How Christ, the Gentiles' king, bestowed
His flesh, concealed in human food;
And left mankind the blood, that paid
The ransom of the souls he made.

Born from above and born for man,
From Virgin's womb his life began;
He lived on earth and preached to sow
The seeds of heavenly truth below;
Then sealed his mission from above,
With strange effects of power and love.
'Twas on that evening, when the last
And most mysterious supper past,
When Christ with his disciples sat
To close the law with legal meat,
And with his hands himself bestowed,
The Christian's food and Lamb of God.

The Word made flesh, for love of man,
With words of bread made flesh again;
Turned wine to blood unseen by sense,
By virtue of omnipotence;

And here the faithful rest secure,
Whilst God can vouch and faith ensure.

To this mysterious table now

Our knees, our hearts and sense we bow;
Let ancient rites resign their place
To nobler elements of grace;
And faith for all defects supply,
While sense is lost in mystery.

To God the Father, born of none,

To Christ his co-eternal Son,

And Holy Ghost, whose equal rays
From both proceed, one equal praise;
One honour, jubilee and fame

For ever bless thy glorious name.

Let us end with the same hymn from two versions. The difference between the italicised stanzas must strike every one; and it is certainly, in the circumstances, not fanciful to attribute it to the passage of Dryden.

TRANSFIGURATION.

Quicunque Christum quæritis.

1685. All that seek Christ, your eyes erect,
On Thabor's mount your sight reflect;
For there you may behold a sign
Of glory, which shall ever shine.
We there a radiant object see
Which cannot circumscribed be,

Endless, sublime, existing e'er

Or heaven, or chaos framed were.

This is the king whose sovereign sway
The Gentiles and the Jews obey;
Promised to Abraham and his race
A grant which time shall not deface.

Him do the prophets' mouths display
Who seal the truth of what they say;
His Father too doth witness give
Bidding us hear him and believe.

May none thy glory, Christ, conceal,
Who dost thyself to babes reveal;
The like unto the Father be,
And Holy Ghost eternally.

1706. O all who seek with Christ to rise,

To Thabor's mount erect your eyes;
And see how Christ in glorious rays
The majesty of God displays.

Behold a sun more old than night,

A blaze of uncreated light,

So high, so deep and vast of space

It knows no bounds of time or place.

'Tis he, the king, whose sovereign sway

The Jews and Gentiles both obey,
The promised ruler heaven decreed
For Abraham and his endless seed.

In him the law and prophets join;
His truths they both attest and sign;
Him God, from his paternal throne,
Commands the world to hear and own.

Glory to Christ, whose light displays
To little ones his saving ways;
Whilst endless hymns of praise repeat
The Father and the Paraclete.

ED.]

No. II.

DRYDEN'S GALLICISMS.

[The tone of Sir Walter's remarks on this subject, vol. i. pp. 436, 437, is rather unnecessarily apologetic and disclamatory. It was the habit of the academic criticism of his own time (to which he, though never making the slightest pretensions to elaborate or exact scholarship, always deferred when its decisions were not absolutely preposterous) to denounce the use of foreign words in English. Nor has this habit become by any means obsolete. I know several excellent persons, some of them scholars, some of them not, who express and no doubt feel abhorrence of the practice. For my own part, the longer I pursue the study of English, the more am I convinced, not only that our language, like our nation, admits a very free naturalisation of foreigners, but that all save a small minority of its greatest practitioners have always availed themselves of this licence. Nor do I think it possible to rule Dryden out from the majority. Sir Walter admits the practice of his youth; the question whether any word has been admitted on his sole authority is quite a minor one; and I am myself disposed to gainsay with all respect the assertion that the "affectation," if an affectation it be, does not appear in his later writings. Attentive readers of the Xavier will find numerous Gallicisms there which certainly, in such a pen as Dryden's, cannot be set down to inability to find more vernacular equivalents. He constantly makes use of the word "ordonnance" (for "arrangement" and "method") in quite late prose works. In his latest and almost greatest poetical production, the Fables, he uses jupon instead of the English form "gippon"; jambeux, grisdelin, menage (for "husband" or "spare"), and others. And always, I think, he practised what he somewhere professes, the rule of enriching the language from old and new sources whenever he can.

It is perhaps unnecessary to say that I am not advocating any of these words in particular, or those which appear in the text at the passage of the Life referred to, or the other instances of foreign words and constructions, to which attention has been drawn in the notes of the present book. Some of them are undesirable; some even indefensible. But time and use have exercised their invariably wise selection, and what was wanted has passed into the language; what was not wanted has

remained outside of it. The point of this present excursus is to insist on the fact that Dryden distinctly and rather eminently belongs to the "xenomaniacs," to the party which admits foreign words gladly, and which (as I contend) has by so doing made English what it is the richest, the most flexible, the most universal of all the languages in the world, not merely in varieties of meaning, but in range of cadence and sound. Most people know the story of Charles James Fox determining to use no word which had not Dryden's sanction. It is difficult to conceive a more curious and innocent irony. For the very authority on which Fox sought to make English a close patrimonial guild, had himself done his best to make the language free to all foreign wordcraft.-ED.]

No. III.

DRYDEN AND SWIFT.

[I think a few lines may not be out of place here for the purpose of suggesting that Swift's animosity to Dryden, or at least its connection with the famous sentence on the younger cousin's verses, has been somewhat exaggerated. Swift no doubt was a very good hater, and a person who had a habit of paying his debts in more ways than one. But literary vanity was by no means one of his special failings, and there is no reason to believe that he set any special store by his serious poetical efforts. On the other hand, in his Battle of the Books stage, he was a rather fervent Whig, and as such likely to depreciate, when he could, the great champion of the other side. He was also a rising young man of letters, of a desperately satirical turn, and such a person is but too apt, half from courage and half from "cubbishness," to fly at the throats or heels of the greatest men of letters of the day. Again, it must be remembered that Swift, despite his own licence of language, was always very severe on loose writing; and that the one thing which he never at any time of his life pardoned or let off without severe punishment, was disrespect to the Church of England and its clergy. Now this was a fault of which "Glorious John," both in his earlier stage of rather freethinking Churchmanship, and in his later of conversion to Rome, was undoubtedly guilty. Lastly, it must be also remembered that, great man as Dryden was, he certainly laid himself open to satire, both by the lavish magnificence of his dedicatory flattery at all times, and by his habit in later years of indulging in complaints-not wholly unreasonable, not exactly undignified, but capable of being parodied and satirised with rather fatal ease. consider these things, it will probably be unnecessary to charge Swift with a petty and sordid attempt to take underhand and partly posthumous vengeance for a criticism which is not absolutely certain as a fact, and which, if made, was, from all we know of Dryden, very unlikely to have been made in an offensive manner.-ED.]

If we