whole extent of its beauty and power. The against their will, been forced to flatter-of respect which the translators felt for the origi- which the tragedy of Bayes is a very favournal prevented them from adding any of the able specimen. What Lord Dorset observed hideous decorations then in fashion. The to Edward Howard, might have been address groundwork of the version, indeed, was of aned to almost all his contemporaries :earlier age. The familiarity with which the Puritans, on almost every occasion, used the scriptural phrases, was no doubt very ridicu lous; but it produced good effects. It was a cant; but it drove out a cant far more offensive.

"As skilful divers to the bottom fall,

Swifter than those who cannot swim at all; So, in this way of writing without thinking, Thou hast a strange alacrity in sinking." From this reproach some clever men of the world must be expected, and among them Dorset himself. Though by no means great poets, or even good versifiers, they always wrote with meaning, and sometimes with wit. Nothing indeed more strongly shows to what a miserable state literature had fallen, than the immense superiority which the occasional rhymes, carelessly thrown on paper by men of this class, possess over the elaborate productions of almost all the professed authors. The reigning taste was so bad, that the success of a writer was in inverse proportion to his labour, and to his desire of excellence. An exception must be made for Butler, who had as much wit and learning as Cowley, and who knew, what Cowley never knew, how to use them. A great command of good homely English distinguishes him still more from the other writers of the time. As for Gondibert, those may criticise it who can read it. Imagination was extinct. Taste was depraved. Poetry, driven from palaces, colleges, and the

The highest kind of poetry is, in a great measure, independent of those circumstances which regulate the style of composition in prose. But with that inferior species of poetry which succeeds to it, the case is widely different. In a few years, the good sense and good taste which had weeded out affectation from moral and political treatises would, in the natural course of things, have effected a similar reform in the sonnet and the ode. The rigour of the victorious sectaries had relaxed. A dominant religion is never ascetic. The government connived at theatrical representations. The influence of Shakspeare was once more felt. But darker days were approaching. A foreign yoke was to be imposed on our literature. Charles, surrounded by the compamions of his long exile, returned to govern a nation which ought never to have cast him out, or never to have received him back. Every year which he had passed among strangers had rendered him more unfit to rule his coun-atres, had found an asylum in the obscure trymen. In France he had seen the refractory magistracy humbled, and royal prerogative. though exercised by a foreign priest in the name of a child, victorious over all opposition. This spectacle naturally gratified a prince to whose family the opposition of parliaments had been so fatal. Politeness was his solitary good quality. The insults which he had suffered in Scotland had taught him to prize it. The effeminacy and apathy of his disposition fitted him to excel in it. The elegance and vivacity of the French manners fascinated him. With the political maxims and the social habits of his favourite people, he adopted their taste in composition; and, when seated on the throne, soon rendered it fashionable, partly by direct patronage, but still more by that contemptible policy which, for a time, made England the last of the nations, and raised Louis the Fourteenth to a height of power and fame, such as no French sovereign had ever before attained.

dwelling, where a great man, born out of due season, in disgrace, penury, pain, and blind ness, still kept uncontaminated a character and a genius worthy of a better age.

Every thing about Milton is wonderful; bu nothing is so wonderful as that, in an age so unfavourable to poetry, he should have pro duced the greatest of modern epic poems We are not sure that this is not in some de gree to be attributed to his want of sight. The imagination is notoriously most active when the external world is shut out. In sleep its illusions are perfect. They produce all the effect of realities. In darkness its visions are always more distinct than in the light. Every person who amuses himself with what is called building castles in the air, must have experienced this. We know artists, who, before they attempt to draw a face from memory, close their eyes, that they may recall a more perfect image of the features and the expres sion. We are therefore inclined to believe, It was to please Charles that rhyme was that the genius of Milton may have been prefirst introduced into our plays. Thus, a rising served from the influence of times so unfablow, which would at any time have been vourable to it, by his infirmity. Be this as it mortal, was dealt to the English drama, then may, his works at first enjoyed a very small just recovering from its languishing condition. share of popularity. To be neglected by his Two detestable manners, the indigenous and contemporaries was the penalty which he paid the imported, were now in a state of alternate for surpassing them. His great poem was conflict and amalgamation. The bombastic not generally studied or admired, till writers meanness of the new style was blended with the far inferior to him had, by obsequiously cringingenious absurdity of the old; and the mixing to the public taste, acquired sufficient fature produced something which the world had vour to reform it. never before seen, and which, we hope, it will never see again-something, by the side of which the worst nonsense of all other ages appears to advantage-something, which those who have attempted to caricature it, have,

