been extolled with perhaps as great unanimity as any translation in any language.

  Dryden’s most extended task, and famous in its time. Though he rarely reproduced the grace of classical writers, he caught their fire; and his scholarship and practised command of verse made him a fluent and usually accurate translator.

Fables, 1699

  I Doe hereby promise to pay John Dryden, Esquire, or order, on the 25th of March, 1699, the sume of two hundred and fifty guineas, in consideration of ten thousand verses, which the said John Dryden, Esquire, is to deliver to me Jacob Tonson, when finished, whereof seaven thousand five hundred verses, more or lesse, are already in the said Jacob Tonson’s possession. And I do hereby further promise and engage my selfe to make up the said sume of two hundred and fifty guineas, three hundred pounds sterling, to the said John Dryden, Esquire, his executors, administrators, or assigns, att the begining of the second impression of the said ten thousand verses. In witness whereof, I have hereunto sett my hand and seal this twentieth day of March, 1698–9.

  His alterations from Chaucer and Boccaccio show a greater knowledge of the taste of his readers, and power of pleasing them, than acquaintance with the genius of his authors. He ekes out the lameness of the verse in the former, and breaks the force of the passion in both. The Tancred and Sigismunda is the only general exception, in which, I think, he has fully retained, if not improved upon, the impassioned declamation of the original. The Honoria has none of the bewildered, dreary, preternatural effect of Boccaccio’s story. Nor has the Flower and the Leaf any thing of the enchanting simplicity and concentrated feeling of Chaucer’s romantic fiction.

  The “Fables” of Dryden, or stories modernized from Boccaccio and Chaucer, are at this day probably the most read and the most popular of Dryden’s poems. They contain passages of so much more impressive beauty, and are altogether so far more adapted to general sympathy, than those we have mentioned, that I should not hesitate to concur in this judgment. Yet Johnson’s accusation of negligence is better supported by these than by the earlier poems. Whether it were that age and misfortune, though they had not impaired the poet’s vigor, had rendered its continual exertion more wearisome, or, as is perhaps the better supposition, be reckoned an easy style, sustained above prose, in some places, rather by metre than expression, more fitted to narration, we find much which might appear slovenly to critics of Johnson’s temper.

  No narrative poems in the language have been more generally admired or read.

  The last and one of the most singular, but at the same time the most brilliantly successful of all his poetical experiments.

  His “Fables” … are deservedly placed at the head of his works. It is of course impossible that they should exhibit the same intellectual strength as his argumentative and satirical poems, but this is more than compensated by their superior attractiveness, the additional scope offered for the display of art, and their comparative freedom from everything that can repel.

  They sin from coarseness, but in style, in magnificent march of verse, in intellectual but not imaginative fire, in ease but not in grace, they are excellent.

Satires

  When I name DRYDEN, I comprehend every varied excellence of our poetry. In harmony, strength, modulation, rhythm, energy, he first displayed the full power of the English language…. He was the first poet who brought to perfection, what I would term, “The Allegory of Satire.”… It was the peculiar happiness of Dryden to give an eternal sense and interest to subjects which are transitory. He placed his scene on the ground of actual history.

  Dryden occupies the foremost place in the foremost ranks of English Didactic Writers…. His Satire is appalling, and tremendous; and not the less so, for its extreme polish and splendour. It excites our indignation against its objects, not only on account of the follies, or faults, which it imputes to them, but also on account of their writhing beneath the infliction of so splendid a weapon. We forgot the offender in the awfulness and majesty of the power by which he is crushed. Instead of shrinking at the horror of the carnage, we are lost in admiration of the brilliancy of the victory. Like the lightning of heaven, the Satire of Dryden throws a splendour around the objects which it destroys. He has immortalised the persons whom he branded with infamy and contempt; for who would have remembered Shadwell, if he had not been handed down to everlasting fame as Mac Flecnoe?

  But there is a difference between a spontaneous effusion of rage and hate, and a cold and malignant preparation of bitterness. The satire which indignation makes will always be the most sympathized with; and the genial man, like Dryden, the most admired. Dryden professes to prefer Juvenal to Horace for his own reading; and this I can quite understand. There are the marks of personal heat in old Dryden’s Satires, and generally a blending of humor and passion, a qualification of scorn by fun, which show you that it was natural for him to hold that opinion. In him, as in Juvenal and some others, the personality and the savageness are accompanied by traces of the satirist’s other private qualities—his wisdom, fancy homeliness. The rod with which he castigates has the leaves and blossoms still sticking to it. The goodness of his nature shows itself when he is angry, even; consequently you sympathize with him, and do not pity his victims so much.

  There are passages of Dryden’s satires in which every couplet has not only the force but the actual sound of a slap in the face. The rapidity of movement from one couplet to the other is another remarkable characteristic. Even Pope, master as he was of verse, often fell into the fault of isolating his couplets too much, as if he expected applause between each, and wished to give time for it. Dryden’s verse, on the other hand, strides along with a careless Olympian motion, as if the writer were looking at his victims rather with a kind of good-humoured scorn than with any elaborate triumph.

Absalom and Achitophel, 1681–82

  The true end of satire is the amendment of vices by correction. And he who writes honestly is no more an enemy to the offender than the physician to the patient, when he prescribes harsh remedies to an inveterate disease; for those are only in order to prevent the chirurgeon’s work of an Ense rescindendum, which I wish not to my very enemies. To conclude all; if the body politic have any analogy to the natural, in my weak judgment, an act of oblivion were as necessary in a hot distempered state as an opiate would be in a raging fever.

  This natural pride and ambition of the soul is very much gratified in the reading of a fable; for, in writings of this kind the reader comes in for half of the performance; every thing appears to him like a discovery of his own…. For this reason the “Absalom and Achitophel” was one of the most popular poems that ever appeared in English.

  This poem is said to be one of the most perfect allegorical pieces that our language has produced. It is carried on through the whole with equal strength and propriety. The veil is no where laid aside. There is a just similarity in the characters, which are exactly pourtrayed; the lineaments are well copied; the colouring is lively; the groupings show the hand of a master, and may serve to convince us, that Mr. Dryden knew his own power when he asserted, that he found it easier to write severely than gently.

  “Absalom and Achitophel” is a work so well known, that particular criticism is superfluous. If it be considered as a poem political and controversial, it will be found to comprise all the excellences of which the subject is susceptible; acrimony of censure, elegance of praise, artful delineation of characters, variety and vigour of sentiment, happy turns of language, and pleasing harmony of numbers; and all these raised to such a height as can scarcely be found in any other English composition.

  You will find this a good gage or criterion of genius,—whether it progresses and evolves, or only spins upon itself. Take Dryden’s Achitophel and Zimri,—Shaftesbury and Buckingham; every line adds to or modifies the character, which is, as it were, a-building up to the very last verse; whereas, in Pope’s Timon, &c., the first two or three couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirised.

