"His brows thick fogs, instead of glories grace,
And lambent dulness play'd about his face.
As Hannibal did to the altar come,

Sworn by his sire, a mortal foe to Rome;

So Shadwell swore, nor should his vow be vain,

That he till death true dulness would maintain.”

Better still the following picture, in imitation of the Homeric or Miltonic manner :

"The Sire then shook the honours of his head,
And from his brows damps of oblivion shed
Full on the filial dulness-long he stood
Repelling from his breast the raging God."

What inimitable irony in this epithet! The God of dulness raging! A stagnant pool in a passion; a canal insane; a mouton enragé, as the French says; or a snail in a tumultuous state of excitement, were but types of the satirical ideas implied in these words. What a description of labouring nonsense of the Pythonic genius of absurdity, panting and heaving on his solemnly ridiculous tripod!

The language and versification of Dryden have been praised, and justly. His style is worthy of a still more powerful and original vein of genius than his own. It is a masculine, clear, elastic, and varied diction, fitted to express all feelings, save the deepest; all fancies, save the subtlest; all passions, save the loftiest; all moods of mind, save the most disinterested and rapt; to represent incidents, however strange; characters, however contradictory to each other; shades of meaning, however evasive: and to do all this, as if it were doing nothing, in point of ease, and as if it were doing everything in point of felt and rejoicing energy. No poetic style since can, in such respects, be compared to Dryden's. Pope's to his is feebleand Byron's forced. He can say the strongest things in the swiftest way, and the most felicitous expressions seem to fall unconsciously from his lips. Had his matter, you say, but been equal to his manner, his thought in originality and imaginative power but commensurate with the boundless quantity, and no less admirable quality, of his words! His versification deserves a commendation scarcely inferior. It is "all ear," if we may so apply an expression of Shakspeare's.

No studied rules,-no elaborate complication of harmonies,it is the mere sinking and swelling of the wave of his thought, as it moves onward to the shore of his purpose. And, as in the sea, there are no furrows absolutely isolated from each other, but each leans on, or melts into each, and the subsidence of the one is the rise of the other-so with the versification of his better poetry. The beginning of the

Hind and Panther," we need not quote; but it will be remembered, as a good specimen of that peculiar style of running the lines into one another, and thereby producing a certain free and noble effect, which the uniform tinkle of Pope and his school is altogether unable to reach; a style which has since been copied by some of our poets-by Churchill, by Cowper, and by Shelley. The lines of the artificial school, on the other hand, may be compared to rollers, each distinct from each other, each being in itself a whole,--but altogether forming none. Pope, says Hazlitt, has turned Pegasus into a rocking-horse.

We are, perhaps, nearly right when we call Dryden the most eloquent and rhetorical of English poets. He bears in this respect an analogy to Lucretius among the Romans, who, inferior in polish to Virgil, was incomparably more animated and energetic in style; who exhibited, besides, traits of lofty imagination rarely met with in Virgil, and never in Dryden; and who equalled the English poet in the power of reasoning in verse, and setting the severe abstractions of metaphysical thought to music. With the Shakspeares, Chaucers, Spensers, Miltons, Byrons, Wordsworths, and Coleridges, the Dii majorum gentium of the Poetic Pantheon of Britain, Dryden ranks not, although towering far above the Moores, Goldsmiths, Gays, and Priors. He may be classed with a middle, but still high order, in which we find the names of Scott, as a poet, Johnson, Pope, Cowper, Southey, Crabbe, and two or three others, who, while all excelling Dryden in some qualities, are all excelled by him in others, and bulk on the whole about as largely as he on the public eye.

We come to make a few remarks, in addition to some we have already incidentally made, on Dryden's separate works.

And first of his Lyrics. His songs, properly so called, are lively, buoyant, and elastic; yet, compared to those of Shakspeare, they are of "the earth, earthy." They are the down of the thistle, carried on a light breeze upwards. Shakspeare's resemble aerial notes-snatches of superhuman melody-descending from above. Compared to the warm-gushing songs of Burns, Dryden's are cold. Better than his songs are his Odes. That on the death of Mrs Killigrew has much divided the opinion of critics-Dr Johnson calling it magnificent, and Warton denying it any merit. We incline to a mediate view. It has bold passages; the first and the last stanzas are very powerful, and the whole is full of that rushing torrent-movement characteristic of the poet. But the sinkings are as deep as the swellings, and the inequality disturbs the general effect. This is still more true of "Threnodia Augustalis," the ode on the death of Charles II. Not only is its spirit fulsome, and its statement of facts grossly partial, but many of its lines are feeble, and the whole is wire-spun. Yet what can be nobler in thought and language than the following, descriptive of the joy at the king's partial recovery!—

"Men met each other with erected look,
The steps were higher that they took;
Each to congratulate his friend made haste,

And long inveterate foes saluted as they pass'd."