Of these Dryden was the most eminent. Amidst the crowd of authors, who, during the earlier years of Charles the Second, courted notoriety by every species of absurdity and affectation, he speedily became conspicuous

No man exercised so much influence on the age. The reason is obvious. On no man did the age exercise so much influence. He was perhaps the greatest of those whom we have designated as the critical poets; and his literary career exhibited, on a reduced scale, the whole history of the school to which he belonged, the rudeness and extravagance of its infancy, the propriety, the grace, the dignified good sense, the temperate splendour of its maturity. His imagination was torpid, till it was awakened by his judgment. He began with quaint parallels and empty mouthing. He gradually acquired the energy of the satirist, the gravity of the moralist, the rapture of the lyric poet. The revolution through which English literature has been passing, from the time of Cowley to that of Scott, may be seen in miniature within the compass of his volumes.

His life divides itself into two parts. There is some debatable ground on the common frontier; but the line may be drawn with tolerable accuracy. The year 1678 is that on which we should be inclined to fix as the date of a great change in his manner. During the preceding period appeared some of his courtly panegyrics-his Annus Mirabilis, and most of his plays; indeed, all his rhyming tragedies. To the subsequent period belong his best dramas-All for Love, The Spanish Friar, and Sebastian-his satires, his translations, his didactic poems, his fables, and his odes.

and his versification were already far supe rior to theirs.

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. We will give a single instance, and certainly a favourable instance-a quatrain which Johnson has praised. Dryden is describing the sea-fight with the Dutch.

"Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a bali į And now their odours armed against them fly Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall, And some by aromatic splinters die." The poet should place his readers, as nearly as possible, in the situation of the sufferers or the spectators. His narration ought to produce feelings similar to those which would be excited by the event itself. Is this the case here? Who, in a sea-fight, ever thought of the price of the china which beats out the brains of a sailor; or of the odour of the splinter which shatters his leg? It is not by an act of the imagination, at once calling up the scene beOf the small pieces which were presented fore the interior eye, but by painful meditation to chancellors and princes, it would scarcely-by turning the subject round and round-by be fair to speak. The greatest advantage tracing out facts into remote consequences, which the fine arts derive from the extension that these incongruous topics are introduced of knowledge is, that the patronage of indivi- into the description. Homer, it is true, perduals becomes unnecessary. Some writers petually uses epithets which are not peculiarly still affect to regret the age of patronage. appropriate. Achilles is the swift-footed, when None but bad writers have reason to regret it. he is sitting still. Ulysses is the much-endurIt is always an age of general ignorance. ing, when he has nothing to endure. Every Where ten thousand readers are eager for the spear casts a long shadow; every ox has appearance of a book, a small contribution crooked horns; and every woman a high bosom, from each makes up a splendid remuneration though these particulars may be quite beside for the author. Where literature is a luxury, the purpose. In our old ballads a similar confined to few, each of them must pay high. practice prevails. The gold is always red, and If the Empress Catherine, for example, wanted the ladies always gay, though nothing whatever an epic poem, she must have wholly supported may depend on the hue of gold, or the temper the poet;-just as, in a remote country village, of the ladies. But these adjectives are mere a man who wants a mutton-chop is sometimes customary additions. They merge in the subforced to take the whole sheep ;-a thing which stantives to which they are attached. If they never happens where the demand is large. at all colour the idea, it is with a tinge so slight But men who pay largely for the gratification as in no respect to alter the general effect. In of their taste, will expect to have it united the passage which we have quoted from Drywith some gratification to their vanity. Flat- den, the case is very different. Preciously and tery is carried to a shameless extent; and the aromatic divert our whole attention to themhabit of flattery almost inevitably introduces selves, and dissolve the image of the battle in a false taste into composition. Its language a moment. The whole poem reminds us of is made up of hyperbolical commonplaces- Lucan, and of the worst parts of Lucan, the offensive from their triteness-and still more sea-fight in the bay of Marseilles, for example. offensive from their extravagance. In no The description of the two fleets during the school is the trick of overstepping the modesty night is perhaps the only passage which ought of nature so speedily acquired. The writer, to be exempted from this censure. If it was accustomed to find exaggeration acceptable from the Annus Mirabilis that Milton formed and necessary on one subject, uses it on all. his opinion, when he pronounced Dryden a It is not strange, therefore, that the early pane-good rhymer, but no poet, he certainly judged gyrical verses of Dryden should be made up of meanness and bombast. They abound with the conceits which his immediate predecessors had brought into fashion. But his language