  The greatest of his satires is “Absalom and Achitophel,”—that work in which his powers become fully known in the world, and which, as many think, he never surpassed. The admirable fitness of the English Couplet for satire had never been shown before; in less skilful hands it had been ineffective. He does not frequently, in his poem, carry the sense beyond the second line, which except when skilfully contrived, as it often is by himself, is apt to enfeeble the emphasis; his triplets are less numerous than usual, but energetic. The spontaneous ease of expression, the rapid transitions, the general elasticity and movement, have never been excelled. It is superfluous to praise the discrimination and vivacity of the chief characters.

  Not even in the elegant gallery of the Horatian satire, nor in the darker and more tragic pictures of Juvenal, can we find any delineations, admirable though they be, equal in vigour, life likeness, and intensity of colouring, to the rich and magnificent collection of portraits given in “Absalom and Achitophel.”

  Of Dryden’s Satires we have already spoken in a general way. “Absalom and Achitophel” is of course the masterpiece, and cannot be too highly praised as a gallery of portraits, and for the daring force and felicity of its style. Why enlarge on a poem, almost every line of which has become a proverb?

  In one respect this poem stands alone in literature. A party pamphlet dedicated to the hour, it is yet immortal. No poem in our language is so interpenetrated with contemporary allusion, with contemporary portraiture, with contemporary point, yet no poem in our language has been more enjoyed by succeeding generations of readers. Scores of intelligent men who know by heart the characters of Zimri and Achitophel are content to remain in ignorance of the political careers of Buckingham and Shaftesbury. The speech in which Achitophel incites his faltering disciple has been admired and recited by hundreds who have been blind to its historical fidelity and to its subtle personalities.

  In what other poem of the kind will be found, together with so much versatility of wit, so incisive a directness of poetic eloquence? Dryden is here at his best; and being at his best, he is entirely free from that irrepressible desire to outdo himself.

The Medal, 1682

  The “Medal,” written upon the same principles with “Absalom and Achitophel,” but upon a narrower plan, gives less pleasure, though it discovers equal abilities in the writer. The superstructure cannot extend beyond the foundation; a single character or incident cannot furnish as many ideas, as a series of events, or multiplicity of agents. This poem therefore, since time has left it to itself, is not much read, nor perhaps generally understood; yet it abounds with touches both of humorous and serious satire.

  The merits of “The Medal,” as a satirical poem, are universally acknowledged; nor does it greatly suffer from being placed as the subject naturally invites, in comparison with “Absalom and Achitophel.”… The language is as striking as the ideas and subject. The illustrations and images are short and apposite, such as give force to the argument, and flow easily into the diction, without appearing to have been laboured, or brought from a distance. I fear, however some of the scriptural allusions are censurable as too free, if not profane. The verse has all the commanding emphasis with which Dryden, beyond any other poet, knew how to body forth and adorn his poetical arguments…. The popularity of “The Medal” did not cease with the crisis that gave it birth.

  In “The Medal” he hurled at Shaftesbury and his party a philippic which, for rancorous abuse, for lofty and uncompromising scorn, for coarse, scathing, ruthless denunciation, couched in diction which now swells to the declamatory grandeur of Juvenal and now sinks to the sordid vulgarity of Swift, has no parallel in our literature. The former attack, indeed, was mercy to this new outburst. To find anything approaching to it in severity and skill we must go back to Claudian’s savage onslaught on the Achitophel of the fourth century, or forward to Akenside’s diatribe against Pulteney.

Mac Flecknoe, 1682

  The severity of this satire, and the excellence of its versification, give it a distinguished rank in this species of composition. At present, an ordinary reader would scarcely suppose that Shadwell, who is here meant by Mac Flecknoe, was worth being chastised; and that Dryden, descending to such game, was like an eagle stooping to catch flies. The truth however is, Shadwell at one time held divided reputation with this great poet. Every age produces its fashionable dunces, who, by following the transcient topic or humour of the day, supply talkative ignorance with materials for conversation.

  “Mac-Flecknoe” must be allowed to be one of the keenest satires in the English language. It is what Dryden has elsewhere termed a Varronian satire; that is, as he seems to use the phrase, one in which the author is not contented with general sarcasm upon the object of attack, but where he has woven his piece into a sort of imaginary story, or scene, in which he introduces the person whom he ridicules as a principal actor. The position in which Dryden has placed Shadwell is the most mortifying to literary vanity which can possibly be imagined, and is hardly excelled by the device of Pope in “The Dunciad,” who has obviously followed the steps of his predecessor.

  Certainly to be numbered among Dryden’s masterpieces. The raillery, though neither nice nor graceful, is light, and with one or two exceptions free from that offensive coarseness which mars so many of his satirical compositions.

  This most happily executed retort upon a by no means despicable antagonist has a double claim to immortality:—its own delightful execution, and the fact that this attempt to extinguish a single Dunce suggested to Pope the heroic idea of annihilating the whole tribe.

Prose

  Dryden may be properly considered as the father of English criticism, as the writer who first taught us to determine upon principles the merit of composition. Of our former poets, the greatest dramatist wrote without rules, conducted through life and nature by a genius that rarely misled, and rarely deserted him. Of the rest, those who knew the laws of propriety had neglected to teach them.

  If a new edition he wanted of Dryden’s critical prose works, I know of nothing better worth republishing. The matter is for the most part excellent: the manner incomparable throughout. There cannot be a better antidote against our modern innovations in style than his compositions—perspicuous, graceful, elegant, humorous and easy.

  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. 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.

  It would be superfluous to echo the praise of Dryden’s prose style, which is in every one’s mouth. Perhaps it may not be equally so, to suggest a limitation of it. Its excellence is an ease and apparent negligence of phrase, which shows, as it were, a powerful mind en deshabille, and free from the fetters of study…. We cannot think the style of Dryden adapted to an historical, much less to a didactic work. We should, indeed, strongly recommend the study of it to those engaged in such compositions, so far as to relieve, in some degree, by its variety and copiousness of English idiom, that stiffness and monotony, which habits of precise and laborious thinking, especially upon abstract subjects, are very apt to engender.

  He had a large soul for a man, containing sundry Queen Anne’s men, one with another, like quartetto tables; but it was not a large soul for a poet, and it entertained the universe by potato-patches. He established finally the reign of the literati for the reign of the poets—and the critics clapped their hands. He established finally the despotism of the final emphasis—and no one dared, in affecting criticism, to speak any more at all against a tinkling cymbal.

  Dryden then has the merit of converting this corruption and dissolution of our old language into a new birth and renovation. And not only must we thank him for making the best of the inevitable circumstances and tendencies of the time, but also praise him absolutely for definitely improving our language. It is true that he sacrificed a great deal of the old beauty of English writing, but that sacrifice was inevitable; he retained all that it was practicable to save, and he added at the same time all the new excellence of which the time was capable. You may call it, if you please, a democratic movement in the language. It was easier henceforth both to write and to read. To understand written English, it was not necessary first to understand Latin; and yet written English was little less instructive than it had been, or if it was less elevating, it was on the other hand more refining.

