DRYDEN. 1. JOHN DRYDEN was born on the 9th of August, 1631 (the year before Locke was born), probably in the house of his maternal grandfather, at Aldwincle All Saints, near Oundle, in Northamptonshire. His father, of a family belonging originally to Cumberland, was the proprietor of a small estate at Blakesley, a village near Aldwincle All Saints. In course of time he was sent to Westminster School, then under the superintendence of Dr. Busby, and subsequently to Trinity College, Cambridge. Leaving the University in 1657, without, it would seem, having specially distinguished himself there, he went up to London, and devoted himself to politics and to literature. Amongst his family connexions were certain important members of the Puritan party. The death of Cromwell soon provided him with a poetical subject. His writing an elegy on that occasion did not prevent him, any more than Waller, and other poets of the day, from welcoming back with a poem Charles the Second. With the Restoration a new field was thrown open to the wits of the time in the shape of the stage, which for some eighteen years had been altogether, or partially, shut up. Dryden turned play-writer. He wrote comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies: the comedies, in prose; the tragedies, the earliest in blank verse, then some in rhyme, on the model of the French tragic drama, the latest in blank verse. His subjects he drew mostly from the old romances, and from history. He reproduced three of Shakspere's plays, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra (which he called All for Love), and The Tempest. In 1671 his plays were heartily, and not undeservedly, ridiculed in the Rehearsal, written by the Duke of Buckingham, assisted, it is said, by "Hudibras" Butler, and others. All this time he was winning more lasting fame by the various critical essays with which his plays, when published, were frequently prefaced. In 1663 he married the Lady Elizabeth Howard, a daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, who by no means proved a congenial consort. 2. It was not till Dryden was some fifty years old that he fully discovered where his strength lay. Before 1681 he had written other poetical pieces, as his Annus Mirabilis (published in 1667, the same year with Paradise Lost), besides his plays, and everything he had written had been marked by a certain power and might; but in that year his Absalom and Achitophel displayed his characteristic talents in their fullest and completest vigour. The nation was at that time in a state of profound excitement; the struggle between Absolutism and Constitutionalism was rapidly nearing its final crisis; the contest between the Court party and the Exclusionists, an important passage in that other all-comprehensive struggle, had just reached its utmost fury. Dryden stood forth as the champion of the Court party; in his Absalom and Achitophel he dealt the Exclusionists the severest blows his genius could inflict, and they were terribly effective. That poem was speedily followed by another, The Medal, aimed at that same Achitophel; and this by another, Mac Flecknoe, aimed at Shadwell, the chief poet of the Whig side. At this same memorable period of his life he wrote also Religio Laici, to vindicate Revelation against Atheism, and Protestantism against Tradition. How well the Stuarts rewarded his great services appears from the fact that it was only with much appealing and difficulty he could procure the payment of the salary due to him as Poet Laureate. Not When long after the succession of James II. he became a Roman Catholic; with his usual fervour and brilliancy he in 1686 wrote his Hind and Panther (published the following year), in which he defended that tradition of which in the Religio Laici he had made so light. the boy was born who was afterwards known as "the Pretender," Dryden celebrated the event in his Britannia Rediviva; but that birth was in fact the signal for the combined action of a justly indignant nation, and the irreparable fall of the Stuart dynasty. 3. Dryden fell with his patrons. Whatever may be thought of the consistency of his previous life, he certainly refused overtures now made to him by the triumphant Protestant party. His political life ended; his literary activity was as intense as ever. He now set himself to the translation of certain classical poets. His version of Persius and Juvenal was published in 1693; that of the Æneid in 1697, in which same year he wrote also his now best-known poem, his Alexander's Feast. His modernizations of Chaucer and other pieces-his Fables -appeared in 1700. Thus his vigour remained to the end, for in 1700 he died. Of his twenty-eight plays scarcely any one is now at all known; and perhaps not much more deserves to be known. The comedies abound in wit, those written in the heroic metre in fine versification; but Dryden was wanting in dramatic power, he was wanting in humour, in tenderness, in delicacy. He could describe in a masterly manner, but this is not the dramatist's great function; he had not the art of making his characters develop themselves -describe themselves by their actions, so to speak. He could lay bare all the motives that actuated them, but he could not show them in a state of action obedient to those motives: in short, his power was rather of the analytical kind. His descriptive power was of the highest. Our literature has in it no more vigorous portrait-gallery than that he has bequeathed it. He succeeds better in his portraits of enemies than of friends; perhaps because, as it happened, the Whig leaders excited in him more disgust than the Tories admiration. The general type of character which that age presented was in an eminent degree calculated not to stir enthusiasm. Dryden fell upon