correctly. But Dryden was, as we have said, one of those writers, in whom the period of imagination does not precede, but follow, the period of observation and reflection.

His plays, his rhyming plays in particular, rested emotion-a loyalty extending to passive obedience—a religion like that of the Quietists, unsupported by any sanction of hope or fear. We see nothing but despotism without power, and sacrifices without compensation. We will give a few instances:-In Aurengzebe, Arimant, governor of Agra, falls in love with his prisoner Indamora. She rejects his suit with scorn; but assures him that she shall make great use of her power over him. He threatens to be angry. She answers, very coolly: "Do not: your anger, like your love, is vain: Whene'er I please, you must be pleased again. Knowing what power I have your will to bend, I'll use it; for 1 need just such a friend."

are admirable subjects for those who wish to study the morbid anatomy of the drama. He was utterly destitute of the power of exhibiting real human beings. Even in the far inferior talent of composing characters out of those elements into which the imperfect process of our reason can resolve them, he was very deficient. His men are not even good personifications; they are not well-assorted assemblages of qualities. Now and then, indeed, he seizes a very coarse and marked distinction; and gives up, not a likeness, but a strong caricature, in which a single peculiarity is protruded, and every thing else neglected; like the Marquis of Granby at an inndoor, whom we know by nothing but his baldness; or Wilkes, who is Wilkes only in his squint. These are the best specimens of his skill. For most of his pictures seem, like Turkey carpets, to have been expressly designed not to resemble any thing in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth.

This is no idle menace. She soon brings a
letter, addressed to his rival, orders him to read
it, asks him whether he thinks it sufficiently
tender, and finally commands him to carry it
himself. Such tyranny as this, it may be
does indeed venture to remonstrate:
thought, would justify resistance.