  English prose is indebted to Dryden for having freed it from the cloister of pedantry. He, more than any other single writer, contributed, as well by precept as example, to give it suppleness of movement and the easier air of the modern world. His own style, juicy with proverbial phrases, has that familiar dignity, so hard to attain, perhaps unattainable except by one who, like Dryden, feels that his position is assured. Charles Cotton is as easy, but not so elegant; Walton as familiar, but not so flowing; Swift as idiomatic, but not so elevated; Burke more splendid, but not so equally luminous.

  We feel in him the stress of modern society, the shiftings of modern thought, the modern spirit of criticism which tries, in the balance of reasoning opinion and the recognized canons of excellence, himself and his performances in one scale, and all sorts of other writers and their performances in another, not perhaps too equitably poised…. In his time criticism was almost a novelty in England. His method was trenchant, decisive, and broad, his perceptions fresh and vigorous, his grasp solid and firm; he said many fine things finely; and his writings of this class had what they merited, a great deal of influence.

  The occasional insertion of a harmless colloquialism or trifling touch of pathos betray the hand of the man who is already master both of his thoughts and of his pen. Swift and Thackeray alone excel Dryden in this peculiar excellence. No one can throw in a political allusion with more effect except Swift himself.

  He is one of the few English poets of high excellence—they may be counted on the fingers—who deserve almost equal credit for their healthy judgments as critics. Right or wrong, his criticism is always manly, always intelligent, always rich in the suggestiveness which is the fruit of a fine imagination and of a capacious intellect.

  Verily, John Dryden perpetuated more rhetorical nonsense than any other literary critic that ever lived.

  Respect for Dryden as a critic has been steadily growing during the last two centuries; what he wrote of Chaucer may with a modification be applied to himself—“He is a fountain of good sense.” He was so open minded and progressive all through his life that the study of his criticism becomes especially interesting as an illustration of literary development. His mind was vigorous rather than subtle, and his sympathies were with the Restoration school, at whose head he stands; yet he manifests no little catholicity and sensitiveness. He is moreover one of the most agreeable prose authors in our literature, writing “prose such as we would all gladly use if we only knew how”—easy and clear, entirely unostentatious, with the pleasantest touches of familiarity, and yet not lacking in seriousness and a gentleman’s dignity.

  To him we owe that perfection of ease, that familiar intercourse between author and reader, that constant reference to the common judgment of educated men, which gave its best note to English prose.

  No later prose writer can approach him in strength, freedom, and harmony of expression. In reading him, when at his best, we are reminded of his own description of Absalom:

  Dryden is master of comparative criticism: he has something of the historical method; he is unrivalled in the art of seizing the distinctive qualities of his author and of setting them before us with the lightest touch. His very style, so pointed yet so easy, is enough in itself to mark the gulf that lies between the age of Elizabeth and the age of the Restoration. All the Elizabethan critics, Sidney himself hardly excepted, bore some trace of the schoolmaster. Dryden was the first to meet his readers entirely as an equal, and talk to them as a friend with friends. It is Dryden, and not Sainte-Beuve, who is the true father of the literary causerie; and he still remains its unequalled master.

  Dryden’s position as the first writer of modern English prose has been long recognized, with hardly a dissenting voice. The “Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” his first separate publication in prose, is thus a work memorable in the history of English style.

  The separate, positive sentences of Dryden, are of small account in his work as critic. His virtue is that, in a time when literature was pestered and cramped with formulas, he found it impossible to write otherwise than freely. He is skeptical, tentative, disengaged, where most of his contemporaries, and most of his successors for a hundred years, are pledged to certain dogmas and principles.

  Dryden himself had given English prose its most masterly, almost its final form.

General

  You do live in as much ignorance and darkness as you did in the womb: your writings are like a Jack-of-all-trade’s shop; they have a variety, but nothing of value; and if thou art not the dullest plant-animal that ever the earth produced, all that I have conversed with are strangely mistaken in thee.

  Mr. Dryden is the most Voluminous Dramatick Writer of our Age, he having already extant above Twenty Plays of his own writing, as the Title-page of each would perswade the World; tho’ some people have been so bold as to call the Truth of this in question, and to propogate in the world another Opinion. His Genius seems to me to incline to Tragedy and Satyr, rather than Comedy: and methinks he writes much better in Heroicks, than in blank Verse.

  I cannot pass by that admirable English poet, without endeavouring to make his country sensible of the obligations they have to his Muse. Whether they consider the flowing grace of his versification, the vigorous sallies of his fancy, or the peculiar delicacy of his periods, they all discover excellences never to be enough admired. If they trace him from the first productions of his youth to the last performances of his age, they will find that as the tyranny of rhyme never imposed on the perspicuity of sense, so a languid sense never wanted to be set off by the harmony of rhyme. And as his earlier works wanted no maturity, so his latter wanted no force or spirit. The falling off of his hair had no other consequence than to make his laurels be seen the more.

  No man hath written in our language so much, and so various matter, and in so various manners so well…. He was equally excellent in verse and in prose. His prose had all the clearness imaginable, together with all the nobleness of expression; all the graces and ornaments proper and peculiar to it, without deviating into the language or diction of poetry…. His versification and his numbers he could learn of nobody; for he first possessed those talents in perfection in our tongue. And they, who have best succeeded in them since his time, have been indebted to his example…. Take his verses and divest them of their rhymes, disjoint them in their numbers, transpose their expressions, make what arrangement and disposition you please of his words, yet shall there eternally be poetry, and something which will be found incapable of being resolved into absolute prose; an incontestable characteristic of a truly poetical genius. I will say but one word more in general of his writings, which is, that what he has done in any one species, or distinct kind, would have been sufficient to have acquired him a great name. If he had written nothing but his prefaces, or nothing but his songs or his prologues, each of them would have entitled him to the preference and distinction of excelling in his kind.

  Dryden, though my near relation, is one I have often blamed as well as pitied. He was poor, and in great haste to finish his plays, because by them he chiefly supported his family, and this made him so very incorrect; he likewise brought in the Alexandrine verse at the end of his triplets.

  In this almost general corruption Dryden, whose plays were more famed for their wit than their chastity, led the way, which he fairly confesses and endeavours to excuse in his epilogue to the “Pilgrim,” revived in 1700 for his benefit in his declining age and fortune.

  I learned versification wholly from Dryden’s works; who had improved it much beyond any of our former poets; and would, probably, have brought it to its perfection, had not he been unhappily obliged to write so often in haste.

  The critics have remarked, that as to tragedy, he seldom touches the passions, but deals rather in pompous language, poetical flights, and descriptions; and too frequently makes his characters speak better than they have occasion, or ought to do, when their sphere in the drama is considered: And it is peculiar to Dryden (says Mr. Addison) to make his personages, as wise, witty, elegant and polite as himself. That he could not so intimately affect the tender passions, is certain, for we find no play of his, in which we are much disposed to weep; and we are so often inchanted with beautiful descriptions, and noble flights of fancy, that we forget the business of the play, and are only attentive to the poet, while the characters sleep.

