worn with cares and age,

And just abandoning the ungrateful stage,
To you, whom every muse and grace adorn,
Whom I foresee to better fortune born.
Be kind to my remains: and O defend,
Against your judgment, your departed friend!
Let not the insulting foe my fame pursue,

But shade those laurels which descend to you.9

Such pieces go far towards explaining a general admiration which outlived their writer by more than a century. Unlike much brilliant work of his, which is strictly earmarked for a period, they have a certain inherent vitality. Unfortunately, common readers are able nevertheless to live without them; and we exercise the right.

There are others, though few, which admit of no option. We have grown up beside them. Verse, like the character of Shaftesbury, is inscribed on the memory in fire :

Of these the false Achitophel was first;
A name to all succeeding ages curst;
For close designs, and crooked councils fit;
Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit;
Reckless, unfix'd in principles and place;
In power unpleas'd, impatient of disgrace;
A fiery soul, which, working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy-body to decay,
And o'er-informed the tenement of clay.
A daring pilot in extremity;

Pleas'd with the danger, when the waves went high

He sought the storms; but for a calm unfit,

Would steer too nigh the sands to boast his wit

Great wits are sure to madness near allied,

And thin partitions do their bounds divide;

Else why should he with wealth and honour blest,
Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?
Punish a body which he could not please;

Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease?

And all to leave what with his toil he won,
To that unfeather'd two-legg'd thing, a son ;
Got while his soul did huddled notions try;
And born a shapeless lump, like anarchy.
In friendship false, implacable in hate;
Resolv'd to ruin or to rule the state.
To compass this the triple bond he broke ;
The pillars of the public safety shook ;
And fitted Israel for a foreign yoke :
Then seiz'd with fear, yet still affecting fame,
Usurp'd a patriot's all-atoning name.
So easy still it proves in factious times
With public zeal to cancel private crimes.
How safe is treason, and how sacred ill,
Where none can sin against the people's will?
Where crowds can wink, and no offence be known,
Since in another's guilt they find their own.
Yet fame deserv'd no enemy can grudge;
The statesman we abhor, but praise the judge.
In Israel's courts ne'er sat an Abethdin
With more discerning eyes, or hands more clean,
Unbrib'd, unsought, the wretched to redress,
Swift of dispatch, and easy of access.

Oh! had he been content to serve the crown,
With virtues only proper to the gown;

Or had the rankness of the soil been freed
From cockle, that oppress'd the noble seed;
David for him his tuneful harp had strung,

And heaven had wanted one immortal song.1 10

Rhetoric? Yes; just enough to clothe the ideas, as a body the soul; more than a suspicion of inspiration 'to order ' —something, may be, of patchwork-but the maker of the song is right;-it is immortal'! Never was there so terrible a process of vivisection-a slicing of living cell from cell -with the visible working on the operator of a fascination at the sense of power, of a sort of greatness in the then helpless subject! Why was there no German Dryden for Bismarck!

And from the same pen and fancy proceeded the majestic pageant of the passions, embodied in Alexander's Feast. Here was no Royal or Ministerial requisition to veneer, encrust, pull down. Lord of himself, his imagination, his conscience, his art, his soul, the cashiered, emancipated courtier bade them work in freedom. See the wonder they have reared! The harmony, the proportions, are perfect. The least change would be desecration. The poet had flattered the painter:

Thy pictures think, and we divine their thought.

With more truth it might be claimed for the Ode on St. Cecilia's Day that every stanza paints a scene; that the result is a series of moving, pictorial pageants, such as the Doge's Palace or Versailles could not parallel. The Ode is one of the world's masterpieces, with not a flaw, unless that it may not be said of it, ' We cannot tell whence it emanated.' We can discern it issuing straight from Dryden's brain : And what Timotheus was is Dryden now.11

He transfigures the Conqueror into a God-and the God of Wine, with his army of Beauties and Revellers. It is his lyre which evokes the shade of Darius :

great and good

By too severe a fate,

Fallen, fallen, fallen, fallen,
Fallen from his high estate,

And welt'ring in his blood;
Deserted, at his utmost need,
By those his former bounty fed;
On the bare earth exposed he lies;
With not a friend to close his eyes.

He is the musician, the magician, who summons the demon

of revenge to lay the

Grecian ghosts, that in battle were slain,

And unburied remain,

by kindling for their funeral pyre the glories of Persepolis,

And glittering temples of the hostile gods.12

So, there are at all events two products of Dryden's Muse, in the enjoyment of a bright immortality, not like that of Tithonus. As much cannot, I am afraid, be claimed for his Translations, which nevertheless merit life also, and life with youth. Among our poet-translators he stands pre-eminent. Much the larger half of his poems, apart from his plays, consists of versions from Greek, Latin, Italian, and early English. To translating he resorted after he had ceased to hire out his Muse to political and religious wranglings, or, worse, to what he knew to be an unworthy and dissolute Stage. His curiosity as to the working of other rich and earlier fancies was extreme. He indulged it in tracing their expatiations line by line, often by intentional deviations. For nature had moulded him critic as well as poet. If he is first of translators, it is that he is first of critics.

As critical exercises his prefaces to the several translations are admirable for English as correct as Addison's, and racier, the earliest actually modern English in our literature; for insight into the spirit of his authors, and discrimination among them; for sympathetic and decisive judgements. Yet more critically instructive are the versions themselves. Few more useful courses in literary art could be pursued than a verbal comparison of the originals and his renderings, and an inquiry into his motives for modifications. Frequently it would probably have to be recognized that Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Chaucer were themselves, and Dryden just himself; that being himself, and a master-poet like them, he is not so successful as he seems to have hoped, in maintaining the character of an author, which dis

tinguishes him from all others'. Ovid and Virgil, with the rest, I confess, as Englished by him, appear to me, independently of the subject-matter, much nearer to being identical in his manner than they were in their own. Still, it cannot but be borne in upon readers that everywhere he in spirit felt the differences, the individuality of each separate poet; and he makes us feel that he felt them.

After all, our business is with Dryden; our primary object is to study the collection as Dryden's work; and as such its merits are transcendent. With Horace alone in the few Odes he has attempted, he seems to me to have failed; that is, he shares the universal failure. In his Theocritus, competent as it is, one is conscious of the want of a dialect, both in temper and tongue. A Burns is needed. The plentiful specimens of the Metamorphoses, if not in smoothness, are, in sparkling and charm, completely Ovidian. We must search long among translations to parallel for ease, power, melody, variety, the Ceyx and Alcyone, and despairing Polyphemus's prayer to Galatea. For Dryden's sake, if not for shameless Ovid's, I pass by the worse than wasted skill in the version of the Art of Love. The treatment of the first book of the Iliad shines out in comparison with Pope's. It is less polished. Sometimes it is slovenly; Pope could not have printed

or

For yesterday the Court of Heaven with Jove
Remov'd; 'tis dead vacation now above;

Brave Hector went to see

His virtuous wife, the fair Andromache.

He found her not at home.

In exchange, it is far and away more resounding, various, vigorous, and vivid.

Over and over again in the Juvenal there is mighty None of the regiment of Dryden's followers has

verse.