ÆäÀÌÁö À̹ÌÁö
PDF
ePub

Was chymist, fiddler, statesman and buffoom
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.
Beggar'd by fools, whom still he found too late,
He had his jest, and they had his estate.

The Medal was written soon afterwards, taking its name from a particular medal worn as a badge by Shaftesbury's friends; and was directed against the same political intriguers; but in both poems, to spare the paternal feelings of the king, Monmouth himself is treated with great indulgence. His Religio Laici, published in 1682, is a satire on the dissenters, but its tendency is more political than theological.

Charles II. died on 6th Feb. 1685, and Dryden, in his Threnodia Augustalis, at once paid a tribute to his memory, and solicited the patronage of his successor James. The new king, however, was a Roman Catholic, and Dryden, finding himself in danger of losing his laureateship, allowed himself to be converted to Catho

the Spanish Friar. He dramatized Paradise Lost, under the name of the State of Innocence, but it is a wretched failure; and in conjunction with Davenant he altered some of Shakespeare's plays to make them suit the corrupt taste of the period. Thus, in his version of the Tempest we find a second monster Sycorax, and a man who had never who had seen no man but her father; beseen a woman, as counterpart to the woman, sides other alterations. When we recall the warm admiration which Dryden always professed for Shakespeare, we cannot admit tions of the great dramatist; but he perthat he willingly undertook these mutilahaps thought, that even a mutilated Shakespeare was better than none at all. Dryden's be regarded as the first true and enlightened prose is elegant and nervous, and he may critic of English literature. As a poet he stands, and always will stand, deservedly high.

II. PHILOSOPHICAL, HISTORICAL AND
MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS.

eminent disciple of Bacon, and after him
John Locke may he regarded as the most
the ablest expounder and apostle of the
by no means undervalued deduction in its
inductive system of philosophy; though he
own legitimate sphere. While declaring
sensation to be the great fountain of our
of what he calls 'an internal sense,' which
knowledge, Locke admitted the existence

Our

licism with somewhat suspicious haste. We can hardly believe that the man who wrote; 'priests of all religions are the same,' troubled himself much about the rival claims of contending creeds. This, however, as things turned out, was an impolitic step, for James's reign was short, and when the Revolution in 1688 again placed a Protestant prince on the throne, Dryden's office and salary were conferred on his rival Shad-every man possesses in himself, the source well, whom in 1682 he had so unmercifully origin of our knowledge is twofold, being of our ideas of reflection;' so that the satirized in his poem of Mac Flecknoe. either sensuous or ideal, according as it Flecknoe, a former Irish priest and bad proceeds from sensation or reflexion. poet, is supposed in the satire, after sway- primary ideas, he says, are derived from ing the realms of Nonsense for years as absolute monarch, to be about to abdicate, reflect on its own operations about the sensation, but 'in time the mind comes to and looking around him in search of a ideas got by sensation, and thereby stores worthy successor, fixes on Shadwell; for, itself with a new set of ideas.' Thus, the as he observes: subjective nature of our knowledge is maintained by Locke, in opposition to the principles of Descartes. Besides his great work, the Essay on the human Understanding, his Essay on Education contains much that is excellent, and has furnished Rousseau with the happiest suggestions we find in his Emile. Locke's style is remarkable for its simplicity and clearness.

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.

To justify his change of faith, Dryden wrote a polemic poem, the Hind and the Panther, in which these two animals symbolize respectively the Church of Rome and the Church of England. In the latter years of his life he made his beautiful translation of Virgil, besides his adaptations of Chaucer and Boccaccio.

Of Dryden's plays, the best are: All for Love, a sort of imitation of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra; Don Sebastian, and

Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon (16081674) has left us a very valuable historical work on the war between Charles I. and the Parliament, under the title of History of the Great Rebellion. He describes the events of which he was an eye-witness, and though we cannot look for impartiality in the work of so prominent a member of the

royalist party, it must be acknowledged that he treats his political antagonists with a fairness quite surprising, when we recollect, that one of the first acts of Charles II., on his returning to England, was to cause the body of the great man he had so much feared while living, to be exhumed (Dec. 2, 1660), and hung on a gibbet at Tyburn, while the severed head was stuck on one of the gates of Oxford. It is no wonder that the honesty of Hyde soon made him lose the favour of his master.