  The character of Dryden’s poetry is as animated as what it paints.

  The strongest demonstration of his no-taste for the buskin are his tragedies fringed with rhyme; which, in epic poetry is a sore disease, in the tragic absolute death. To Dryden’s enormity, Pope’s was a slight offence…. “Must rhyme,” then say you, “be banished?” I wish the nature of our language could bear its entire expulsion; but our lesser poetry stands in need of a toleration for it; it raises that, but sinks the great; as spangles adorn children, but expose men.

  Dryden, though a great and undisputed genius, had the same cast as L’Estrange. Even his plays discover him to be a party-man, and the same principle infects his style in subjects of the lightest nature; but the English tongue, as it stands at present, is greatly his debtor. He first gave it regular harmony, and discovered its latent powers. It was his pen that formed the Congreves, the Priors, and the Addisons, who succeeded him; and had it not been for Dryden we never should have known a Pope, at least in the meridian lustre he now displays. But Dryden’s excellencies as a writer were not confined to poetry alone. There is in his prose writings an ease and elegance that have never yet been so well united in works of taste or criticism.

  Remember Dryden, and be blind to all his faults.

  Dryden was the father of true English poetry, and the most universal of all poets. This universality has been objected to him as a fault; but it was the unhappy effect of penury and dependance. He was not at liberty to pursue his own inclination; but was frequently obliged to prostitute his pen to such persons and things as a man of his talents must have despised. He was the great improver of our language and versification. The chains of our English bards were formerly heard to rattle only; in the age of Waller and Dryden, they became harmonious. He has failed in most of his dramatic writings, of which the prologues, epilogues, and prefaces, are generally more valuable than the pieces to which they are affixed. But even in this branch of poetry, he has written enough to perpetuate his fame; as his “All for Love,” his “Spanish Friar,” and “Don Sebastian,” can never be forgotten. There was a native fire in this great poet, which poverty could not damp, nor old age extinguish. On the contrary, he was still improving as a writer, while he was declining as a man; and was far advanced in years when he wrote his “Alexander’s Feast,” which is confessedly at the head of modern lyrics, and in the true spirit of the ancients. Great injury has been done him, in taking an estimate of his character from the meanest of his productions. It would be just as uncandid, to determine the merit of Kneller, from the vilest of his paintings.

  There is no modern writer, whose style is more distinguishable…. His English is pure and simple, nervous and clear, to a degree which Pope has never exceeded, and not always equalled…. Dryden’s genius did not lead him to the sublime or pathetic. Good strokes of both may be found in him; but they are momentary, and seem to be accidental. He is too witty for the one, and too familiar for the other…. Pope excels in solemnity of sound; Dryden, in an easy melody, and boundless variety of rhythm. In this last respect he is perhaps superior to all other English poets, Milton himself not excepted. Till Dryden appeared, none of our writers in rhyme of the last century approached in any measure to the harmony of Fairfax and Spenser.

  His literature, though not always free from ostentation, will be commonly found either obvious, and made his own by the art of dressing it; or superficial, which, by what he gives, shews what he wanted; or erroneous, hastily collected, and negligently scattered. Yet it cannot be said that his genius is ever unprovided of matter, or that his fancy languishes in penury of ideas. His works abound with knowledge, and sparkle with illustrations. There is scarcely any science or faculty that does not supply him with occasional images and lucky similitudes; every page discovers a mind very widely acquainted both with art and nature, and in full possession of great stores of intellectual wealth. Of him that knows much it is natural to suppose that he has read with diligence: yet I rather believe that the knowledge of Dryden was gleaned from accidental intelligence and various conversation, by a quick apprehension, a judicious selection, and a happy memory, a keen appetite of knowledge, and a powerful digestion; by vigilance that permitted nothing to pass without notice, and a habit of reflection that suffered nothing useful to be lost. A mind like Dryden’s, always curious, always active, to which every understanding was proud to be associated, and of which every one solicited the regard, by an ambitious display of himself, had a more pleasant, perhaps a nearer way to knowledge than by the silent progress of solitary reading. I do not suppose that he despised books, or intentionally neglected them; but that he was carried out, by the impetuosity of his genius, to more vivid and speedy instructors; and that his studies were rather desultory and fortuitous than constant and systematical.

  But I admire Dryden most, [he had been speaking of Pope], who has succeeded by a mere dint of genius, and in spite of a laziness and a carelessness almost peculiar to himself. His faults are numberless, and so are his beauties. His faults are those of a great man, and his beauties are such (at least sometimes) as Pope with all his touching and retouching, could never equal.

  Dryden’s practical knowledge of English was beyond all others exquisite and wonderful.

  Dryden has rather paraphrased than translated, and though in the small portion he has favoured us with, his versification be, as usual, spirited and easy, it wants the majesty and solemn colouring of Lucretius; and towards the conclusion of the fourth book he is more licentious, broad and open, than the text, faulty as it undoubtedly is, in this respect, will warrant.

  I was much pleased to hear of your engagement with Dryden: not that he is, as a poet, any great favourite of mine: I admire his talents and genius highly,—but his is not a poetical genius. The only qualities I can find in Dryden that are essentially poetical, are a certain ardour and impetuosity of mind, with an excellent ear. It may seem strange that I do not add to this, great command of language: That he certainly has, and of such language, too, as it is most desirable that a poet should possess, or rather that he should not be without. But it is not language that is, in the highest sense of the word, poetical, being neither of the imagination nor of the passions; I mean the amiable, the ennobling, or the intense passions. I do not mean to say that there is nothing of this in Dryden, but as little, I think, as is possible, considering how much he has written…. Dryden had neither a tender heart nor a lofty sense of moral dignity.

  This man, from his influence in fixing versification and diction, especially in rhyme, has acquired a reputation altogether disproportionate to his true merit. We shall not here inquire whether his translations of the Latin poets are not manneristical paraphrases, whether his political allegories, now that party interest is dead, can be read without the greatest wearisomeness; but his plays are, considered with reference to his great reputation, incredibly bad. Dryden had a flowing and easy versification, the knowledge which he possessed was rather considerable, but undigested, and all this was coupled with the talent of giving a certain appearance of novelty to what he borrowed from every quarter: his serviceable muse was the resource of an irregular life.

  Dryden’s slovenly verses written for the trade.

  Dryden was a better prose-writer, and a bolder and more varied versifier, than Pope. He was a more vigorous thinker, a more correct and logical declaimer, and had more of what may be called strength of mind than Pope; but he had not the same refinement and delicacy of feeling.

  He is a writer of manly and elastic character. His strong judgement gave force as well as direction to a flexible fancy; and his harmony is generally the echo of solid thoughts. But he is not gifted with intense or lofty sensibility; on the contrary, the grosser any idea is the happier he seems to expatiate upon it. The transports of the heart, and the deep and varied delineations of the passions, are strangers to its poetry. He could describe character in the abstract, but could not embody it in the drama, for he entered into character more than clear perception than fervid sympathy. This great high-priest of all the nine was not a confessor to the finer secrets of the human breast. Had the subject of Eloisa fallen into his hands, he would have left but a coarse draught of her passion.

