the nation." "Astræa Redux," a poem celebrating the return of Charles, appeared in 1660, the "Panegyric on the Coronation" in 1661, and the "Epistle to the Lord Chancellor " (Clarendon) in 1662. All these poems are in the heroic couplet, the form of verse over which Dryden was afterwards to gain such a mastery. In 1663 appeared the “Epistle to Dr. Charleton," which Hallam very unjustly thought was the first of Dryden's works that possessed any considerable merit.

At the close of 1663, Dryden married Lady Elizabeth Howard, the eldest daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. This union is thought, though on no very certain evidence, to have been an unhappy one. Some months before his marriage, Dryden's first play, the "Wild Gallant," was acted. During the Commonwealth the drama had lived in a stealthy and precarious kind of way, forbidden by the law and frowned upon by all who wished to stand well with the Puritans. At the Restoration it revived, and became, in fact, the best market which a man of literary talents could carry his wares to. It may be safely asserted that a writer, possessed like Dryden of a versatile genius, will, in almost every case, employ himself mainly in the kind of work which he finds most remunerative, even though it may not be the kind of work for which he is best adapted. It is idle, therefore, to lament that so much of Dayden's time should have been occupied in the composition of plays, none of which is of such value that it would be any serious loss to literature to be deprived of it, and which several writers of his time could have written almost, if not quite, as well. But we have good cause to lament that he should have prostituted his genius by, in his comic dramas, pandering shamelessly and recklessly to the licentious tastes of his audience. Altogether he wrote twenty-eight plays, the first appearing, as above stated, in 1663, the last, "Love Triumphant," in 1694. In his comedies, indecency frequently takes the place of wit, and their merit in other respects is smail. "I know," wrote Dryden himself, "I am not so fitted by nature to write comedy. My conversation is slow and duil, my humour saturnine and reserved. So that those who decry

my comedies do me no injury except it be in point of profit; reputation in them is the last thing to which I shall pretend." Dryden's serious dramas fall into two well-marked divisions. The earlier of them are written in the pompous heroic style which had been made fashionable in England by Sir William Davenant, and the tragic portions are, like the similar parts of Davenant's plays, written in rhyming couplets. A good specimen of Dryden's dramas of rhymed declamation, as they may be called, is afforded by the "Conquest of Granada" (1670). The sublime rants of its hero, Almanzor, are difficult to regard in other than a humorous light, though, singularly enough, they seem to have inspired Dr. Johnson with a sort of admiration. "All the rays of romantic heat," he says, "whether amorous or warlike, glow in Almanzor by a kind of concentration. He is above all laws; he is exempt from all restraints; he ranges the world at will, and governs wherever he appears. He fights without inquiring the cause, and loves in spite of the obligations of justice, of rejection by his mistress, and of prohibition from the dead. Yet the scenes are, for the most part, delightful; they exhibit a kind of illustrious depravity and majestic madness, such as, if it is sometimes despised, is often reverenced, and in which the majestic mingles with the astonishing." In 1668 Dryden had defended rhymed tragedies in an "Essay on Dramatic Poesy," which first showed his skill in prose composition and his power of acute and discerning criticism. He did not, however, remain steadfast to the practice he then advocated. In 1671 appeared the famous burlesque called the "Rehearsal," which inflicted a severe blow on the popularity of rhymed tragedies. This very amusing play, which will bear reading even by those whose knowledge of the literature of the age is not sufficient to enable them to appreciate all its allusions, was the work of the Duke of Buckingham, assisted by Samuel Butler, Thomas Sprat, afterwards made a bishop, and Martin Clifford, the head-master of the Charterhouse. Though it contained allusions to several other dramatists of the time, the main object of the "Rehearsal" was to caricature Dryden, who is represented under the name

of Bayes, a nickname which stuck to him throughout life. Not only his literary but his personal peculiarities, his dress, his voice, his gesture, his habit of taking snuff, his favourite expletives are mercilessly ridiculed. This attack Dryden bore very stoically, making no reply, and continuing to write rhymed. tragedies as before. At length his own good sense showed him that it would be better to abandon the practice, and return to the form of verse which had been employed with such eminent success by the Elizabethan dramatists. About 1678 appeared "All for Love," his first drama in blank verse, and one of his best plays from every point of view. There was something of audacity in writing a play on a subject which had already been handled by the greatest dramatist the world has ever seen in "Anthony and Cleopatra." Yet with such vigour and force is "All for Love" written, that it can sustain comparison with the work of Shakespeare, and still be admired. Dryden's other most famous play in blank verse is "Don Sebastian" (1689), one scene in which, the altercation between Sebastian and Dorax, used to be very often given in books of extracts. Having thus briefly dealt with Dryden as a dramatist, we now return to trace the course of his life. "Annus Mirabilis" appeared in 1667, which, from a literary point of view, is one of the most important years of the seventeenth century. It witnessed the publication of "Paradise Lost," the death of Denham, Cowley, and Jeremy Taylor, and the birth of Swift and Arbuthnot. "Annus Mirabilis," which is written in the Astræa Redux," commemorates the events of the "wonderful year" 1666, the great fire of London, and the Dutch war. Though frequently disfigured by "metaphysical" conceits, it is a powerful piece of writing, and at once made Dryden the most illustrious poet of the day, Milton of course excepted. His "Discourse on Dramatic Poesy" raised him to similar rank as a prose writer; and in 1670 his merits in both capacities were recognised by his being appointed historiographer-royal and poet laureate. In the latter capacity he succeeded Sir William Davenant, who died in 1668. The two offices brought him a salary of

