Secretary. As he explains in the next Sonnet, loss of eyesight was hastened by his labor upon his Defense of the English People against Salmasius. talent; Matthew XXV. 14-30. thousands at his bidding speed. We have the same thought in Par. Lost, IV. 677-8. Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep. Compare also the Te Deum, 2−3. All the earth doth worship thee. To thee all Angels cry aloud; the Heavens and all the Powers therein. post. This word is a bit of fossil history; it will repay you to dig it out. They also serve who only stand and wait; a beautiful expression of a beautiful thought that has brought consolation to thousands of weary souls. TO CYRIACK SKINNER. Skinner had been a pupil of Milton's and at the date of this Sonnet (probably 1655) was a lawyer of some prominence. this three years' day. We have a similar phrase in 2 Henry VI. ii. 1; these seven years' day.' rings; the Cambridge MS. reads 'talks' which is so much feebler, that Pattison is almost the only editor who retains it. With the magnificent courage of this Sonnet compare the pathetic resignation of Thus with the year Seasons return; but not to me returns Of Nature's works, to me expunged and rased, Of the six short poems of Milton here given, you will do well to commit to memory the lines On Shakespeare, On His Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-Three, and either the Sonnet On His Blindness or To Cyriack Skinner. From these, you cannot fail to learn that Nobility of Thought goes hand-in-hand with Simplicity of Expression and that the highest poetic effects are based upon Sincerity. INTRODUCTION TO DRYDEN AND POPE. DURING the thirty-eight years which elapsed between Milton's Sonnet to Skinner and Dryden's Epistle to Congreve, a great change came over the spirit of English literature. Even before the outbreak of the Civil War (1642) it was evident that the Romantic movement had almost spent its force, running off into such absurdities and extravagancies that even the prosy Waller was welcomed with relief as the herald of a new age. During the time of Puritan ascendancy (1649-1660), with the exception of an occasional Sonnet from Milton, Literature, suffering in silence, hid her diminished head. When she emerged at the Restoration, she found herself in a new world; a world of Realism to which Idealism was dead, a world on whose map the Forest of Ardennes is undiscoverable, but on which the Mall and the Coffee House are printed in large letters. It has been seriously maintained that the poets of this age- such great literary artists as Dryden and Pope- — are not poets at all. But surely they dwell in a Poetry Land of narrow dimensions who cannot find room in it for the author of the Absalom and Achitophel and of the Epistle to Augustus. Was ever dictum more absurd than the following, advanced by a critic of some repute; 1 'Dryden is perhaps the only great writer — he is certainly the only English poet of high rank who appears to be wholly destitute of the gift of observation.'(!) Observation of what? Surely there is power of observing Human Nature in him who etched Zimri, in lines as clear-cut today as they were two hundred years ago. And is not Human Nature as worthy an object of study as Inanimate Nature? Does not its delineation call for as high poetic powers? 'The proper study of mankind is man.' Was there ever a truer line than this hackneyed one of Pope's - hackneyed because so true? The eighteenth century poets then (and with them Dryden belongs) are the poets of Human Nature, or, more specifically, of Man in Society; they confine themselves almost exclusively to this topic; they love the 'sweet shady side of Pall Mall;' caring almost nothing for Inanimate Nature, they have their limits, but within these limits they are unexcelled for keen observation and for aphoristic expression. The form which this expression takes is almost invariably the heroic couplet, an instrument that Dryden forged out of crude materials,' and that Pope polished until it became smooth and shining as a Venetian dagger of glass. Let us not quarrel with them, as did Wordsworth, because 1 Gosse. History of 18th Century Literature, p. 379. 2 The Chaucerian 'couplet' is a different thing. For illustrations, see Notes on Dryden's Character of a Good Parson, pp. 31-32. they contain few 'images from Nature,' but rather let us study them sympathetically, remembering Dryden's saying: Poetry, which is an image of Nature, must generally please, but 'tis not to be understood that all parts of it must please every man. JOHN DRYDEN. BORN in Northamptonshire in 1631. He came of a Puritan family, and accordingly was sent to Cambridge, where he took his degree in 1654. The political and religious tendencies of his later years estranged him completely from his University, causing him even to write, Oxford to him a dearer name shall be After the Restoration (1660) he took to the writing of plays, - almost the only means by which a professional author could then make a living. But his genius was not dramatic, and few of his many attempts in this line are now read, except as literary curiosities. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1670. He did not find his true vein until 1681, when he published the Absalom and Achitophel, the greatest of English satires in verse. Macflecknoe (1682) is hardly inferior. At the Revolution (1688) he was deprived of his position as Poet Laureate, and was compelled to return to the uncongenial task of playwriting. To many of his plays he prefixed introductions in which, for the first time in England, the laws of dramatic criticism were stated and discussed clearly and acutely. The prose style of these prefaces is clean-cut and modern, and entitles Dryden to the distinction of being the first to break away from the cumbersome periods in which English prose had heretofore obscured itself. His later years were spent upon his translation of Vergil and his Fables. His mind was always quick to welcome new ideas, and the work of his declining years, though in a lighter vein, shows no falling-off from the high standard of his prime. He died in 1700. CONTEMPORARIES - Milton, Charles II., Cowley, Addison, Swift, Pope. BIBLIOGRAPHY. LIFE AND TIMES. The complete works of Dryden are to be found in Saintsbury's edition of 18 vols., published by Paterson, of Edinburgh. This edition is a revision of Scott's; it is expensive, and hardly to be found, except in a large city or university library. As a partial substitute may be used (1) Saintsbury's Life in the E.M.L., a model short biography; (2) Christie's excellent edition of the Poems; (3) T. Arnold's edition of the Essay on Dramatic Poetry (Macmillan). Malone's edition of the prose works is not easy to procure, nor is Tonson's edition of the plays. TEXT. Christie's (Macmillan). CRITICISM.