His

"The darling of my youth, the famous Cowley," wrote Dryden in 1693, long after he had outgrown his young enthusiasms. There had been a time, shortly after he left Cambridge, when he had known Cowley's work minutely, and had made good use of it. Cowley was a zealous scientist. He studied medicine, wrote a botanical treatise, proposed a College for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy, was admitted to the Royal Society, and practiced odes on Dr. Scarborough and Dr. Harvey. He was interested in everything. He took a naïve delight in explication, and loved to give accounts of things in verse. mind was agile and airy, and worked with a certain dry animation that captivated the attention. At times he was a facile metrist, and always his spirit was sweet. It is often said that Dryden's early poems are bad because they are like Cowley. It is fair to Cowley to say that if they had been exactly like him they would not have been so bad. Dryden approximated the plenty but not the sprightliness of his elder. Even in that plenty there were signs of strength. Dryden's poem to Dr. Charleton follows closely after Cowley's to Mr. Hobbes in its treatment of Aristotle and the schoolmen. The Heroic Stanzas and the verses to Sir Robert Howard contain a generous proportion of scientific figures inserted in the Cowley manner. For years Dryden spoke always in the warmest accents of his "master," and it was not until his last piece of criticism altogether, the preface to the Fables, that he took pains to expose

Cowley's faults. He seems always to have been thoroughly familiar with his poems. It has long been known that four lines in Mac Flecknoe,

Where their vast courts the mother-strumpets keep,
And undisturbed by watch in silence sleep.
Where unfledged actors learn to laugh and cry,
And infant punks their tender voices try,
are a close parody of four in the Davideis:
Where their vast courts the mother-waters keep,
And undisturbed by moons in silence sleep. . .
Beneath the dens where unfledged tempests lie,
And infant winds their tender voices try;

it has not been observed that the famous portrait of Shadwell near the beginning of Mac Flecknoe,

Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,
Strike through and make a lucid interval;
But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray;
His rising fogs prevail upon the day,

is replete with echoes from an adjoining passage in Cowley's epic:

There is a place deep, wondrous deep below,
Where genuine night and horror does o'erflow; . . .
Here no dear glimpse of the sun's lovely face,
Strikes through the solid darkness of the place;
No dawning morn does her kind reds display;
One slight weak beam would here be thought the day.

Cowley was dry, and wrote without passion. Dryden's tutors were all mild and self-contained. Mildest among them came Waller and Denham,

the pair whom Dryden began as early as the dedication of the Rival Ladies in 1664 to name together, and whose twin fames for a century were the outcome of his persistent praise. The importance of neither can be over-emphasized. Dryden said of Waller, "Unless he had written, none of us could write," and of Denham that his Cooper's Hill, "for the majesty of the style, is, and ever will be, the exact standard of good writing."

To begin with Waller. The novelty of his numbers will be considered in another place. It was the novelty of his expression and his processes that charmed the wits who read his first volume in 1645, and who continued for forty-two years to hear occasions graced by his easy voice. He had learned the secret which Augustan poets were to need to know, the secret of writing with ease. His ease

was ease of mind as well as of meter. He was cool and gracious at the same time. He was not perturbed by his subjects, which indeed were never really great-St. James's Park, the repairing of St. Paul's Cathedral, or Her Majesty's taste for tea; even the wars he sung were petty affairs. He was obvious and pleasant, and could in perfect selfpossession build up an idea or a conceit in verse that would charm by its symmetry. Thought in him was often fatuous, but it was never absent; Goldsmith was struck by his "strength of thinking." When Dryden in 1680-1 revised Sir William Soame's translation of Boileau's Art of Poetry and substituted English names for the French, he wrote "Waller" for "Malherbe," saying,

His happy genius did our tongue refine,

And easy words with pleasing numbers join.

"Easy" and "pleasing" were important terms in Restoration criticism of verse. Waller was not without his conceits; his complimentary effusions are full of absurdities. But he is not shocking; he bathes his bizarrerie in a geniality to which no exception can be taken. His good will is irresistible. Dryden has not exaggerated his own debt to Waller. He borrowed many things, both good and bad, from the suave old Parliamentarian. By constitution he was scarcely so agreeable as Waller, but he learned from him the accent and the diction of

affability. Waller's favorite and most frequent images, those of the eagle and the halcyon, Dryden calmly appropriated. Whenever Dryden's early panegyrical tone is soft and insinuating, as it is in the poems to Charles II, the Lord Chancellor, Lady Castlemaine, and the Duchess of York, he is speaking with Waller's voice. And anyone who will take the trouble to read three poems by Waller on public occasions, the Panegyric to my Lord Protector (1655), Of a War with Spain, and Fight at Sea (1656-61), and Instructions to a Painter, for the Drawing of the Posture and Progress of His Majesty's Forces at Sea (1666), will no longer be in doubt as to whence Dryden derived certain features of his Heroic Stanzas and his Annus Mirabilis. The dignity and the beauty of those two poems are his own; the occasional notes of sober fatuity are Waller's.

Denham's Cooper's Hill owed its vogue largely to Dryden, who neglected no opportunity to praise it. Two lines in that poem,

Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;
Strong without rage; without o'erflowing, full,

modelled by Denham on three lines in Cartwright's verses in memory of Ben Jonson,

Low without creeping, high without loss of wings;
Smooth, yet not weak, and by a thorough-care,
Big without swelling, without painting fair,

became classic through Dryden's analysis of them in his dedication of the Eneis. From Denham Dryden acquired the ratiocinative dignity which is secured by quiet rhetorical questions, restful aphorisms, and meditative enjambement.

The volume which contained Sir William Davenant's Gondibert (1651) is now interesting chiefly for its introductory matter. The epic which followed is important only because it called out poems by Waller and Cowley, and because it needed the elaborate introduction of essays written in Paris the previous year by Davenant and Hobbes. These four prefixtures are interesting despite their failure to convince the world that Gondibert was either new or significant. In themselves they reflected or expressed new doctrines in poetry which were not sterile. They prescribed the materials for the new poetry, and they analyzed the psychological processes by which it would be produced. This volume of 1651 was almost a text-book of the new æsthetics.