John Bunyan (1628-1688), the 'prince of allegorists,' is probably the only man who ever wrote an allegory of the length of the Pilgrim's Progress, without falling into tediousness. His characters are wonderfully lifelike, and Mr. Christian, Mr. Feeblemind, Mr. Wordly Wiseman, Miss Muchafraid, and the rest, possess all the interest attaching to persons who have actually lived. From the first page our attention is arrested, and it never flags till we reach the bottom of the last. The language is plain and homely, but pure English, powerful in its very homeliness. With the exception of the Bible, no book has been so extensively read among the English peasantry as the Pilgrim's Progress. His second work, the Holy War, though written in the same style, wants the freshness of the first, and the siege of the city of Mansoul by Diabolus, with its relief by Immanuel, interests the reader less than the perils of Christian on his way to the New Jerusalem. His Grace abounding is an autobiography, in which he accuses himself of the greatest sins in his youth, but

on examination we discover that these are reduced to a thoughtless habit of swearing, which a single rebuke was sufficient to cure, and to a fondness for innocent popular amusements. This remarkable man, who in early life followed the humble calling of a tinker, and after enduring much persecution became a preacher, died in consequence of a cold caught while on a journey to reconcile a father with his repentant son-a fitting end to his pious and unobtrusive career!

That boy was Alexander Pope (1680-1744), who wrote in numbers' almost from early childhood. His first work of importance was his Essay on Criticism, in which he endeavours to fix the true canons which should guide the judgment of critics, and exposes the hasty and inadequate decisions of many who profess to be authorities on literature. The true critic, he says, must enter into the spirit of the author, and indulgently examine a work as a whole: With the same spirit that its author writ: A perfect judge will read each work of wit Where nature moves, and rapture warms the Survey the whole, not seek slight faults to find

mind.

Some, he maintains, are dazzled by glittering images and conceits, which often conceal poverty of invention:

Poets, like painters, thus, unskill'd to trace

The naked nature and the living grace,
With gold and jewels cover every part,
And hide with ornaments their want of art.

There are some, on the other hand, who
never look farther than the language:
Others for language all their care express,
And value books, as women men, for dress:
Their praise is still: the style is excellent;
The sense they humbly take upon content.
Words are like leaves; and where they most

abound,

Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.

The majority, however, judge merely by the sound:

But most by numbers judge a poet's song, And smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong:

In the bright Muse, though thousand charms
Her voice is all these tuneful fools admire.
conspire,
This is precisely, he adds:

-as some to church repair, Not for the doctrine, but the music there. The Essay on Criticism was fiercely assailed by the eccentric poet and critic, John Dennis, who believed himself alluded to

FROM THE REIGN OF QUEEN ANNE (with good reason, we think) under the

TILL THE YEAR 1780.

L. THE WITS OF QUEEN ANNE'S REIGN. Towards the close of John Dryden's life, a boy of twelve was one day introduced to him, by a gentleman of literary tastes, at Will's coffee-house, as a lad who had already composed some very good verses.

name of Appius:

But Appius reddens at each word you speak, And stares, tremendous with a threatening eye, Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry.

The Messiah, published in the Spectator, and the Elegy on an unfortunate Lady, followed. Of this lady Dr. Johnson says, that she was a person of rank and fortune,

it so much resembles that we not unfrequently find some of Denham's lines ascribed to Pope. The description of the wounded pheasant in Windsor Forest has been often quoted with admiration:

See from the brake the whirring pheasant

And mounts exulting on triumphant wings;
springs,
Short is his joy; he feels the fiery wound,
Flutters in blood, and panting beats the ground.