same metre as

Dryden's Satires.

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£200 a year, to which was afterwards added a pension of £100 bestowed on him by Charles. The income thus derived was, however, to a considerable extent a nominal one; for Charles was a very bad paymaster, and Dryden's salary was frequently in arrear. Nevertheless his financial position about this time was tolerably prosperous. He had a small estate worth about £80 a year, which he had inherited from his father; and from his dramas, and a lucrative contract he entered into with the players, he obtained a considerable revenue, For fourteen years after the publication of "Annus Mirabilis " Dryden employed himself in dramatic work, adding little to his permanent fame, but acquiring, by prolonged and laborious practice, a consummate mastery of the heroic couplet. In 1681, when party spirit ran very high about the Exclusion Bill, he gave the first specimen of his wonderful power of reasoning in verse and his extraordinary talent for satire by the publication of "Absalom and Achitophel." The plan of the poem is not original, but the mode of treatment is eminently so. In vigorous couplets he gives us a matchless series. of political portraits, strong, mordant, incisive, and always having the crowning merit of keeping sufficiently close to actual fact to save them from having the semblance of caricature. Interspersed with these are occasional speeches relating the sentiments of the different characters from Dryden's point of view. Dryden never surpassed this his first essay in the field of satire: the energy of genius, it has been well said, has transformed a party pamphlet in verse into a work which men of all ages and of all opinions have agreed to recognise as a masterpiece. When, on the acquittal of Shaftesbury, who had been tried on a charge of high treason, a medal was struck by the joyful Whigs to commemorate the event, Dryden followed up "Absalom and Achitophel" by another satire, "The Medal," in which "he hurled at Shaftesbury and his party a philippic which, for rancorous abuse, for lofty and uncompromising scorn, for coarse, scathing, ruthless denunciation, couched in diction which now swells to the declamatory grandeur of Juvenal, and now sinks to the homely vulgarity

of Swift, has no parallel in literature." Of the innumerable replies and attacks on the author which "Absalom and Achitophel" and "The Medal" called forth, Dryden took no notice, till Thomas Shadwell, a dramatist of no inconsiderable talents but of infamous life, assailed his private character in terms so gross and libellous as to imperatively demand a rejoinder. Of him Dryden determined to make a terrible example. This he did in "Mac Flecknoe," which was published late in 1682. Richard Flecknoe, an Irish priest, who died in 1678, and who had been the favourite butt of many satirists, is represented as having chosen Shadwell for his successor as King of the Realms of Nonsense in a mock-heroic strain which must have been infinitely galling to the subject of ridicule. Shadwell's coronation is then described, and the Foem concludes with a ferocious assault which bears too many traces of personal bitterness. About a month after "Mac-Flecknoe" appeared the second part of "Absalom and Achitophel." Most of it was written by Nahum Tate, a worthy though dull man, but two hundred and fifty lines are entirely from Dryden's pen, and traces of his hand may be perceived in other parts of the poem. In the portion which is wholly his he returned to the attack on Shadwell, and also took the opportunity of gibbeting Elkanah Settle, a worthless versifier and playwright, who had occupied a rather prominent place among his numerous assailants.

In the same year, 1682, the "annus mirabilis" of his genius, Dryden took a new departure. In that year he published "Religio Laici," which Scott has described as one of the most admirable poems of the language. "It is,” says Mr. George Saintsbury, in his excellent little book on Dryden, "also one of the most singular. That a man who had never previously displayed any particular interest in theological questions, and who had reached the age of fifty-one with a

1 Quarterly Review, October 1878, art. "Dryden," one of the ablest and most vigorous Review articles of the kind which has appeared for many a year. Bating its opinions, it might very well have been written by Macaulay. It is, we believe, by Mr. J. Churton Collins.