evil times. What he for the most part saw was flagrant corruption in Church and in State, and in society: he lived the best years of his life in the most infamous period of English history; he was getting old when a better time began. The poet reflects his age: there was but little noble for Dryden to reflect. Naturally, he turned satirist. His power of expression is beyond praise. language: he uses always the right word. There is always a singular fitness in his He is one of our greatest masters of metre: metre was, in fact, no restraint to him, but rather it seems to have given him freedom. It has been observed that he argues better in verse than in prose: verse was the natural costume of his thoughts. As a prose-writer he is excellent; but verse-writing was his proper province. MAC FLECKNOE. INTRODUCTION. THIS piece was directed against Shadwell, the leading Whig poet of the day, as Dryden was the Tory. It was published in October 1682. Johnson therefore mistakes when he says that it was occasioned by Shadwell's being appointed to succeed Dryden as Poet Laureate (see his Life of Dryden); for that superseding did not take place till after the Revolution. In spite of what is said in the following Satire, Shadwell was a comic poet of no mean power, and but for his lavish indecency would well deserve to be read. He was certainly a better play-writer than his satirist. Dryden and he had once been friends, and indeed fellow-workers, and in those days Dryden had not been blind to his merits. to the Volunteers, one of Shadwell's plays, he speaks of him as "The great support of the comic stage, Born to expose the follies of the age, First of our times, and second but to Ben." In the Epilogue This praise must have been particularly welcome to Shadwell, not only as coming from whom it did come, but for its form; for Shadwell modelled himself upon Ben Jonson. He, too, aimed at representing "humours." He is said to have resembled him somewhat in person. He found no difficulty in resembling him in his affection for the tavern. Had he lived some half-century sooner he would no doubt have gladly been enrolled in what Jonson himself called "the tribe of Ben." If Jonson wrote Masques, Shadwell wrote an opera, Pysche. in course of time Dryden and he became enemies. Dryden had spoken disparagingly of Ben Jonson (see his Essay on Dramatic Poetry); Shadwell sneered at Aureng-zebe. When the fearful factious excitements connected with the Exclusion Bill and the Popish Plot came to a head in 1678, and the two following years, Dryden and Shadwell were ranged on opposite sides. Shadwell answered the Medal with his Medal of John Bayes; he took part also in a lampoon called The Tory Poets, aimed at Dryden and Otway. In October 1682 appeared Mac Flecknoc: A Satire on the True Blue Protestant Poet, T.S.; and in the following month the Portrait of Shadwell under the name of Og in the Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel. For the name, Shadwell would have been proud to be called the "Son of Ben; " Dryden calls him the "Son of Flecknoe," the heir of one of the meanest versifiers of the century. Of this poor poetaster, Flecknoe, the very name would now barely be known but for the immortality Dryden thus gave him. Dryden plucked him from oblivion to become a proverb of badness. Thus Swift writes in his On Poetry, a Rhapsody, 1744: "Remains a difficulty still To purchase fame by writing ill. From Flecknoe down to Howard's time, How few have reached the low sublime ! " Besides its great intrinsic merit, Mac Flecknoe has the additional interest of having mainly suggested the form of Pope's Dunciad. "I doubt not," says Pope himself in a note to 'Flecknoe's Irish Throne" (Dunciad, ii. 2), our author took occasion to mention him in respect to the poem of Mr. Dryden, to which this bears some resemblance, though of a character more different from it than that of the Eneid from the Iliad, or the Lutrin of Boileau from the Défait de Bonts Rimées [sic] of Sarazin." 27. 3. Flecknoe. See Introduction. Augustus was just thirty-three years of age when he overthrew his formidable rival Antony, and became the undisputed master of the Roman world. He held that mastership for forty-four years. See Class. Dict. or Hist. Rom. [In what year did he accept the imperium proconsulare? In what year did he die ?] 8. [Explain the exact meaning of a large increase. In what relation do the words stand to issue?] increase is often used particularly for family or progeny. See 1 Sam. ii. 33. So Shakspere's Coriolanus, III. iii. 114; Pope's Odyssey: Comp. Latin incrementum. Often it is used generally for produce. 27. 10. to settle the settling. So "For not to have been dipt in Lethe's lake Could save the son of Thetis from to-die." (Two Gentlemen of Verona, III. i. 182.) how to settle; comp. Milton's Lyc. 10. it." (Bunyan's Holy War.) See Shakspere's "I leave to be," &c. Or debate to settle may= debate Comp. "to subdue any that in anywise denied to do The settling of the succession of the political state was an only too familiar question at this time. It had troubled Cromwell; it was now pressing upon Charles the Second, if anything could press upon him; it was certainly vexing the whole nation. Thus Flecknoe's position was easy to realize. 13. Observe the force of the metre here. 'Tis resolved. Comp. beginning of Alexander's Feast. 14. [What "part of speech" is onely here? What does it qualify? Where ought it, strictly, to be placed? Quote or find similar instances of careless arrangement.] 22. "The long dissensions of the two houses, which although they had had luci intervals and happy pauses, yet they did ever hang over the kingdom ready to break forth." (Bacon.) intervall here, as etymologically, of space. Shakspere uses the Latin form in 2 Henry IV. V. i. 85, "a' shall laugh without intervallums." 