Elkanah was prepared to meet it. The anti-papal procession, the patronage of Shaftesbury, the Whig songs, and some other unfortunate antecedents, were forthwith obliterated; and Settle appeared before the City of London metamorphosed into a Tory parasite. He had vehemently declaimed against the profanity and immorality of the stage; yet so truly in his case was necessity without its law, that the Revolution drove him to write plays for puppet shows. His earlier days had been thrown into the strife of literary warfare, and his later years were spent in mounting the stage at the fairs, and combating with wooden performers. The unhappy man was at length admitted to the Charter House, whither he finally retired from the toils of literary ambition and the toils of battle at the puppet-show. The quarrel between Rochester and Dryden reached its climax in 1679. The Essay on Satire, which gained a celebrity from extrinsic circumstances totally at variance with its real merits, and in which Rochester was lampooned, appeared in that year. This production was generally ascribed either to Dryden or to Mulgrave; but those who assigned it to the latter insisted that it had undergone the revision of the Laureate. The internal evidence of the poem appears to us, however, as conclusive against the authorship of Dryden as that of Icon Basilike against the authorship of Charles I. Every portion of it is, as Scott observes, similarly and atrociously bad. It would be difficult, indeed, to point out a single line which Dryden could possibly have written. There is evidence to show that Sedley, who is satirised in the Essay, possessed the friendship of the Laureate at the time of its publication. Mulgrave, on the other hand, was then out of favour at the Palace; and the ridicule of Charles and his mistresses bespoke the spleen of a discontented courtier. The King, if we may believe Rochester, took the satire in jest; but the experiment would have been a hazardous one for Dryden, who could scarcely have relied on the ultimate secrecy of the authorship. Rochester, it can scarcely be doubted, avenged himself on mere suspicion, and, after the fashion of the day, hired ruffians to assault the Laureate in the street. The encounter took place in Rose Street, Covent Garden, on the night of the 18th of December, 1679. Dryden lived in Gerrard Street, Soho, and his evenings were spent in the council of the wits, at Wills's Coffee House in Bow Street. The reader who has passed, as often as ourselves, from Piccadilly to Lincoln's Inn, may have remarked a covered way leading out of Long Acre into an obscure and dingy street, which appears to have undergone no change since the pranks of Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, were once the theme of the gay world. This is the historical Rose Street; and the number of its angles adapt it as well for an ambuscade as a street in Smyrna or in Constantinople. There is scarcely any other alley in London, in the same proximity to a thoroughfare, which could have been so well adapted to deeds of darkness two centuries ago. Rochester had already intimated the character of the revenge he sought; and to him the outrage was generally ascribed. A reward of fifty pounds for a discovery of the perpetrators was, however, vainly offered in the Gazette. Nothing can more fully illustrate the moral barbarism of that age than the fact that while Rochester, for the brief remainder of his life, continued to be received into society, the indignity sustained by Dryden was held as a stigma on the social position of the poet, much as the refusal of a challenge to fight a duel would have been regarded thirty years ago. Dryden was scarcely more fortunate in his friendships with the masters than with the patrons of literature. There could be little sympathy between characters so alien as his own and that of Milton. The politician who defended the regicidesthe poet debarred at once of society and the sight of external nature-the philosopher enduring the trials of evil days' with magnanimity and resolution had few thoughts in common with the flatterer of the court, the genius of the stage, and the dependent on the aristocracy. With Butler, Dryden was at enmity; and Swift, probably aware that he held his sacerdotal dignity on a somewhat precarious tenure, never forgave the Laureate's satires on the clergy, and his criticism of some juvenile verses. But with Cowley, Denham, Waller, Davenant, and some others, he lived on terms of friendship. The heroic poetry of Dryden has its chief value as an illustration of gradual and successive improvements in metre and diction. In this point of view, indeed, the progress of Dryden in some degree corresponds to the progress of versification. The diction of the heroic couplet had improved, it is true, during the preceding age; but the earliest versification of Dryden is as superior to that of Fairfax and Sandys as the versification of Fairfax and Sandys is superior to that of Chaucer. The writers intervening between the Plantagenets and the Stuarts generally advanced less in metrical excellence than they retrograded in intellectual power, from the great Romanticist of the fourteenth century. In his heroic verse, Dryden has employed two metres, the couplet and the quatrain stanza. The 'Death of Cromwell,' and the Annus Mirabilis,' are instances of the latter. The Annus' is of considerable merit, although we have scarcely another poem framed upon its model. These poems and a few plays were all that Dryden had accomplished at the age of thirty-six. But thirty-six years comprehended the whole life of Byron, Burns, Rochester, and the younger Lyttelton. Shelley, at his death, was little more than thirty: his mind, indeed, had scarcely attained its full vigour. If the Annus Mirabilis' had been the last work of Dryden, its author would have left a reputation by far inferior to that of Burns, and scarcely equal to the fame of Rochester. If he had died at the age which closed the career of Shelley, his name would barely have survived him. Yet the application of such statistics to an adjudication of relative merit would clearly lead to false results. Cowley had written poetry at ten; and he had written poetry at twelve superior to what Dryden had written at twenty-four. Yet at his death, in his fiftieth year, he left a reputation which the fame of Dryden, at the same period of life, totally eclipsed. Pope had written his inimitable Essay on Criticism at twenty-two. If Shakspeare and Milton had died at that age, they would have left absolutely no