-Johnson; Lives of the Poets. In the Dryden and the Pope the Doctor is at his best. Macaulay; Essay on Dryden. Though written only three years after the Milton, this shows a great advance in critical judgment. the Lowell; Essay on Dryden. The most satisfactory estimate, but fragmentary, like so much of Lowell's prose work. Dryden's best performances Absalom and Achitophel and the Fables - are barely touched on. On the whole, few poets have been more fortunate in their critics than Dryden. The three Essays mentioned above make a high average. Much less pleasing is Matthew Arnold, who in his Introduction to Ward's English Poets delivers himself of an extraordinary ex cathedra judgment on Dryden and Pope. See this judgment neatly disposed of in a reductio ad absurdum by Courthope in the Elwin and Courthope Pope, V. 16. William Congreve was the first comedy writer of his day. The best short account of him is by Swinburne in the Encyclopedia Britannica, article Congreve. See also Thackeray's Congreve and Addison, in his English Humorists. Congreve's first play, the Old Bachelor (1693) made a great hit. The Double Dealer, brought out the same year, scored only a succès d'estime. I-10. Strong were our sires; a reference to the Elizabethan dramatists, the last of whom (Shirley) lived until Dryden was a man of thirty-five. when Charles returned; Charles II. 1660. He was the last English king with any literary pretensions, and the praise Dryden awards him seems not undeserved. His native wit, his long residence in France, and his acquaintance with the comedies of Molière made him a critic of no mean ability. Janus, according to one legend, assisted Saturn to civilize the early inhabitants of Italy. 11-19. Vitruvius. A famous Roman architect, a contemporary of Augustus. For Doric columns, see a picture of the Parthenon; for Corinthian, of the Madeleine; for Ionic, of the Temple of Wingless Victory on the Acropolis. 20-27. Fletcher; the friend of Shakespeare, with whom he is supposed to have written The Two Noble Kinsmen. Many of his plays were written with Beaumont; of these, The Knight of the Burning Pestle for humor and Philaster for pathos, are not unworthy of Shakespeare himself. Jonson; see notes on L'Allegro, 126– 134. The magnificent compliment in lines 26-7 owes something to the partiality of friendship. 28-34. Etherege; a friend of Dryden's; the, earliest and not the least of the Restoration comedy writers. There has been preserved a letter in verse which Dryden wrote him when he was minister at Hamburg or Ratisbon. and a protégé of Dryden's. Southern; an indifferent play-writer 35-40. Fabius; Scipio; Hannibal. Consult a History of Rome under the years 206–205 B.C. Raphael, the great Italian painter, died 1520. "Sweet poetry and music and tender hymns drop from him; he lifts his pencil and something gracious falls from it on the paper. How noble his mind must have been! It seems but to receive and his eye seems only to rest on what is great and generous and lovely." Thackeray, Newcomes, Chapter xxxv. 41-48. Edward. In 1327, Parliament deposed the weak and incompetent Edward II. and declared his son, Edward of Windsor, successor. If we exclude Oliver Cromwell, Edward III. is probably the ablest Englishman that has ever sat upon the English throne. Tom the First. Dryden was succeeded in the position of Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal by Thomas Shadwell, an indifferent Whig poet whom he had mercilessly satirized as Macflecknoe. Tom the Second must be Thomas Rymer, who was made Historiographer Royal on Shadwell's death in 1692, Nahum Tate becoming Poet Laureate. 49-63. wear (54); this infinitive must be connected with line 51. first attempt; Congreve's comedy The Old Bachelor. regular, as explained by the next line, refers to the Unities of Time, Place, and Action, which the French critics derived (or thought they derived) from the Poetics of Aristotle and the usage of the Attic dramatists. The Unities require that the events in a play shall be only such as could happen within one revolution of the sun; that the scene must not be shifted from one place to another and that nothing shall be introduced that does not further the development of the main plot. The success of the Shakesperian drama, in which the first two Unities are disregarded, shows that with the exception of the last they are of little importance now, whatever value they may have had in forming critical opinion in the past. (For a brief but admirably philosophic discussion of the Unities, see Coleridge's Lecture on The Progress of the Drama.) Shakespeare; this coupling of Congreve with Shakespeare seems humorous to us, though it probably did not impress Congreve in that way. 64-77. 'tis impossible you should proceed. Dryden was mistaken here. In 1695 Congreve produced his best comedy, Love for Love. For keen wit and brilliant dialogue nothing was written in England to equal this until Sheridan's School for Scandal (1777). th' ungrateful stage. In the year previous to this, Dryden's twentysixth play, Cleomenes, had proved almost a failure. defend ... your departed friend. Congreve, in one of the few respectable acts |