23. [What is meant by genuine night?] "prevail upon," = persuade; so "prevail with." In a material sense perhaps we should rather say "prevail over." See Shakspere's Richard III. III. iv. 64. Comp. ". 'prevail against." Comp. also Daniel iii. 27: These men upon whose bodies the fire had no power." [Has rising any present force here ?] 25. See Introd. fabrick. The comparison of a body to a building is common enough: see St. Paul's Second Epistle to the Corinthians, v. 1. It is the leading idea of Howe's Living Temple. (See 1 Cor. iii. 16, &c.) 26. [Is majesty used here in an abstract or a concrete sense?] 28. supinely. Keats used supine in its original sense in Eve of St. Agnes. 28. 29. Heywood was one of the "Elizabethan" dramatists. Of the details of his life little is known. He died some time in the reign of Charles I. He would seem to have been a writer of wonderful fertility, for he boasts of having had "an entire hand, or at the least a main finger," in 220 plays. He was a writer of far greater merit than might be supposed from this mention of him by Dryden. See some extracts from his plays in Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets. Lamb, a most discerning critic, says of him that he is "a sort of prose Shakspeare. His scenes are to the full as natural and affecting. But we miss the Poet, that which in Shakspeare always appears out and above the surface of the nature," &c. Shirley, born probably in 1594, died in 1666. Neither to him does Dryden here quite do justice; see specimens of his plays in the selection just mentioned. Lamb says of him, that he claims a place amongst the worthies of this period not so much for any transcendent genius in himself as that he was the last of a great race, all of whom spoke nearly the same language, and had a set of moral feelings and notions in common. A new language and quite a new turn of tragic and comic interest came in with the Restoration." Dryden, as the great superseder of this school of which Shirley was the last notable member, not unnaturally failed to appreciate what merits he had. 31. dunce. Duns Scotus (he was born about the same time as Dante, died in 1308,) was a man of an acute intellect, and of great erudition; but, when that school of learning to which he belonged fell into contempt, his name became a by-word for ignorance: thus his very eminence in his own age placed him in a low and contemptible position in another age. See Trench's Study of Words. 28. 33. Norwich drugget. He wrote first "rusty-drugget." (Todd.) Norwich was known for its woollen manufactures from the time of Henry I., when a colony of Flemings settled in the neighbourhood of Worstead. "Others, settlers from the same country, joined their brethren in the reign of Henry VI. and Elizabeth." (Pop. Encycl.) "Worsted," "Lindsey Wolsey," and "Kerseymere” are said to be so called from East Anglian villages noted for their woollen productions: see Taylor's Words and Places. For the term drugget, “it is said that drugget or droget was first made at Drogheda in Ireland." 35. warbling. See Hymn Nat. 96. lute. See Ode for St. Cecilia's Day, 36. whilom. Scotch "quhylum." This is an old dat. case; so 66 seldom." With the help of a prep. was formed from the same stem the adverb "umwhile," Scotch "umquhile: " see Piers Ploughman, Ed. Skeat, v. 345. 36. See Introd. 38. silver Thames. See Spenser's Prothal. 1. 11. 39. [What other meaning has well-tim'd?] barge: = pleasure boat. In a "barge" Cleopatra sailed down the Cydnus; see Antony and Cleopatra, II. ii. 196. 40. [What is the force of of here ?] 42. That is, "such a scene was never depicted even in one of your own nonsensical plays." Shadwell had written a play called Epsom Wells. The virtue of the springs at Epsom was 45. well-sharpned thumb. As if his thumb was a sword inflicting cruel cuts on the trebles and the basses. Comp. Juvenal's "stricto pane" (Sat. v. 169). Shadwell is the leader of the band. [Why do nail and thumb make the description ludicrous?] 49. As they might be supposed to have thronged around Arion; but in fact fishes, except seals, are said to be insensible to the charms of music. Comp. with this passage an old ballad on the death and funeral of Queen Elizabeth (quoted here from memory): "The Queen was brought by water to Whitehall, At every stroke the oars did tears let fall; Some clung about the boat; the fishes under water Wept out their eyes of pearl, and swam blind after.” No doubt one great amusement of leisurely voyagers up and down the Thames in the days of pleasure barges would be throwing over pieces of bread and toast and watching the eager contentious pursuit of the little fishes. Or, more probably, this passage refers to fragments of the morning toast which, thrown out for the benefit of the swans (a great number of these were kept on the river in the old days), became objects of desire and pursuit to the fishes. 50. thy threshing hand, i.e. the hand which you move as if you were threshing which you beat time. His roll of "papers" served him as a bâton. 51. St. André was a well-known French dancing-master of the day. 52. Psyche. See Introd. = with 54. [What is meant by they? and what by saying they fell like tautology?] 55. Singleton is said to have been the leader of the King's private band. Pepys mentions how once, in 1660, the king "did put a great affront upon his music, bidding them stop and make the French music play." He was also an actor, as the present passage shows. Villerius is a persona in Sir W. D'Avenant's Siege of Rhodes. With regard to the lute ana sword, see the Fifth Act of The Rehearsal, where that play is parodied. The stage direction runs: Enter at several doors the General and Lieutenant-General` arm'd Cap-a-pea, with T |