in the smiling mind of a massive old satirist. Here in this legend of two preposterous lovers and afterwards in the "character" of the raw militia swarming on the fields of Rhodes are exhibited most of the traits of Dryden. One will observe the absence of wonder, and the powerful presence of hard, substantial laughter.

VIII

REPUTATION: CONCLUSION

The reputation of Dryden as a poet has not been international. Where English is not spoken his name is likely to be respected, but his poetry seldom is read. A man who has had so little to say to his countrymen has had no claim at all on the ears of foreigners. It is only a few poets who can be or need be translated. Dryden, in whom style was paramount, and whose manner proved generally incommunicable even to native successors, can hardly have expected to appear to advantage in other languages. Thackeray asserted in his essay on Congreve and Addison that Dryden died "the marked man of all Europe," but that is an exaggeration. Naturally enough, he was heard more of in France than elsewhere on the continent; yet he was never famous there. At no time before 1700 were the French much interested in England's belles lettres; it did not much matter to Boileau whether Dryden or Blackmore was best among the poets across the Channel. Boileau, indeed, when told of Dryden's death is said to have affected never to have heard his name. Rapin, on the other hand, may have learned English merely to read him. At all events, it was not until the next century, when everything English suddenly became of enormous concern to

Frenchmen, that Voltaire celebrated and gave some little vogue to "l'inégal et impétueux Dryden,” "un très-grand génie," as he called him in the dedication of Zaïre in 1736. He had introduced the author of Aureng-Zebe to the French public in 1734, in his letter on English tragedy: "C'est Dryden Poëte du tems de Charles second, Auteur plus fécond que judicieux, qui aurait une réputation sans mélange, s'il n'avait fait que la dixième partie de ses Ouvrages, et dont le grand deffaut est d'avoir voulu être universel." In 1752, in the thirty-fourth chapter of his Siècle de Louis XIV, he announced of Dryden's works that they were "pleins de détails naturels à la fois et brillants, animés, vigoureux, hardis, passionés, mérite qu'aucun ancien n'a surpassé." He drew upon The Wife of Bath in 1764 for the idea of his tale in verse, Ce Que Plait Aux Dames. Alexander's Feast was always for him a point de repère in English poetry. In his article on Enthusiasm in the Dictionary he showed an excellent understanding of the conventional English judgments upon it: "De toutes les odes modernes, celle où il règne le plus grand enthousiasme qui ne s'affaiblit jamais, et qui ne tombe ni dans le faux ni dans l'ampulé, est le Timothée, ou la fête d'Alexandre, par Dryden; elle est encore regardée en Angleterre comme un chefd'oeuvre inimitable, dont Pope n'a pu approcher quand il a voulu s'exercer dans le même genre. Cette ode fut chantée; et si on avait eu un musicien digne du poëte, ce serait le chef-d'oeuvre de la poésie lyrique." To M. de Chabanon, who had just published a translation of Pindar with an essay on the

Pindaric genre, he wrote from Ferney on the 9th of March, 1772: "Vous appelez Cowley le Pindare anglais. . . c'était un poète sans harmonie.

Le vrai Pindare est Dryden, auteur de cette belle ode intitulée la Fête d'Alexandre, ou Alexandre et Timothée. Cette ode. passe en Angleterre pour le chef-d'oeuvre de la poésie la plus sublime et la plus variée; et je vous avoue que, comme je sais meux l'anglais que le grec, j'aime cent fois mieux cette ode que tout Pindare." Boswell told Johnson "that Voltaire, in a conversation with me, had distinguished Pope and Dryden thus: 'Pope drives a handsome chariot, with a couple of neat trim nags; Dryden a coach, and six stately horses."" It will be seen that Voltaire had not listened for nothing to the wits and savants of London. And he must have known that he was safer in extolling Alexander's Feast than he would have been on any other ground. Dryden's last ode has penetrated where none of the other poems will ever go. Händel's music kept it long familiar to Germans who had no taste for the other lyrics. Henry Crabb Robinson wrote in his diary in 1803, after a visit to Voss, the German translator of Homer: "I was quite unable to make him see the beauty of Dryden's translations from Horace,-such as the 'Ode on Fortune."" A. W. Schlegel was at a loss to understand what he considered the inflated reputation at home of the plays, the translations, and the "political allegories." It is in England, and incidentally in America, that one must remain if he would find what fame the name of Dryden has enjoyed.

"I loved Mr. Dryden," said Congreve with a sim

plicity that was rare with him and his generation. The stout old poet with his cherry cheeks, his heavy eyes, his long grey hair, and his snuff-soiled waistcoat was not in want of affectionate as well as valuable friends after the Revolution. He kept company not only with poets, but with important laymen. He V was a believer in conversation, though he may not have been an adept himself. "Great contemporaries whet and cultivate each other," he wrote in 1693 in the Discourse of Satire. Back in the time of Charles he had been intimate with the wits and poets of the court. "We have . . . our genial nights," he reminded Sedley in the dedication of The Assignation in 1673, "where our discourse is neither too serious nor too light, but always pleasant, and, for the most part, instructive; the raillery neither too sharp upon the present, nor too censorious on the absent; and the cups only such as will raise the conversation of the night, without disturbing the business of the morrow." In his last decade he was welcome in the houses of his relations, Mrs. Steward of Cotterstock Hall, near Oundle, Northamptonshire, and John Driden of Chesterton, in Huntingdonshire, and in that of the really noble Duke of Ormonde. Thomas Carte, who wrote a life of the Duke in 1736, said that "once in a quarter of a year he used to have the Marquis of Halifax, the earls of Mulgrave, Dorset, and Danby, Mr. Dryden, and others of that set of men at supper, and then they were merry and drank hard." 1

1 John Caryll of Lady Holt, Sussex, who formed the amiable habit late in the century of inviting celebrities to his house and accompanying