  Dryden was, beyond all comparison, the greatest poet of his own day; and, endued as he was with a vigorous and discursive imagination, and possessing a mastery over his language which no later writer has attained, if he had known nothing of foreign literature, and been left to form himself on the models of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton; or if he had lived in the country, at a distance from the pollutions of courts, factions, and playhouses, there is reason to think that he would have built up the pure and original school of English poetry so firmly, as to have made it impossible for fashion, or caprice, or prejudice of any sort, ever to have rendered any other popular among our own inhabitants. As it is, he has not written one line that is pathetic, and very few that can be considered as sublime.

  The public voice has assigned to Dryden the first place in the second rank of our poets—no mean station in a table of intellectual precedency so rich in illustrious names. It is allowed that, even of the few who were his superiors in genius, none has exercised a more extensive or permanent influence on the national habits of thought and expression. His life was commensurate with the period during which a great revolution in the public taste was effected; and in that revolution he played the part of Cromwell. By unscrupulously taking the lead in its wildest excesses, he obtained the absolute guidance of it. By trampling on laws, he acquired the authority of a legislator. By signalizing himself as the most daring and irreverent of rebels, he raised himself to the dignity of a recognised prince. He commenced his career by the most frantic outrages. He terminated it in the repose of established sovereignty—the author of a new code, the root of a new dynasty…. His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar. When he attempted the highest flights, he became ridiculous; but while he remained in a lower region, he outstripped all competitors…. His command of language was immense. With him died the secret of the old poetical diction of England—the art of producing rich effects by familiar words. In the following century, it was as completely lost as the gothic method of painting glass, and was but poorly supplied by the laborious and tesselated imitations of Mason and Gray. On the other hand, he was the first writer under whose skilful management the scientific vocabulary fell into natural and pleasing verse. In this department, he succeeded as completely as his contemporary Gibbons succeeded in the similar enterprise of carving the most delicate flowers from heart of oak. The toughest and most knotty parts of language became ductile at his touch. His versification, in the same manner, while it gave the first model of that neatness and precision which the following generation esteemed so highly, exhibited, at the same time, the last examples of nobleness, freedom, variety of pause and cadence.

  Of all our really great poets, Dryden is the one least indebted to woman, and to whom, in return, women are least indebted: he is almost devoid of sentiment in the true meaning of the word…. In his tragedies, his heroines on stilts, and his draw-cansir heroes, whine, rant, strut and rage, and tear passion to tatters—to very rags; but love, such as it exists in gentle, pure, unselfish bosoms—love, such as it glows in the pages of Shakespeare and Spenser, Petrarch and Tasso,—such love

  Dryden’s genius was of that sort which catches fire by its own motion; his chariot wheels get hot by driving fast.

  In Dryden, such is the difference in the structure of his dramas, the characters are, from the outset, surrounded with elaborate contrivances of perplexity. Affections are dissembled, perverted, or misplaced; the calls of duty and the feelings of desire are placed in opposition to each other; the difficulties do not grow out of the progress of the plot, or arise from the natural development of individual character, and the conflict or combinations of the varied passions and affections, but are gratuitously formed: and, at length, when ingenuity has been exhausted, and the arts of evasion baffled by the stubbornness of the materials, a conclusion is obtained by an unnatural and rapid removal of part of the characters, or by an unexpected and unaccountable alteration of their sentiments…. In the very best of Dryden’s plays, there is something of an artificial medium which the poet has interposed between us and nature; we see her features in a glass darkly. It is a style formed after the rules of criticism, from arbitrary opinions and narrow views; its illustrations are tedious, its events improbable, its catastrophes ridiculous. It is wanting in real force, and rapidity of thought and language; it gives no emphatic imitation of real individual character, no strong representation of powerful feeling; the perfume is drawn through a limbec before it reaches us. In Shakespeare, it comes with all the woodland fragrance on its wing, fresh blowing from the violet banks, and breathing the vernal odours. Dryden’s composition is like the artificial grotto raised amid level plains, sparkling with imported minerals, and glittering with reflected and unnatural lights. The old drama resembles rather the cavern, hewn from the marble rock by nature’s hand, whose lofty portals, winding labyrinths, and gigantic chambers, fill the mind with wonder and delight. The one opens into decorated gardens, trellised bowers, and smooth and shaven lawns; the other lies amid nature’s richest and wildest scenes, the glacier, and the granite hills above,—wild flowers, and viny glens and sunlit lakes below.

  Few of his poems are completely unexceptionable, but what transcendent passages are to be found in almost all!

  He never loiters about a single thought or image, never labors about the turn of a phrase. The impression upon our minds, that he wrote with exceeding ease, is irresistible; and I do not know that we have any evidence to repel it. The admiration of Dryden gains upon us, if I may speak from my own experience, with advancing years, as we become more sensible of the difficulty of his style, and of the comparative facility of that which is merely imaginative.

  In studying his works you are struck, throughout, with a mind loosely disciplined in its great intellectual powers. In his critical writings, principles hastily proposed from partial consideration, are set up and forgotten. He intends largely, but a thousand causes restrain and lame the execution. Milton, in unsettled times, maintained his inward tranquility of soul—and “dwelt apart.” Dryden, in times oscillating indeed and various, yet quieter and safer, discloses private disturbance. His own bark appears to be borne on continually on a restless, violent, whirling and tossing stream. It never sleeps in brightness on its own calm and bright shadow. An unhappy biography weaves itself into the history of the inly dwelling Genius.

  Dryden’s wardrobe, we are told, was like that of a Russian noble—“all filth and diamonds, dirty linen and inestimable sables.” To such speculations and fancies as these are we led, when we acknowledge the truth of the maxim, that words are the dress of thought.

  If Dryden had been cast in a somewhat finer mould, and added sentiment to his other qualifications, he would have been almost as great a poet in the world of nature, as he was in that of art and the town. He had force, expression, scholarship, geniality, admirable good sense, musical enthusiasm. The rhymed heroic couplet in his hands continues still to be the finest in the language. But his perceptions were more acute than subtle; more sensual, by far, than spiritual. The delicacy of them had no proportion to the strength. He prized the flower, but had little sense of the fragrance; was gross as well as generous in his intellectual diet; and if it had not been genuine and hearty, would have shown an almost impudent delight in doing justice to the least refined of Nature’s impressions. His Venus was not the Celestial. He would as soon have described the coarsest flower, as a rose; sooner, if it was large and luxuriant…. Agreeably to this character of his genius, Dryden’s wit is less airy than masculine; less quick to move than eloquent when roused; less productive of pleasure and love than admiration and a sense of his mastery. His satire, if not so learned and universal as Butler’s, is aimed more at the individual and his public standing, and therefore comes more home to us.

