Dryden died. Like every other poet, who in a highly civilised age has gained immediate popularity, he lived under the conditions of society, and these he found in many respects unchanged. The revelries of the Buckinghams and the Sedleys of the Restoration had passed away; but the natural habits of the people were less transient than the artificial manners of the Court. The same character of literary society which compelled Dryden to write the satire of Mac-Flecnoe induced Pope to write the Dunciad.

Between the two poets there was a yet greater difference of mind than even of execution. It was not simply that Pope was a careful, Dryden a careless writer. Pope had no talent for the theatre. Among the dramatic works of Dryden are some which bear the strongest evidence of his powers. Dryden could draw individual characters, whether real or ideal, in exquisite perfection. Pope could draw them in the concrete with similar force. Where, consequently, the one writer more often satirised men, the other satirised systems. Neither seemed in this respect to invade the dominion of the other. The portraiture of Ahitophel and Zimri, of Sir Martin and the Friar, was foreign to the mind of Pope. The Essays upon Criticism and upon Man have no closer example in the works of Dryden than the Religio Laici. Pope, again, possessed no talent for the union of allegory with controversial reasoning displayed in the Hind and Panther. Dryden could scarcely have written the Messiah, nor Pope the Odes for St. Cecilia's Day. We need not go further. The distinction between the two writers is surely too complete either to trench on the independent position of the one, or to clash with the originality of the other.

If,' says Coleridge, Pope was a poet, Dryden was a very great poet.' But Coleridge will not admit that the mind either of Pope or Dryden was strictly of the poetical order. To read the lyrics of Dryden,-or to read such portraitures as those of Monmouth and Dorax,-and say that they contain no poetry, seems to us as monstrous as to read his satires or even his comedies, and say that they contain no wit. The criticism of Scott, which complains that Dryden was apt to philosophise where he ought to have felt, is strikingly just. His very versatility, which was his glory if we view him as a whole, was his defect if we view him in part. Had he attempted to write the Paradise Lost as an Epic poem, he would have fallen immeasurably below Milton. But he made up in area for what he lost in depth. The stern morality of the Puritan contrasted strikingly with the voluptuous sensibility of the Royalist; but

the interests of poetry were somewhat in opposition to either of these party characteristics.

The political consistency of Dryden has been vehemently impugned, but it was exposed to severe trials from the political changes and the social condition of the age he lived in. He was one of the last writers of distinction who was essentially dependent on the favour of the aristocracy, and he was doomed to experience rapid changes in the fortune of public men. Society had not in his day made the progress which enabled Pope to live in affluence on the profits of his works; nor was there then that security in the duration of power which served so long to attach Sir Geoffrey Chaucer to the court of John of Gaunt. Born in the year 1631, Dryden found, on his entry upon life, that the old factitious avenues of fame had been done away. The ancient fabric of State and Church had been supplanted by a civil and theocratical commonwealth. Kingly and aristocratic patronage was gone by. Accordingly, in 1657, he sought and obtained a subordinate office in the government of the Protector through the influence of his friends, Sir John Dryden and Sir Gilbert Pickering, who enjoyed the confidence of Cromwell. At a later period, his enemies charged him with inconsistency and tergiversation, in having served under the republican polity. But it was sufficiently ridiculous, whatever had been his original opinions, to asperse a young man of twenty-six, who was ignorant of public affairs, for his acquiescence in an established Government which maintained our peace at home and our glory abroad. During the three years, however, that preceded the Restoration, great changes took place. Oliver died in 1658. The imbecility of the young Protector shook the dynasty of the Cromwells to its base. The cabal of Wallingford House overthrew both him and his Government. The country was threatened with endless revolution. In these circumstances, the restoration of Charles was, we conceive, as clearly expedient in 1660, as had been the support of the Protectorate in 1657.

Men are apt to form an ideal standard of political virtue. History has seemed, indeed, peculiarly prone to construe whatever is equivocal in the life of an author as a proof of the pliancy and suppleness of his sense of right. In the present instance, we can only say that the change in the opinions and interests of Dryden coincided with the change in the opinions and interests of the country. That consistency which clings to an already enunciated opinion for the mere sake of uniformity, is simply a dogged adherence to a false principle. We are often told of the contrast, in political consistency, between the two great

poets of the seventeenth century. None can admire more highly than ourselves the rectitude and moral independence which marked the declining years of Milton. He possessed a greatness of soul to which Dryden cannot lay claim. Yet it is far less easy to regard his conduct during the Commonwealth as an illustration of such a view of political morality. The circumstances of the nation may be pleaded, perhaps, in palliation of his acceptance of office under Cromwell: but such a termination of public life would unquestionably have cast a shade over the memory of Hampden.

Dryden's education was completed at Trinity College, Cambridge. The poet took the degree of Bachelor of Arts in January, 1653-4, and that of Master in 1657. He appears to have lived on bad terms with the collegiate authorities, and to have preserved through life his dislike to the University. His undergraduate career seems, nevertheless, to have been prolonged beyond the ordinary period; for it is related that he gained a scholarship at Trinity early in 1650. Scholarships, it is true, may have been disposed of, in his day, at an earlier period of residence than is now customary at that college.

