changes in taste and of belying reasons why they should not be read. It may be urged against Dryden that he was the too unctuous spokesman of a decaying order; that, clear as he may have seemed to a smaller, more literary world, for the purposes of modern life he is hard and opaque; that he handles not images but facts, that by naming he destroys and by failing to suggest he fails to create, that he elaborates and disguises rather than foreshortens and intensifies experience; that he is more journalist than artist, more orator than seer. But even while this is urged, warning may issue from other quarters that foreshortening implies bad perspective and intensification a heat that withers as well as inspirits. If there was something fatuous about the opulence of the Augustans there is often something desperate about the simplicity of the moderns. If an aristocratic society fattens and sleeks the poets of its choice, democracy grinds many of its sons to powder. A man who composes verse too exclusively out of his faculties can hardly be judged by men who write too much with their nerves; the imagination, the umpire of art, might acknowledge neither. Dryden lives not as one who went out to rear great frames of thought and feeling, or as one who waited within himself and caught fine, fugitive details of sensation, but as one who elastically paced the limits of a dry though well-packed mind. He braces those who listen to his music; he will be found refreshing if, answering his own invitation, When tired with following nature, you think fit, APPENDIX The Authorship of Mac Flecknoe Recent investigations 1 having overcast Mac Flecknoe with curious uncertainties concerning the authenticity of its first publication, the date of its composition, and the identity of its author, it becomes necessary to summarize both what is known and what can be reasonably conjectured about a poem which it has not been unusual to consider Dryden's masterpiece. There seems to be no doubt that the edition of 1682, recognized now as the first, was a pirated one. The publisher was not Dryden's Jacob Tonson, as would be expected, but D. Green, who not only was obscure but desired to remain so, since he printed no address other than London adjacent to his name on the title page. The publication of the pamphlet could hardly have proceeded under the supervision of its author. There was no preface, strangely enough at least for Dryden, and the text was one of which an intelligent man would have been permanently ashamed; as witness line 82, or line 92, Amidst this monument of varnisht minds, Humorists and Hypocrites his pen should produce, 1 Babington, Percy L. Modern Language Review. Dryden not the Author of Mac Flecknoe. January, 1918. Thorn-Drury, G. Dryden's Mac Flecknoe. A Vindication. Ibid. July, 1918. Belden, H. M. The Authorship of Mac Flecknoe. Modern Language Notes. December, 1918. metrically impossible, or lines 135-6, And from his brows damps of oblivion shed, Full of the filial dulness, where the only conceivable point is lost, or line 167, But write thy best, on th' top; and in each line— which means nothing. Had the poem been brand new in 1682, as has been supposed by those who have believed it an almost extempore reply to Shadwell's Medal of John Bayes, it is difficult to see why it should have escaped so completely from the author's hands; since surely he would lose no time himself in getting it to a printer. The fate of Mac Flecknoe was a fate not uncommonly visited upon works for some time existent and circulating in manuscript. That Mac Flecknoe was such a work is far from impossible. It is possible, for instance, that it had been composed upon the occasion of Flecknoe's death (1678?), an event somewhat ambiguously referred to by Dryden in the dedication of Limberham in 1680. As a satire on Shadwell it would have been as timely in 1676 as it was in 1682. It alludes to no play published by Shadwell later than 1676. It makes no capital out of Shadwell's politics, which were conspicuously Whiggish after the Popish Plot and which would naturally draw Dryden's fire after Absalom and Achitophel, The Medal, and particularly The Medal of John Bayes. The epithet applied to Shadwell on the title page, "TrueBlew-Protestant," may only have been D. Green's; it was not repeated in later editions. The occupation of the poem is wholly with personalities and literary principles; chastisement is administered not to a Whig, or even to a drunken treason-monger, as in the second part of Absalom and Achitophel, but simply to a fat dull poet who deals too much in "humours." Furthermore, there is in |