  Next to this poet’s astonishing ease, spirit, and elastic vigour, may be ranked his clear, sharp intellect. He may be called more a logician than a poet. He reasons often, and always acutely, and his rhyme, instead of shackling, strengthens the movement of his argumentation. Parts of his “Religio Laici” and the “Hind and Panther” resemble portions of Duns Scotus or Aquinas set on fire. Indeed, keen, strong intellect, inflamed with passion, and inspirited by that “ardour and impetuosity of mind” which Wordsworth is compelled to allow to him, rather than creative or original genius, is the differentia of Dryden.

  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.

  I do not know that one could make the writings of John Dryden friends; so many of the very cleverest of them are bitter satires, containing a great deal of shrewd observation, sometimes just, as well as severe, but certainly not binding as by any strong ties of affection to their author. Yet there is such a tragedy in the history of a mind so full of power as his, and so unable to guide itself amidst the shoals and quicksands of his time, that I believe we need not, and that we cannot, speak of him merely with the admiration which is due to his gifts; we must feel for him somewhat of the pity that is akin to love.

  Without either creative imagination or any power of pathos, he is in argument, in satire, and in declamatory magnificence, the greatest of our poets. His poetry, indeed, is not the highest kind of poetry, but in that kind he stands unrivaled and unapproached. Pope, his great disciple, who, in correctness, in neatness, and in the brilliancy of epigrammatic point, has outshone his master, has not come near him in easy flexible vigor, in indignant vehemence, in narrative rapidity, any more than he has in sweep and variety of versification. Dryden never writes coldly, or timidly, or drowsily. The movement of verse always sets him on fire, and whatever he produces is a coinage hot from the brain, not slowly scraped or pinched into shape, but struck out as from a die with a few stout blows or a single wrench of the screw. It is this fervor especially which gives to his personal sketches their wonderful life and force.

  Within the limited circle that we have described, Dryden was a conscious artist, and exercised dominion with conscious facility. He had attained to perfect mastery over his medium. Poetic diction and facile rhyme were at his command, and the poet exulted in their use, showing neither effort nor exhaustion in his work. His work was mainly intellectual. He scarcely attempted any that aimed at a boundary, beyond that which circumscribed the usual processes of the understanding. His mind, within such limits, moved with logical precision; but to what has been since called the “Vision and the Faculty divine” he was a stranger. It was neither the gift of his age nor of his genius. The former had to wait for a new birth of the creative power, and attained it in due course…. Let us recognise in Dryden his mental vigour, his vivid touch, his willing service, his impassioned courage, his detestation of vice and meanness, his fiery eloquence, his subtle rhetoric, his steady pursuit of what appeared to him to be truth, and the progress that he made in the direction that led to the desired goal.

  After Milton, the many-sided, fecund, flexible, unequal Dryden, the man of transition and of partition, first in date among the classics, but still broad and powerful.

  John Dryden stands in the foremost rank of English satirists. He is the most forcible and masculine of English poets. For sheer downright intellectual strength we must seek his fellow among the great philosophers and divines,—not among poets. His justice of judgment, variety of faculty, felicity of diction, splendour of invective, have rarely been matched. It is true that the finer and more delicate forms of the imagination did not visit him; his keen observant eye failed to detect their difficult beauty; his ear was deaf to their haunting music. Yet even in his infirmities we have been used to regard him as a not unworthy representative of the English type of character,—unideal, yet manly, sagacious, affectionate, and fairly if not scrupulously honest.

  The songs scattered through Dryden’s plays are strikingly inferior to the rest of his poetry. The confession he makes in one of his dedications that in writing for the stage he consulted the taste of the audiences and not his own, and that, looking at the results, he was equally ashamed of the public and himself, applies with special force to his songs. They seem for the most part to have been thrown off merely to fill up a situation, or produce a transitory effect, without reference to substance, art, or beauty, in their structure. Like nearly all pieces written expressly for music, the convenience of the composer is consulted in many of them rather than the judgment of the poet, although the world had a right to expect that the genius of Dryden would have vindicated itself by reconciling both. Some of the verses designed on this principle undoubtedly exhibit remarkable skill in accommodating the diction and rhythm to the demands of the air; and, however indifferent they may be in perusal, it can be easily understood how effective their breaks, repetitions, and sonorous words (sometimes without much meaning in them) must have been in the delivery. Dryden descended to the smallest things with as much success as he soared to the highest; and, if he had cared to bestow any pains upon such compositions, two or three of the following specimens are sufficient to show with what a subtle fancy and melody of versification he might have enriched this department of our poetical literature.

  In the second class of English poets perhaps no one stands, on the whole, so high as he…. Thrice unhappy he who, born to see things as they might be, is schooled by circumstances to see them as people say they are,—to read God in a prose translation. Such was Dryden’s lot, and such, for a good part of his days, it was by his own choice. He who was of a stature to snatch the torch of life that flashes from lifted hand to hand along the generations, over the heads of inferior men, chose rather to be a link-boy to the stews…. Was he, then, a great poet? Hardly, in the narrowest definition. But he was a strong thinker who sometimes carried common sense to a height where it catches the light of a diviner air, and warmed reason till it had wellnigh the illuminating property of intuition. Certainly he is not, like Spenser, the poets’ poet, but other men have also their rights…. He had, beyond most, the gift of the right word.

  A strong, sharp, subtle and versatile intellect, and a fine ear for numbers, which with practice gave him a matchless power of versification, are Dryden’s chief characteristics of excellence as a poet. The self-contained, self-subsisting imagination of the greater Milton is wanting. He has more strength and larger grasp of mind than his more polished and equable successor, Pope, who divides with him suffrages for the superior place among our classic poets of second rank.

  Within a limited range he was a true poet; his imagination was far from fertile, nor had he much skill in awakening emotion, but he could treat certain subjects magnificently in verse, and often where his imagination fails him he is sustained by the vigor of his understanding and the largeness of his knowledge.

  Dryden has left undone what he should have done, and has done what he should not have done…. His was a singularly solid and judicious mind, an excellent reasoner, accustomed to discriminate his ideas, armed with good long meditated proofs, strong in discussion, asserting principles, establishing his subdivisions, citing authorities, drawing inferences; so that, if we read his prefaces without reading his dramas, we might take him for one of the masters of the dramatic art. He naturally attains a definite prose style; his ideas are unfolded with breadth and clearness; his style is well moulded, exact and simple, free from the affectations and ornaments with which Pope afterwards burdened his own; his expression is, like that of Corneille, ample and periodic, by virtue simply of the internal argumentativeness which unfolds and sustains it. We can see that he thinks, and that on his own behalf; that he combines and verifies his thoughts; that beyond all this, he naturally has a just perception, and that with his method he has good sense…. I have found in him beautiful pieces, but never pleasing ones; he cannot even argue with taste…. In spite of several falls and many slips, he shows a mind constantly upright, bending rather from conventionality than from nature, with a dash and afflatus, occupied with grave thoughts, and subjecting his conduct to his convictions.