The Drydens were a modern but respectable family. They cannot be traced above the fourth generation from the poet. The grandfather of John Dryden, who migrated from Cumberland, and purchased the estate of Canons-Ashby, in Northamptonshire, became High Sheriff under Queen Elizabeth, and was created a baronet by her successor. The poet's father was a younger son, and left but a small provision for a progeny of fourteen children. It was less uncommon in those times for different members of the same family to fill very different stations in society than at this day. Of Dryden's more immediate relatives, one was a considerable landholder in Northamptonshire, another was a grocer in King Street, Westminster. The poet married, in 1663, Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, and sister of Sir Robert Howard, whose name is associated with several of his literary works. From the Restoration until the fall of the Tories in 1688, Dryden became estranged from his influential kinsmen, who had opposed the Royalist cause, and had remained steadfast in their adhesion to the Puritan faith. They were perhaps too deeply pledged to have profited by conversion, if they would. But the Court, it must be remembered, which had inaugurated its reign by dragging the dead remains of Cromwell to execution, became afterwards sufficiently forgiving to raise his brotherin-law, Dr. John Wilkins, to the See of Chester.

The Restoration involved as great a change in literature as

in politics. The triumph of the Puritans had thrown into comparative obscurity the masterpieces of Shakspeare, of Massinger, and of Jonson. The closing of the theatres, indeed, had exhausted the chief means of pecuniary fortune that literature could then supply. The play, meanwhile, had been the chief amusement of the exiled court. With the restoration, therefore, of the monarchy, the patronage of the drama gained a zest from long restraint, and importance as a badge of political opinion. Those who had occasionally written poetry, or who had not cared to write at all, were now zealous in writing tragedy and comedy for court favour and pecuniary reward. But the harvest was not so rich as the reapers had anticipated. The Puritans refused to lend the theatre the sanction of their presence. They seemed, in truth, to regard Satan as the Genius of the stage. Nor did the license of that age, in its dramatic representations, admit of the establishment of more than two theatres in the Metropolis. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that Dryden should seldom have gained more than a hundred pounds for each of his plays, when we consider the relation of such a sum in those days to a hundred pounds now. But there is no doubt that the drama was his most profitable avocation.

The countenance of the aristocracy, which brought popularity and success, brought also disappointments and disgrace. Insecurity was an inevitable incident of a fortune built less upon intrinsic qualities than upon the patronage of the versatile and the vicious. Dryden's services to the State were repaid by a parsimony characteristic of Charles and James. The death of Sir William Davenant, who had been the principal restorer of the stage, vacated, in 1668, the offices of poet laureate and historiographer. These were at length bestowed on Dryden. The laureateship was then perhaps a more creditable office than it became in the 18th century. It passed, indeed, from Dryden into the hands of Shadwell, a miserable charlatan, who was, nevertheless, thought to have displayed a certain power of portraying low comic life; but the office had previously been held by Jonson, in the age of Charles I. Yet it was even then a very different thing to be crowned with laurel at Westminster and at Rome!

It was necessary, in the age of the Restoration, for any writer, who cared for immediate success, to dedicate his works to men singularly destitute both of ability and moral worth. But we suspect that such men as Dryden despised and derided a custom to which the state of society compelled them to conform; and that they often designed as a satire what they published ostensibly as a panegyric. It was not unusual for a

favourite writer, when entertained at dinner by his patron, to find a present of fifty or a hundred pounds awaiting him in his plate. And its acceptance does not seem to have been made a subject of reproach. Dryden's political friendships were generally more useful and influential than they were lasting and sincere. He reckoned among them, not many years after the Restoration, the names of Newcastle, Ormond, Clifford, Rochester, and Sedley. He was gratified, indeed, in his old age, by the reflection that he had possessed, for three generations, the confidence and goodwill of the Ormond family. But the instance was a rare one.

Buckingham invented the play of the Rehearsal with a view of decrying the rhyming tragedies which had been in vogue since the Restoration. He obtained the assistance of Butler, Sprat, Martin Clifford, and others. The license of the Rehearsalists, in the introduction of living characters under fictitious names, virtually exceeded that of the old comedy; and the personal insults heaped on poor Davenant and some others would have driven the authors of the play out of society in the present age. There is no doubt, however, that this satire tended to the liberation of tragedy from the thraldom of rhyme. The poet dissembled for the while the resentment which he afterwards displayed toward Buckingham in his great satire. Posterity, however, records the triumph on Dryden's side. Scarcely any man has forgotten the character of Zimri, but few men remember the personages of the Rehearsal.

Rochester, at once a poet and a patron of poets, was at first Dryden's friend and then his enemy. Jealous of the reputation of the Laureate, he transferred his patronage to Settle, soon after the appearance of Dryden's comedy of Marriage à la Mode, in 1673. Elkanah Settle was one of those unfortunate individuals whom Nature had designed for a peaceful and honourable oblivion, but whose perversity of temperament doom them to an inheritance of everlasting ridicule. He entertained a steadfast antipathy to Dryden. This antipathy Dryden condescended to reciprocate. Settle was a zealous Whig, and poet-laureate to the City of London. It is related that the Whigs entrusted to him the management of a procession which had its climax in the burning of the Pope in effigy. Shaftesbury, whose declining influence began to render him an inconvenient friend, had long been his patron. The philosophical politician was accordingly doomed to his last humiliation - he was abandoned by Settle! About the same time Tory principles began very inopportunely to predominate among the magistracy of the City. A crisis was clearly at hand: but