Ah! what avail his glossy, varying dyes,

His purple crest, and scarlet-circled eyes,
The vivid green his shining plumes unfold
His painted wings, and breast that flames with
gold?

who, contrary to the wishes of her uncle | Denham's fine poem: Cooper's Hill, which and guardian, had bestowed her affections on a young man of inferior condition, and having been sent to France, to be out of reach of her lover, there committed suicide. One of the most beautiful heroi-comical poems ever written, the Rape of the Lock, was published in 1712. Lord Petre, an admirer of Miss Arabella Fermor, one day accompanied that lady and a number of other friends on an aquatic excursion to Hampton Court Palace, and having privately procured a pair of scissors from one of the ladies present, cut off and kept a long and beautiful lock of Miss Fermor's hair. At this liberty the young lady was very indignant, and a coolness between the two families being the consequence, Mr. Caryl, a friend of both parties, requested Pope to write a poem turning the whole thing into good-natured ridicule, in hopes of laughing Miss Fermor out of her anger. Pope willingly consented, and produced the Rape of the Lock, into which he most happily introduced the sylphs and gnomes of the Rosicrucian philosophy, the former as guardians of the lock, the latter as the abettors of mischief. Whether the poem had the desired effect or not, we cannot tell, for accounts differ; but at all events the treasury of English literature was enriched with a new gem.

It was about the same time that Pope wrote his Temple of Fame, an adaptation of Chaucer's House of Fame, and he turned the Merchant's Tale and the Wife of Bath's prologue into modern English, but in spite of their smooth versification, most readers will prefer them in Chaucer's Own unadorned language. We turn with more pleasure to his sweet pathetic poem, Eloisa to Abelard. After the separation of these unfortunate lovers, and their retirement into separate convents, a letter from Abelard to a friend fell accidentally into the hands of Eloisa. This re-awakened all her former tenderness, and gave occasion to those celebrated letters, which Pope has taken as the groundwork of his poem. In the few lines subjoined we have a perfect picture of the unfortunate nun:

Even here, where frozen chastity retires,
Love finds an altar for forbidden fires.
I ought to grieve, but cannot what I ought;
I mourn the lover, not lament the fault.
Of all affliction taught a lover yet,
"Tis sure the hardest science to forget!

Windsor Forest was written by Pope at the age of sixteen, but not published till 1713. It was suggested by Sir John

to

Though Pope had read a great deal in
his own desultory way, he was not a man
of deep learning, nor had he ever studied
at a university, or even attended a public
school, from which at that time Roman
Catholics were jealously excluded. It is
therefore surprising that he not only under-
took to edit Shakespeare, but even
translate the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer.
His Shakespeare was disappointing, and
Theobald published a rival edition, under
the name of Shakespeare restored. In the
Iliad he relied partly on the aid of his
friend, Lord Bolingbroke, and partly on
Chapman's older translation; but as he
wrote for the general public, and not for
the learned, he rather sought to produce
an agreeable English poem, than a strictly
accurate English version of the Greek ori-
ginal. In many places he has amplified the
Greek text in what scholars may regard as
an unwarrantable manner, but of which the
mere English reader will not complain. As
an example, we quote his fine description
of a starry and moonlight night, to which
the effect of the camp-fires under the walls
of Troy is compared (Book VIII, v. 687):
As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night,
O'er Heav'n's clear azure spreads her sacred
light,
When not a breath disturbs the deep serene,
And not a cloud o'ercasts the solemn scene;
Around her throne the vivid planets roll,
And stars unnumber'd gild the glowing pole;
O'er the dark trees a yellower verdure shed,
And tip with silver every mountain's head;
Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect
rise,

A flood of glory bursts from all the skies;
The conscious swains, rejoicing in the sight;
Eye the blue vault, and bless the useful light.

In the translation of the Odyssey, he was aided by Fenton and Broome.