How admirably this last line describes that sudden solution of the hostile elements in human nature-that swift sense of unity in society, produced by some glad tidings or great public enthusiasm, when for an hour the Millennium is anticipated, and the poet's wish, that

is fulfilled!

"Man wi' man, the warld o'er,

Shall brithers be, for a' that,"

The two odes on St Cecilia's Day are both admirable in different ways. "Alexander's Feast," like Burns's "Tam o'Shanter," seems to come out at once as from a mould." It is pure inspiration, but of the second order—rather that of the Greek Pythoness than of the Hebrew prophet. Coleridge

or Wordsworth makes the objection to it, that the Bacchus it describes is the mere vulgar deity of drink

"Flush'd with a purple grace,

He shows his honest face"

not the ideal Bacchus, clad in vine-leaves, returning from the conquest of India, and attended by a procession of the lions and tigers he had tamed. But this, although a more imaginative representation of the god of wine, had not been so suitably sung at an entertainment presided over by an Alexander and a Thais, a drunk conqueror and a courtezan. Dryden himself, we have seen, thought this the best ode that ever was or would be written in the English language. In a certain sense he was right. For vivacity, freedom of movement, and eloquence, it has never been equalled. But there are some odes—such as Coleridge's "Ode to France" and Wordsworth's "Power of Sound"-which as certainly excel it in strength of imagination, grandeur of conception, and unity of execution and

effect.

way.

Of Dryden's Satires we have already spoken in a general "Absalom and Achitophel" is of course the masterpiece, and cannot be too highly praised as a gallery of portraits, and for the daring force and felicity of its style. Why enlarge on a poem, almost every line of which has become a proverb? "The Medal" is inferior only in condensation— in spirit and energy it is quite equal. In "MacFlecknoe," the mock-heroic is sustained with unparalleled vigour from the first line to the last. Shadwell is a favourite of Dryden's ire. He fancies him, and loves to empty out on his head all the riches of his wrath. What can be more terrible than the words occurring in the second part of "Absalom and Achitophel❞—

"When wine hath given him courage to blaspheme,

He curses God-but God before curst him!"

He has written two pieces, which may be called didactic or controversial poems-" Religio Laici" and "The Hind and Panther." The chief power of the former is in its admirable combination of two things, often dissociated-reason and

Far

rhyme; and its chief interest lies in the light it casts upon Dryden's uncertainty of religious view. The thought has little originality, the versification less varied music than is his wont, and no passage of transcendent power occurs. more faulty in plan, and far more unequal, is "The Hind and Panther;" but it has, on the other hand, many passages of amazing eloquence-some satirical pictures equal to anything in "Absalom and Achitophel "-some vivid natural descriptions; and even the absurdities of the fable, and the sophistries of the argument add to its character as the most exquisitely perverted piece of ingenuity in the language. Nothing but high genius, very vigorously exerted, could reconcile us to a story so monstrous, and to reasoning so palpably one-sided and weak.

His Epistles are of divers merit, but all discover Dryden's usual sense, sarcastic observation, and sweeping force of style. The best are that to Sir Godfrey Kneller—remarkable for its knowledge of, and graceful tribute to, the "serene and silent art" of painting; and the very noble epistle addressed to Congreve, which reminds you of one giant hand of genius held out to welcome and embrace another. Gross flatterer as Dryden often was, there is something in this epistle that rings true, and the emotion in it you feel even all his powers could never have enabled him to counterfeit. Such generous patronage of rising, by acknowledged merit, was as rare then as it is still. The envy of the literary man too often crowns his gray hairs with a chaplet of nightshade, and pours its dark poison into the latest cup of existence.

His "Annus Mirabilis" is another instance of perverted power, and ingenuity astray. Written in that bad style he found prevalent in his early days-the style of the metaphysical poets, Cowley, Donne, and Drayton-the author ever and anon soars out of his trammels into strong and simple poetry, fervid description, and in one passage-that about the future fortunes of London-into eloquent prophecy. The fire of London is vigorously pictured, but its breath of flame should have burned up petty conceit and tawdry ornament. He should have sternly daguerreotyped the spectacle of the capital of the civilised world burning-a spectacle awful, not