cent of the ancient world. When he makes our English search her coffers round, it is not for any home-made ornaments, and his commentators are fain to unravel some of his syntax by the help of the Greek or Latin grammar.

Dryden knew Latin literature very well, but that innate scepticism of his mind, which made him an admirable critic, would not allow him to be subjugated by antiquity. His æsthetical training was essentially French; and if this sometimes had an ill effect on his poetry, it was greatly to the advantage of his prose, wherein ease and dignity are combined in that happy congruity of proportion which we call style, and the scholar's fulness of mind is mercifully tempered by the man of the world's dread of being too fiercely in earnest. It is a gentlemanlike style, thoroughbred in every fibre. As it was without example, so, I think, it has remained without a parallel in English. Swift has the ease, but lacks the lift; and Burke, who plainly formed himself on Dryden, has matched him in splendor, but has not caught his artistic skill in gradation, nor that perfection of tone which can be eloquent without being declamatory.

When I try to penetrate the secret of Dryden's manner, I seem to discover that the new quality in it is a certain air of good society, an urbanity, in the original meaning of the word. By this I mean that his turn of thought (I am

speaking of his maturer works) is that of the capital, of the great world, as it is somewhat presumptuously called, and that his diction is, in consequence, more conversational than that which had been traditional with any of the more considerable poets who had preceded him. It is hard to justify a general impression by conclusive examples. Two instances will serve to point my meaning, if not wholly to justify my generalization. His ode on the death of Mrs. Killigrew begins thus,

"Thou youngest virgin-daughter of the skies,

Made in the last promotion of the blest."

And in his translation of the third book of the "Æneid," he describes Achæmenides, the Greek rescued by the Trojans from the island of the Cyclops, as "bolting" from the woods.

Dryden, in making verse the vehicle of good sense and argument rather than of passion and intuition, affords but an indication of the tendency of the time in which he lived,—a tendency quickened by the influence which could not fail to be exerted by his really splendid powers as a poet, especially by the copious felicity of his language and his fine instinct for the energies and harmonies of rhythm. But the fact that a great deal of his work was job-work, that most of it was done in a hurry, led him often to fill up a gap with the first sonorous epithet that came to hand, and his indolence was thus partly

to blame for that poetic diction which brought poetry to a deadlock in the next century. Dryden knew very well that sound makes part of the sense and a large part of the sentiment of a verse, and, where he is in the vein, few poets have known better than he how to conjure with vowels, or to beguile the mind into acquiescence through the ear. Addison said truly, though in verses whose see-saw cadence and lack of musical instinct would have vexed the master's ear,

"Great Dryden next, whose tuneful Muse affords
The sweetest numbers and the fittest words."

But Dryden never made the discovery that ten syllables arranged in a proper accentual order were all that was needful to make a ten-syllable verse. He is great Dryden, after all, and between him and Wordsworth there was no poet with enough energy of imagination to deserve that epithet. But he had taught the trick of cadences that made the manufacture of verses more easy, and he had brought the language of poetry nearer, not to the language of real life as Wordsworth understood it, that is, to the speech of the people, but to the language of the educated and polite. He himself tells us at the end of the Religio Laici,"

“And this unpolished, rugged verse I chose

As fittest for discourse, and nearest prose."

Unpolished and rugged the verse certainly was

not, nor in his hands could ever be. It is the thought that has an irresistible attraction for prosaic phrase, and coalesces with it in a stubborn precipitate which will not become ductile to the poetic form.

Dryden perfected the English rhymed heroic verse by giving it a variety of cadence and pomp of movement which it had never had before. Pope's epigrammatic cast of thought led him to spend his skill on bringing to a nicer adjustment the balance of the couplet, in which he succeeded only too wearisomely well. Between them they reduced versification in their favorite measure to the precision of a mechanical art, and then came the mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease. Through the whole eighteenth century the artificial school of poetry reigned by a kind of undivine right over a public which admired — and yawned. This public seems to have listened to its poets as it did to its preachers, satisfied that all was orthodox if only they heard the same thing over again every time, and believing the pentameter couplet a part of the British Constitution. And yet it is to the credit of that age to have kept alive the wholesome tradition that Writing, whether in prose or verse, was an Art that required training, at least, if nothing more, in those who assumed to practise it.

Burke thought it impossible to draw an indictment against a whole people, and the remark

is equally just if we apply it to a century. It is true that with the eighteenth a season of common sense set in with uncommon severity, and such a season acts like a drought upon the springs of poesy. To be sure, an unsentimental person might say that the world can get on much better without the finest verses that ever were written than without common sense, and I am willing to admit that the question is a debatable one, and to compromise upon uncommon sense whenever it is to be had. Let us admit that the eighteenth century was, on the whole, prosaic, yet it may have been a pretty fair one as centuries go. "'Tis hard to find a whole age to imitate, or what century to propose for example," says wise Sir Thomas Browne. Every age is as good as the people who live in it choose or can contrive to make it, and, if good enough for them, perhaps we, who had no hand in the making of it, can complain of it only so far as it had a hand in the making of us. Perhaps even our own age, with its marvels of applied science that have made the world more prosily comfortable, will loom less gigantic than now through the prospective of the future. Perhaps it will even be found that the telephone, of which we are so proud, cannot carry human speech so far as Homer and Plato have contrived to carry it with their simpler appliances. As one grows older, one finds more points.