  To the plays of Dryden we must not look for the enduring part of his writings. Versatile, vigorous, and inventive as they are, they nevertheless lack wit and genuine pathos, and they are disfigured by bombast, and a coarseness of the crudest, not satisfactorily explained by the prevailing profligacy of the time, or excused by the tardy regrets of the poet’s maturer years. Few of them survived the age of their writer. It is in his satires, translations, fables, and prologues, where he gives full play to his matchless mastery over heroics, that his successes are most signal. As a satirist he was probably unequalled, whether for command of language, management of metre, or the power of reasoning in verse.

  His character led him to conciliation and concession. He was governed by no supreme, elevated impulse, he was a devotee to no theory, but with considerable insight and power of adaptation, adjusted his action to the predominant impressions, the passing circumstances. He undertook literary labor as work, and wrought at it as one apprenticed to the business, rather than as one who felt chiefly the control of inspiration, who built above and beyond the style about him, by impulses transcending it. He bound himself to furnish a certain number of plays each year, and like a shrewd contractor, tried to fill the order in a manner agreeable to the taste of those who gave it.

  Dryden’s conversion to Catholicism had a great indirect influence on the preservation of his fame. It was this which gained him the discipleship and loving imitation of Pope. He thus became by accident, as it were, the literary father and chief model of the greatest poet of the next generation. If his fame had stood simply upon his merits as a poet, he would in all likelihood have been a much less imposing figure in literary history than he is now. The splendid force of his satire must always be admired, but there is surprisingly little of the vast mass of his writings that can be considered worthy of lasting remembrance. He showed little inventive genius. He was simply a masterly littérateur of immense intellectual energy, whose one lucky hit was the first splendid application of heroic couplets to satire and religious, moral, and political argument. Upon this lucky hit supervened another, the accidental discipleship of Pope. Dryden lent his gift of verse to the service of politics, and his fame profited by the connection. It would be unjust to say that his fame was due to this, but it was helped by this; apart from the attachment of Pope, he owed to party also something of the favor of Johnson and the personal championship and editorial zeal of Scott.

  His services had indeed been manifold and splendid. He had determined the bent of a great literature at a great crisis. He had banished for ever the unpruned luxuriance, the licence, the essentially uncritical spirit, which had marked expression in the literature of Elizabeth and James, and he had vindicated the substitution of a style which should proceed on critical principles, which should aim at terseness, precision, and point, should learn to restrain itself, should master the mysteries of selection and suppression…. He had given us the true canons of classical translation. He had shown us how our language could adapt itself with precision to the various needs of didactic prose, of lyric poetry, of argumentative exposition, of satirical invective, of easy narrative, of sonorous declamation. He had exhibited for the first time in all their fulness the power, ductility, and compass of the heroic couplet; and he had demonstrated the possibility of reasoning closely and vigorously in verse, without the elliptical obscurity of Fulke Greville on the one hand or the painful condensation of Davies on the other. Of English classical satire he had practically been the creator…. He had reconstructed and popularised the poetry of romance. He had inaugurated a new era in English prose, and a new era in English criticism…. He is one of those figures which are constantly before us, and if his writings in their entirety are not as familiar to us as they were to our forefathers, their influence is to be traced in ever-recurring allusion and quotation; they have moulded or leavened much of our prose, more of our verse, and almost all our earlier criticism.

  None of his moral qualities better consorted with his magnificent genius than the real modesty which underlay his buoyant self-assertion.

  By the suffrages of his own and succeeding generations, his place is first in the second class of English poets. Perhaps his fame would have suffered little, if he had written not one of his twenty-eight dramas. He could not produce correct representations of human nature, for his was an examining rather than a believing frame of mind; and he wrought literature more as one apprenticed to the business than as one under the control of inspiration: he attained, however, the excellences that lie on the lower grade of the satirical, didactic, and polemic. Not to be numbered with those who have sounded the depths of soul, he is incomparable as a reasoner in verse.

  Let us remember the almost universal corruption of the time, and in special defence of Dryden the fact that, a great poet as he was, he wrote mainly as a journalist, so to speak. In the absence of other ways of reaching the public, his poems were written to order for direct, immediate political effect, and with the same unscrupulousness that is sometimes seen in a corrupt press. This by no means frees his conduct from blame, but it may possibly be in part an explanation.

  His drama, composed when the drama was most dependent upon the court, was written, rather in spite of his nature, to win bread and to please his patrons. His comedies are a lamentable condescension to the worst tendencies of the time. His tragedies, while influenced by the French precedents, and falling into the mock heroics congenial to the hollow sentiment of the court, in which sensuality is covered by a thin veil of sham romance, gave not infrequent opportunity for a vigorous utterance of a rather cynical view of life. The declamatory passages are often in his best style. Whatever their faults no tragedies comparable to his best work have since been written for the stage. The masculine sense and power of sustained arguments gave a force unrivalled in English literature to his satires, and the same qualities appear in the vigorous versification of the “Fables,” which are deformed, however, by the absence of delicate or lofty sentiment. His lyrical poetry, in spite of the vigorous “Alexander’s Feast,” has hardly held its own, though still admired by some critics. His prose is among the first models of a pure English style.

  I can conceive nothing more sinister for the future of English literature than that to any great extent, or among any influential circle of reading and writing men, the majesty and sinewy force of the most masculine of all the English poets should be despised and rejected. Something of a temper less hurried than that of the man who runs and reads is no doubt required for the appreciation of that somewhat heavy-footed and sombre giant of tragic and of narrative song, John Dryden, warring with dunces, marching with sunken head—“a down look,” as Pope described it—through the unappreciative flat places of our second Charles and James. Prosaic at times he is, slow, fatigued, unstimulating; but, at his best, how full of the true sublime, how uplifted by the wind of tragic passion, how stirred to the depths by the noblest intellectual and moral enthusiasm! For my own part, there are moments and moods in which nothing satisfies my ear and my brain as do the great accents of Dryden, while he marches down the page, with his elephants and his standards and his kettledrums, “in the full vintage of his flowing honours.” There must be something effeminate and feeble in the nervous system of a generation which cannot hear this grandiose music, this virile tramp of Dryden’s soldiers and camp-followers; something singularly dull and timid in a spirit that rejects this robust intellectual companion. And, with all his russet suit of homespun, Dryden is imbued to the core with the truest and richest blood of poetry.

  A writer, who in the matter of verbal and rhythmical construction, has been used as a “Gradus ad Parnassum” by such poets as Pope, Goldsmith, and Tennyson, and who is nothing less than the literary ancestor of Walter Scott, his chief admirer and editor, ought certainly to be more generally appreciated than he seems to be at present…. If a young lady should express a wish to become acquainted in a harmless way, with the general texture and spirit of Dryden’s satire, we should refer her to the imitation of it in Tennyson’s “Sea-dreams,” with the comment at the end which so well illustrates the difference in the spirit of the time.