Pope's popularity aroused the jealousy of a host of less favoured poets, and though he affected to despise them, their open or covert attacks caused him great annoyance. At length he resolved to annihilate them all at one fell swoop,' and he wrote his mock-epic, the Dunciad, in the style of Dryden's Mac Flecknoe. In this satire, which was dedicated to Swift, he represents the goddess Dulness holding a grand assembly of all the dunces to elect a king out of their number, and the choice is made to fall on Pope's rival and enemy, Theobald. Most of the small poets whom he castigates in the Dunciad would have long since been forgotten, had he not preserved their names in his poem, 'like flies in amber.' Pope in a later edition (1743) deposed Theobald, and promoted the poet laureate, Colley Cibber, in his stead, to the dignity of king of the dunces, but the change was injudicious, for the public deelined to acknowledge the author of the careless Husband, as a dunce. The concluding lines of the fourth book have been deservedly much praised, and Dr. Johnson could never repeat them without emotion. They have but one fault-they are far too beautiful for the subject of the poem.

Pope wrote well in prose, and excelled in letter-writing; but on this our limited space forbids us to dwell. Like Dryden, he had no very high opinion of women in general, and he declares they know but two passions:

In men, we various ruling passions find; In women two almost divide the kind; Those, only fix'd, they first or last obey, The love of pleasure, and the love of sway. In the same epistle he sums up the career of most women he had known, in the following pithy style:

A youth of frolics, an old age of cards;
Fair to no purpose, artful to no end,
Young without lovers, old without a friend;
A fop their passion, but their prize a sot;
Alive, ridiculous; and dead, forgot!

Lady Mary, however, did not long remain his debtor, and paid back the 'Wasp of Twickenham' with interest. Like most men who habitually suffer from bad health, Pope was pettish; but his attachments to friends were ardent and lasting; and death alone severed the ties that bound him to Swift, Prior, Atterbury, Arbuthnot, the gentle Gay, and the noble-minded Addison. His love for his widowed mother is well known. Swift speaks of him as one

-whose filial piety excels Whatever Grecian story tells. That he could forgive, is proved by his reconciliation with Addison, after he felt convinced (though we believe he was mistaken) that the latter had attempted to undermine his poetical reputation; and still more by his generous aid to John Dennis in age and poverty, though Dennis, among other opprobrious epithets, had bestowed on him those of an affected little hypocrite,' and a 'popular scribbler.'

It only remains for us to notice briefly his celebrated philosophical poem, the Essay on Man, for the groundwork of which, he freely acknowledges, he is indebted to Bolingbroke, his 'guide, philosopher and friend.' The Essay consists of four epistles, all addressed to the friend just named. In the first he shows, that man was created with the faculties which fit him to fill a certain place in creation; that consequently he should not repine at his imperfections, nor accuse divine Providence of injustice, for he might have been formed a much more insignificant creature; that a gradation of beings has been established for wise purposes, but that man must not suppose himself to be the final cause of the creation, nor expect in the moral world that uniformity which does not exist in the natural; that human happiness partly depends on our ignorance of future events, partly on the hope of a future life. The second epistle inculcates the duty of man to study himself, his strength and his weakness; thenit treats of the passions, of virtue and vice,

If he extols Belinda (Miss Fermor) it is and shows how the ends of Providence are for her beauty alone:

If to her share some female errors fall, Look on her face, and you'll forgive them all.

For a time, it is true, he felt a warm admiration for Lady Mary Montagu, but he soon fell out with her, and rather ungenerously compared

-Sappho at her toilet's greasy task
With Sappho fragrant at an evening mask.
Herrig, British Auth.

furthered even by our frailties. In the third epistle he examines the origin of society and government, of religion and superstition. The fourth epistle treats of the nature and state of man in relation to of virtue consists in a conformity to the happiness, and shows that the perfection order established by Providence. The general purpose of this didactic and argumentative poem is, as he announces, to 'vindicate the ways of God to man.' It must

C

be conceded, that in Pope's philosophy there is nothing very new or very deep, but never were commonplaces recommended by such a sweetness of melody and elegance of diction. Scarcely had the Essay on Man appeared when it was violently assailed by Pope's numerous enemies, who not only denied it all poetical merit, but accused the author of preaching pantheism. Pope, however, found a friend in need, and Warburton came to the rescue, proved the groundlessness of the charge, showed that the incriminated passages simply illustrated the omnipresence of God, and gave a more lucid exposition of Pope's philosophy than the poet could have himself written.