"This fatal paper rather let me tear,

Arimant

The latter manner he practises most frequently in his tragedies, the former in his comedies. The comic characters are, without mixture, loathsome and despicable. The men of Etherege and Vanbrugh are bad enough. Those of Smollet are perhaps worse. But they do not approach to the Celadons, the Wildbloods, the Woodalls, and the Rhodophils of Dryden. The vices of these last are set off by a certain fierce, hard impudence, to which we know nothing comparable. Their love is the appetite of beasts; their friendship the confederacy of knaves. The ladies seem to have been expressly created to form helps meet for sach gentlemen. In deceiving and insulting their old fathers, they do not perhaps exceed the license which, by immemorial prescription, has been allowed to heroines. But they also cheat at cards, rob strong boxes, put up their favours to auction, betray their friends, abuse their rivals in a style of Billingsgate, and invite their lovers in the language of the Piazza. These, it must be remembered, are not the valets and waiting-women, the Mascarilles and Nerines, but the recognised heroes and heroines, who appear as the representatives of good society, and who, at the end of the fifth act, marry and live very happily ever after. The sensuality, baseness, and malice of their natures are unredeemed by any quality of a different description, by any touch of kindness, or even by an honest burst of hearty hatred and revenge. We are in a world where there is That these passages violate all historical no humanity, no veracity, no sense of shame propriety; that sentiments, to which nothing a world for which any good-natured man similar was ever even affected except by the would gladly take in exchange the society of cavaliers of Europe, are transferred to Mexico Milton's devils. But as soon as we enter the and Agra, is a light accusation. We have no regions of Tragedy, we find a great change. objection to a conventional world, an Illyrian There is no lack of the fine sentiment there. puritan, or a Bohemian scaport. While the Metastasio is surpassed in his own department. faces are good, we care little about the backScuderi is out-scuderied. We are introduced ground. Sir Joshua Reynolds says, that the to people whose proceedings we can trace to curtains and hangings in an historical painting no motive-of whose feelings we can form no ought to be, not velvet or cotton, but merely more idea than of a sixth sense. We have drapery. The same principle should be apleft a race of creatures, whose love is as deli-plied to poetry and romance. The truth of cate and affectionate as the passion which an character is the first object; the truth of place alderman feels for a turtle. We find ourselves and time is to be considered only in the second among beings, whose love is purely disinte-place. Puf' himself could tell the actor to turn

Than, like Bellerophon, my sentence bear."
The answer of the lady is incomparable:

"You may; but 'twill not be your best advice;
"Twill only give me pains of writing twice.
You know you must obey me, soon or late.
Why should you vainly struggle with your fate ?”

Poor Arimant seems to be of the same opinion. He mutters something about fate and freewill, and walks off with the billet-doux.

In the Indian Emperor, Montezuma presents Almeria with a garland as a token of his love, and offers to make her his queen. She replies: "I take this garland, not as given by you; But as my merit's and my beauty's due As for the crown which you, my slave, possess, To share it with you would but make me less."

In return for such proofs of tenderness as these, her admirer consents to murder his two sons, and a benefactor, to whom he feels the warmest gratitude. Lyndaraxa, in the Conquest of Granada, assumes the same lofty tone with Abdelmelech. He complains that sho smiles upon his rival.

"Lynd.

Abdel.

And when did I my power so far resign,
That you should regulate each look of mine?
Then, when you gave your love, you gave that
power.

Lynd. 'Twas during pleasure-'tis revoked this hour.
Abdel. I'll hate you, and this visit is my last.
Lynd. Do, if you can; you know I hold you fast."

out his toes, and remind him that Keeper Hatton was a great dancer. We wish that, in our own time, a writer of a very different order from Puff had not too often forgotten human nature in the niceties of upholstery, millinery, and cookery.

considered as his best, are in blank verse. No experiment can be more decisive.

It must be allowed, that the worst even of the rhyming tragedies contains good description and magnificent rhetoric. But, even when we forget that they are plays, and, passing by We blame Dryden, not because the persons their dramatic improprieties, consider them of his dramas are not Moors or Americans, with reference to the language, we are perpebut because they are not men and women; tually disgusted by passages which it is diffi not because love, such as he represents it, cult to conceive how any author could have could not exist in a harem or in a wigwam, written, or any audience have tolerated; rants but because it could not exist anywhere. As in which the raving violence of the manner is the love of his heroes, such are all their forms a strange contrast with the abject tameother emotions. All their qualities, their cou- ness of the thought. The author laid the whole rage, their generosity, their pride, are on the fault on the audience, and declared, that when same colossal scale. Justice and prudence he wrote them, he considered them bad enough are virtues which can exist only in a moderate to please. This defence is unworthy of a man degree, and which change their nature and of genius, and, after all, is no defence. Ota their name if pushed to excess. Of justice and way pleased without rant; and so might Dryprudence, therefore, Dryden leaves his favour- den have done, if he had possessed the powers ites destitute. He did not care to give them of Otway. The fact is, that he had a tendency what he could not give without measure. The to bombast, which, though subsequently cortyrants and ruffians are merely the heroes al-rected by time and thought, was never wholly tered by a few touches, similar to those which removed, and which showed itself in performtransformed the honest face of Sir Roger de ances not designed to please the rude mob of Coverley into the Saracen's head. Through the theatre. the grin and frown, the original features are still perceptible.