  No fictitious character of his is a live one to-day; you can hardly recall one if you try. No couplet or verselet of his is so freighted with a serene or hopeful philosophy as to make our march the blither by reason of it down the corridors of time. No blast of all his fanfaron of trumpets sounds the opening of the gates upon any Delectable Mountains. A great, clever, literary worker! I think that is all we can say of him. And when you or I pass under his monument in the corner of Westminster Abbey, we will stand bowed respectfully, but not with any such veneration, I think, as we expect to carry to the tomb of Milton or of Chaucer; and if one falls on Pope—what then? I think we might pause—waver; more polish here—more power there—the humanities not radiant in either; and so we might safely sidle away to warm ourselves before the cenotaph of Goldsmith.

  By him poetry was made subservient to politics and to religious polemics, and addressing himself with his varied intellectual gifts to the leading topics of the day, literature, under his auspices, became for the first time a great political power.

  His faults were many, both as a man and as a poet, but he belongs to the race of the giants, and the impress of greatness is stamped upon his works. No student of Dryden can fail to mark the force and sweep of an intellect impatient of restraint. His “long-resounding march” reminds us of a turbulent river that overflows its banks, and if order and perfection of art are sometimes wanting in his verse, there is never the lack of power. Unfortunately many of the best years of his life were devoted to a craft in which he was working against the grain.

  On the whole, few poets have been more fortunate in their critics than Dryden.

  The poet makes cunning pivots and spring-boards out of identical words, on which, without any disgusting repetition, the verse circles, from whence it leaps, and on which the reader’s eye and ear travel easily and pleasantly to the close. The individual line often attempts, and sometimes gains, that magnificent thunder and roll which, to one who has once discerned it, is the very hallmark of the Drydenian decasyllable. With such facilities he must have made his way at any time—how much more at that time, when the contemporary models we have mentioned were rapidly removed by death (except Waller, who lived longer, but produced nothing), when Milton was out of touch with the audience, and when there was no one else?

  Dryden is an admirable example [of the man of letters]: ready to turn his hand to anything, swift in production, easy in manner, free from pedantry, yet accurate, and careful of pure diction; proud of his profession, not treating it as a plaything, like Byron and Scott, yet a man of the world, with his eyes open to what went on about him.

  The songs in Dryden’s plays are cheerful and sprightly. In the higher graces of poetry they are infinitely inferior to Fletcher’s, but they are very good of their kind. With all his consummate genius Dryden could not reproduce such strains as “Lay a garland on my hearse” or “God Lyæus ever young.”

  Dryden was a great originator.

  The recognizing and following of popular taste can easily become other than a merit; but it marks the true journalistic mind, which was Dryden’s, and at another period he would have written very differently. In our own time we can conceive of his occupying such a position as Charles A. Dana, with his ability for polemic writing and leadership in diction, but with the literary side more emphasized, as in the case of Bryant. He has left much that will stand the test of any age, but his whole work must not be judged save in connection with the ferments in which his lot was cast.

  Though Dryden’s poetry is not of the highest class, it is of the very highest kind in its class. Wherever the pure intellect comes into play, there he is invariably excellent. There is never any weakness; there is never any vagueness; there is never any deviation from the true path into aimless digression. His words invariably go straight to the mark, and not unfrequently with a directness and force that fully merit the epithet “burning” applied to them by the poet Gray. His thoughts always rise naturally out of the matter in hand; and in the treatment of the meanest subjects he is not only never mean, but often falls without apparent effort into a felicity of phrase which holds the attention and implants itself in the memory.

  Dryden, a man of supreme talent rather than of great spontaneous genius, was pre-eminently a man of his age. He reflected its gayety, its brilliance, its wit, its immorality; he reflected, also, those nobler and more serious elements of life which it did not utterly lack. He possessed, moreover, many noble qualities which raised him above the level of his age and made him worthy to rank with the great ones of our literature. Strength and solidity of mind, accuracy and comprehensiveness of scholarship, astonishing fluency and versatility, masterly skill as a literary workman, brilliant wit, keenness of discrimination and insight, an imagination vivid if not original, a poetic sense real if not profound—these are some of the qualities which made Dryden great. Nothing about him is more impressive than the range of his literary work, unless it be its excellence in every kind…. As a poet, he was first without even a near rival. No one was his equal as an original poet; no one was his equal as a translator. In imaginative prose, he must yield the palm to Bunyan; but as a literary critic, and master of a thoroughly modern prose style, he was first in his own time, and still commands the respect of the student of literature. It will thus appear that in each of the great departments of literature in his own age his name must be placed in the first rank. Dryden is more, however, than the greatest figure in a comparatively inferior literary period. He is one of the great poets of English literature. Though not of supreme stature, he is still one of the race of giants.

  It was the fault of his age that he was not greater. No man can wholly detach himself from the influences by which he is surrounded; and Dryden came on the stage when a false taste prevailed, and when licentiousness gave moral tone to poetry. Living in the midst of burning religious and political questions, he was drawn into the vortex of controversy. He was always a partisan in some religious or political issue of the day. While this fact has given us some of the best satirical and didactic poems in our language, it did not contribute, perhaps, to the largest development of his poetical powers…. Dryden did not attain to the highest regions of poetry. He could not portray what is deepest and finest in human experience. His strong, masculine hands were too clumsy. He has no charm of pathos; he does not touch that part of our nature where “thoughts do often lie too deep for tears.” But he was a virile thinker and a master of the English tongue. He had the gift of using the right word.

  He wrote a great number of plays, usually in rhyme…. Of these “All’s for Love,” based on the Antony and Cleopatra story, is one of the best, but they all seem to us very tedious, and need be read only by those who wish to make a special study of the theatre of this time. Bits of splendid declamation can be found,—Dryden is always vigorous,—but the plays are artificial structures, and their interest depended on a literary fashion which is past. There is not enough of the stuff of genuine human nature in them to give them vitality. At the same time we cannot fail to be struck with the excellence of the literary workmanship.

  We now possess, thanks to Mr. Christie and Mr. Ker, scholarly, if not irreproachable, editions of Dryden’s poems and of his chief prose writings. His dramas, which, aside from their historical importance, contain much of his best poetry, have yet to be made generally accessible. But a greater need than this remains to be supplied. Despite the seamy side of his character, which is only too obvious, Dryden had a personality full of grace and charm, which reveals itself to sympathetic readers of his works, and for which illustration might be found in contemporary literature. But he has been unfortunate in his biographers. Even Johnson and Scott, of whom most might have been expected, dwell too exclusively on the literary and political aspects of his career. Hence Dryden, who should be as well loved as Dr. Johnson or Charles Lamb—to choose widely different illustrations—is known to the “average men” only as a political and religious turn-coat, who wrote satires on forgotten men and dead issue. Some true lover may yet produce an imaginative portrait of Dryden such as Carlyle has given us of Burns, showing him as the “high and remarkable man” he really was.