reputation at all. Dryden was happier in his lyric verse. The Ode was with him a later inspiration. He is better known by his poems in celebration of St. Cecilia's Day than by all his satires, fables, and dramas. Neither Gray nor Campbell can detract from his natural supremacy as a lyric poet. Their odes caught the spirit and force of Dryden, but they had neither his boldness of fancy nor his depth of thought. They displayed, if we may borrow a metaphor from Chios, the yvyn kaì sídwλov without the paves of the elder poet. If it be true, as it has been related, that Henry St. John called one morning upon Dryden, and found that he had written the second ode for St. Cecilia's Day during the past night, the story will illustrate the hacknied saying that poetic talent is necessarily an innate faculty. Those again who affect to regard these lyrics as the only true poetry of Dryden will find their theory hard to reconcile with the deduction that this innate faculty should not have developed itself until the age of sixty-six! The Threnodia Augustalis, a longer lyric poem, is of far less merit. The satires of Dryden- the Absalom, the Medal, and Mac-Flecnoe, form an era in satirical writing. They are the earliest polished satires in the language. The works of Cleveland and Donne, which immediately preceded them, had clothed a poverty of thought in a barbarous diction, and were even more harsh than the satires of Bishop Hall, who figured in the reign of Elizabeth. Very different notions of wit and sarcasm prevailed in the age which preceded the Restoration. That which we now term Satire appears to have been unknown in English literature before the middle of the seventeenth century. Up to that time, the essence of wit seems to have been held to rest in a play upon words. The reputed brilliancy of preceding generations was as vitiated as the diction of the Euphuists. Punning, however, was a venerable sin; for it was a tradition of Anglo-Saxon poetry. But we are confident that no Sir Thomas Lucy of the reign of Charles the Second would have felt his vanity wounded by an idle play upon his name, sufficiently coarse and obvious for the jovial conversation of a modern public-house. Nor were there any satirists of reputation, in the stricter sense of the term, among Dryden's contemporaries. Swift clearly could not be so termed; and Butler, as Scott observes, was rather a humourist. The satire of Absalom and Ahitophel' is nearly as well known as the career of Monmouth. The story coincides with the last act in the great Parliamentary drama of the age of Charles II. The effete policy of Clarendon,-the infamous administration of the Cabal,-the feeble government of Danby,together with the uncontested dominance of that which it would, perhaps, be an anachronism to term the Tory party-had passed away. A new Parliament, and a new form of Administration, were called into existence in 1679. Shaftesbury became President of the Privy Council of Thirty, and virtually directed the House of Commons. The Exclusion Bill was the first condition of the latter assembly. Monmouth was the hope and the pride of the popular party. Charles, refusing to alienate the succession, cut the Gordian knot by the dismissal of Shaftesbury, and afterwards by the dissolution of the Parliament. In this antagonism between the People and the Crown, the disgraced Minister essayed to make a puppet of the popular idol. The scheme was adapted to the daring of the one, and to the imbecility of the other. Meanwhile, the Oxford Parliament assembled in March, 1681. It insisted on the transfer of the succession, and was summarily dissolved. Shaftesbury was committed to the Tower. Parliamentary Government being at an end, a literary warfare succeeded. The Protestant writers now assailed the King, the Duke, and the Ministry. The Court gladly employed Dryden as their defender. Dryden as gladly seized the opportunity to avenge his private quarrels, and gain the favour of the Crown. He at this time numbered among his patrons the Duke of Ormond and young Laurence Hyde, the conceited Mulgrave and the intellectual Halifax. The principles of the Opposition, since the period of the Restoration, had been represented, for the most part, by a race of illustrious and consistent patriots; those which actuated the Court, by a twenty years' triumvirate of tyranny, perfidy, and vice. The independent classes of the population were now shaken in their allegiance to a dynasty, in comparison of whose rule the iron sceptre of the Plantagenets, of the Yorkists, and of the Tudors had been honourable, and virtuous, and benign. The cause of Parliamentary Government was overthrown, and the great work of the Revolution was undone. The country seemed falling into a political condition which strangely promised to combine the miseries of an anarchical commonwealth and of a sanguinary despotism. Of the politicians who then sought to bind up the interests of the Crown and the People, there were none who could approach to the practical talents of Ashley, or the theoretical perceptions of Savile. Of the politicians who were then in the confidence of the Sovereign, there was scarcely one who was not contemned as well as mistrusted by the country. But when the deluge of misgovernment had swept his old Ministers away, Charles, as a political Deucalion, created statesmen out of stones. Very different, nevertheless, from the Whigs and Tories of the day was the mongrel Anthony Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury. He had joined almost every existing party; he had professed almost every conceivable principle. He was versed in every variety of political demonstration. He might have set the capital on fire at Constantinople; he might have raised barricades in the streets of Paris; he might have flogged women at Pesth. It was a confession, or rather a boast, of Halifax, in speaking of himself, that he was a trimmer, after the fashion of the temperate zone, between extremes of heat and cold. But Shaftesbury passed from zone to zone. He flourished, in equal and indestructible vitality, in the sultry Toryism of the Cabal, in the icy Liberalism of the Opposition, and, finally, in the genial Conservatism of Monmouth. comparison with such a career, the career of Halifax was consistent and honourable. The consistency of Shaftesbury, on the other hand, was a lawless and profligate ambition, which formed the motive power of his splendid talents, In friendship false, implacable in hate; The portrait of him drawn by Dryden in his great satire, is VOL. CII. NO. CCVII. C |