Some indulgent critics have represented this failing as an indication of genius, as the profusion of unlimited wealth, the wantonness of exuberant vigour. To us it seems to bear a nearer affinity to the tawdriness of poverty, or the spasms and convulsions of weakness. Dry

It is in the tragicomedies that these absurdities strike us most. The two races of men, or rather the angels and the baboons, are there presented to us together. We meet in one scene with nothing but gross, selfish, unblush-den surely had not more imagination than ing, lying libertines of both sexes, who, as a punishment, we suppose, for their depravity, are condemned to talk nothing but prose. But as soon as we meet with people who speak in verse, we know that we are in society which would have enraptured the Cathos and Madelon of Molière, in society for which Oroondates would have too little of the lover, Clelia too much of the coquette.

The

Homer, Dante, or Milton, who never fall into this vice. The swelling diction of Eschylus and Isaiah resembles that of Almanzor and Maximin no more than the tumidity of a muscle resembles the tumidity of a boil. former is symptomatic of health and strength, the latter of debility and disease. If ever Shakspeare rants, it is not when his imagination is hurrying him along, but when he is hurAs Dryden was unable to render his plays rying his imagination along-when his mind interesting by means of that which is the pecu-is for a moment jaded-when, as was said of liar and appropriate excellence of the drama, it was necessary that he should find some substitute for it. In his comedies he supplied its place, sometimes by wit, bat more frequently by intrigue, by disguises, mistakes of persons, dialogues at cross purposes, hairbreadth escapes, perplexing concealments, and surprising disclosures. He thus succeeded at least in making these pieces very amusing.

In his tragedies he trusted, and not altogether without reason, to his diction and his versification. It was on this account, in all probability, that he so eagerly adopted, and so reluctantly abandoned, the practice of rhyming in his plays. What is unnatural appears less unnatural in that species of verse, than in lines which approach more nearly to common conversation; and in the management of the heroic couplet, Dryden has never been equalled. It is unnecessary to urge any arguments against a fashion now universally condemned. But it is worthy of observation, that though Dryden was deficient in that talent which blank verse exhibits to the greatest advantage, and was certainly the best writer of heroic rhyme in our language, yet the plays which have, from the time of their first appear ance, been

Euripides, he resembles a lion, who excites. his own fury by lashing himself with his tail. What happened to Shakspeare from the occasional suspension of his powers, happened to Dryden from constant impotence. He, like his confederate Lee, had judgment enough to appreciate the great poets of the preceding age, but not judgment enough to shun competition with them. He felt and admired their wild and daring sublimity. That it belonged to another age than that in which he lived, aud required other talents than those which he possessed; that, in aspiring to emulate it, he was wasting, in a hopeless attempt, powers which might render him pre-eminent in a different career, was a lesson which he did not learn till late. As those knavish enthusiasts, the French prophets, courted inspiration, by mimicking the writhings, swoonings, and gaspings, which they considered as its symptoms, he attempted, by affected fits of poetical fury, to bring on a real paroxysm; and, like them, he got nothing but his distortions for his pains.

Horace very happily compares those who, in his time, imitated Pindar, to the youth who attempted to fly to heaven on waxen wings, and who experienced so fatal and ignominious