John Gay (1688-1732) was one of those enviable soft-tempered men, who have no enemies, and whom every one loves. the early part of his literary career he

In

wrote several unsuccessful comedies, and a poor tragedy called the Captives. Sir Richard Steele having published, in the Guardian, a highly laudatory review of some pastorals by Ambrose Philips, in which their truthfulness to nature was particularly dwelt on, Pope, who looked on this compliment as tantamount to a depreciation of the pastorals published by himself, urged Gay to write a series of poems, in which English

rustics were drawn from real life in all

their grossness, as a sort of parody on Philips, and a satirical illustration of Steele's paper in the Guardian. This was the origin of Gay's Shepherd's Week, consisting of six pastorals, but the public, caring nothing for the jealousies of authors, accepted them simply as true pictures of rural life, and perused them with delight. His Fables, of which the first volume appeared in 1716, and the second only after his death, attained no less popularity. In his Trivia, or the Art of walking the Streets of London, which is a gallery of curious or comic pictures, he was assisted by Swift. Gay's ballads are usually pathetic, and one of them, Black-eyed Susan, has been very successfully dramatized by Douglas Jerrold. The Beggar's Opera, his best-known dramatic work, was intended as a parody on the Italian opera, and he got the hint from Swift. By way of prologue, we have a dialogue between the pretended author, who is a beggar, and a player. The immense popularity of the Beggar's Opera was partly owing to the numerous songs, adapted to favourite English melodies, scattered through it, and partly to the humorous political allusions it contained. Pope has drawn with great exactness the character of Gay in a single line:

[ocr errors]

poem

In wit, a man; simplicity, a child. Edward Young (1681-1765) is always principal work, the Night Thoughts, a series associated, in the public mind, with his of reflexions, in nine books, on Life, Death and Immortality. In his preface to the Complaint he tells us, that the occasion of the short space of time his heart had been lacerated by the death of three persons very dear to him: those were, his wife, Lady Elizabeth, his step-daughter and her husband, Mrs. and Mr. Temple; the two latter of whom he names, in the poem, Philander and Narcissa. Mrs. Temple died Nice, and the difficulty of procuring her of consumption at Lyons, on her way to Christian burial, as mentioned in the third The poem is Night, was literally true. addressed to a sceptical and loose-living acquaintance, called by the author Lorenzo; Johnson thinks, but why should it not be one of the Marquis of Wharton's set, as the dissolute Marquis himself? Attempts have been made, without either evidence or probability, to identify the 'gay friend,' Lorenzo, with the author's own son. Young's Love of Fame, a series of seven satires addressed to the Duke of Dorset, appeared in 1725-1726, and have been incorrectly regarded as an imitation of Pope's satires, though the first of the latter were not published till 1733, or seven to eight years later. Of the many ingenious thoughts, admirably expressed in the Love of Fame, the following may serve as a sample:

was real, not fictitious. In a

What then is to be done? Be wise with speed;
A fool at forty is a fool indeed.
The man who pardons, disappoints his foe.

Titles are marks of honest men and wise;
The fool or knave, that wears a title, lies.
Unlearned men of books assume the care,

As eunuchs are the guardians of the fair.

Of Young's dramatic pieces, the best is the Revenge. The story is borrowed from Othello, but the details differ a good deal. Leonora, when suspected by her husband, stabs herself; Zanga is not so base a character as Iago; and when Alonso kills himself after Leonora's death, Zanga is visited by some feelings of compunction: he wars not with the dead:

The conqueror of Afric was my foe: A lion preys not upon carcases. The worst of the piece is, that it continually reminds us of Othello, and Young is not a Shakespeare.

« ÀÌÀü°è¼Ó »