Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he
Who stands confirm'd in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.
Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,
Strike through, and make a lucid interval:
But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray;
His rising fogs prevail against the day.
Besides, his goodly fabric fills the eye,
And seems design'd for thoughtless majesty;
Thoughtless as monarch oaks, that shade the plain,
And spread in solemn state supinely reign.
Heywood and Shirley were but types of thee,
Thou last great prophet of tautology!

Heywood and Shirley were dramatic writers of the past age, both superior to what Dryden here intimates of them; but he saw their tediousness and commonplace, and did not feel their sentiment. Shadwell was a great fat debauchee, who mistook will for genius; and because he enjoyed the humor of Ben Jonson, and was not indeed altogether destitute of humor himself, poured forth a profusion of shallow dialogue, which was the very dotage of pertness. As to his "poetry," the reader may see a specimen of it in "Imagination and Fancy," p. 31.

It is a curious oversight of Dryden's in this satire, that he should put the best wit of it into the mouth of Flecnoe himself.

CHARACTER OF LORD SHAFTESBURY.1

From the poem of "ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL."

This plot which fail'd for want of common sense,t
Had yet a deep and dangerous consequence:

For as when raging fevers boil the blood,

The standing lake soon floats into a flood,

* "Absalom and Achitophel" is a satire, under Jewish names, upon the intrigues of Lord Shaftesbury and the Duke of Monmouth against the Catholic and Court interest.

†The Popish Plot, real or pretended, which was sworn to by the infamous Titus Oates.

And every hostile humor, which before
Slept quiet in its channels, bubbles o'er ;
So several factions, from this first ferment,
Work up to foam, and threat the government.

Some by their friends, more by themselves, thought wise,
Oppos'd the power to which they could not rise.

Some had in courts been great, and, thrown from thence,
Like fiends were harden'd in impenitence.
Some, by their monarch's fatal mercy, grown,
From pardon'd rebels, kinsmen to the throne,
Were rais'd in power, and public office high ;
Strong bands, if bands ungrateful men could tie.
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;
Restless, unfix'd in principles and place,
In power unpleas'd, impatient of disgrace;
A fiery soul, that working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy body to decay,

And o'er-inform'd 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 show his wit.

Great wits to madness surely are allied,

And thin partitions do their bounds divide ;a

Else, why should he, with wealth and honor 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 such 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 see 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 despatch, 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 "Character of Lord Shaftesbury."-Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury, a mercurial and ambitious man, not very well principled where power was to be obtained, but not indisposed to be just and patriotic when possessed of it. Even the famous reply which he is said to have made to a banter of Charles the Second, contained a sort of impudent aspiration, which must have at once disconcerted and delighted the merry monarch; for it implied that his majesty and he stood in a very remarkable state of relationship.

The King. Shaftesbury, I believe thou art the wickedest dog in my dominions.

Shaftesbury (with a bow). May it please your majesty, of a subject, I believe I am."

2 "Great wits to madness surely are allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”

The truth of this striking couplet may seem to be exemplified in the history of Swift and others; but it is not the greatness of the wit that is allied to the madness; it is the weakness or violence of the will. Rabelais was no madman, Molière was none, Sterne was none, Butler none, Horace, Aristophanes, Ariosto, Berni, Voltaire, Shakspeare, Cervantes. The greater the wit, for the most part, the healthier the understanding, because it is thoroughly wisest and well-balanced. Some physical irregularity

* A Jewish word for judge. Shaftesbury had been Lord Chancellor.

or accident is generally at the bottom of the madness of men of genius. Lee was a drinker, and used to lie at night in the streets. Swift had a diseased blood. Poor Collins probably got the seeds of his malady in the gay life he once led "about town," a very unfit one for his sensitive and sequestered turn of mind. Cowper was driven mad through an excessive delicacy of organization frightened by Methodism; instead of being soothed, as it ought to have been, by the liberal opinions natural to his heart and good

sense.

3" To that unfeather'd two-legg'd thing, a son.”—Father of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, the philosopher; who with all his philosophy never forgave Dryden this attack on the parental insignificance.

CHARACTER OF THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM.

From the same poem.

A numerous host of dreaming saints succeed,

Of the true old enthusiastic breed:

'Gainst form and order they their power employ,
Nothing to build, and all things to destroy.
But far more numerous was the herd of such,
Who think too little, and who talk too much.
These out of mere instinct, they knew not why,
Ador'd their fathers' God, and property;
And by the same blind benefit of fate,
The Devil and the Jebusite did hate;
Born to be sav'd, even in their own despite,
Because they could not help believing right.
Such were the tools; but a whole hydra more
Remains of sprouting heads too long to score.
Some of their chiefs were princes of the land.
In the first rank of these did Zimri stand;

A man so various, that he seem'd to be
but all mankind's epitome;

Not one,

Stiff in opinion, always in the wrong,

Was everything by starts, and nothing long ;

George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, son of the favorite of James and Charles the First.

But, in the course of one revolving moon,

Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon;
Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.
Blest madman, who could every hour employ
With something new to wish or to enjoy!
Railing and praising were his usual themes,
And both, to show his judgment in extremes;
So over violent, or over civil,

That every man with him was God or Devil.
In squandering wealth was his peculiar art;
Nothing went unrewarded but desert.
Beggar'd by fools whom still he found too late,
He had his jest, and they had his estate.

He laugh'd himself from court; then sought relief
By forming parties, but could ne'er be chief:
For spite of him the weight of business fell
On Absalom and false Achitophel.
Thus, wicked but in will, of means bereft,
He left not faction, but of that was left."

1" Character of the Duke of Buckingham."-The duke intrigued against a giddy and unprincipled court out of pure similarity of disposition. Dryden's attack on him was partly in payment for offence received in the critical comedy of The Rehearsal. His Grace was very angry, and replied in a wretched pamphlet, which is forgotten.-See the interesting notes on Walter Scott's edition of Dryden, vol. ix., p. 272.

2" He left not faction, but of that was left."-See, in the present volume, the rival portrait of Buckingham from the hand of Pope.

FOPPERIES OF THE TIME.

(Being the Epilogue to Etherege's "MAN OF MODE, or SIR FOPLING FLUTTER."

Most modern wits such monstrous fools have shown,
They seem not of Heaven's making, but their own:

Those nauseous harlequins in farce may pass,

But there goes more to a substantial ass: