written his defence of rhymed tragedies, led him in his latter years to acknowledge his error, might have induced him to cast his English Virgil in a different mould, if facility and expedition had not been with him the chief consideration. In that measure, however, he wrote not with ease only, but with a freedom and vigour which entitle him to all the praise that he has received as a great master in his art. The superiority of the couplet to all other measures was completely established in public opinion by his example and authority; and the versifyers of the succeeding age (for poets there were none), looked to Dryden as their model with as much deference as their predecessors in the generations between Chaucer and Surrey, had looked to the great father of English poetry.

14

But when Johnson asserts that before the time of Dryden "the happy combinations of words which distinguish poetry from prose had been rarely attempted," and that "there was no poetical diction, no system of words at once refined from the grossness 14 of domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to particular arts,"-Dryden himself never advanced a more inconsiderate assertion. "From his time," says Johnson," English poetry has had no tendency to relapse to its former savageness." That it should fall back to the rudeness of an unsettled and rude speech,

14 The same kind of reformation has been thus described in France, I know not by what author: Un melange de termes familiers et nobles défigurait tous les ouvrages sérieux. C'est Boileau qui le premier enseigna l'art de parler toujours convenablement. But Dryden agreed neither in opinion nor in practice with Voltaire's maxim, that plus la poësie est devenue difficile, plus elle est belle; a maxim quite worthy of a French critic.

was impossible; time had polished the language, and the Bible and the liturgy had fixed it; the tendency to degenerate was in another way. Justly as Johnson condemned the metaphysical poets, he saw how superior they were to those who were trained, up in the school of Dryden. "To write on their plan," he has truly said, "it was at least necessary to read and think. No man could be born a metaphysical poet, nor assume the dignity of a writer by descriptions copied from descriptions, by imitations borrowed from imitations, by traditional imagery, and hereditary similes, by readiness of rhyme and volubility of sylla bles."

Johnson has also said, that the veneration with which Dryden's name is pronounced by every cultivator of English literature, is paid to him for having improved the sentiments of English poetry. When he bestowed this unmerited praise, he must have forgotten Milton; and Milton, indeed, as a poet, belonged so little to his age, that he may easily have been overlooked in Johnson's estimate; but he overlooked, at the same time, every other poet who had treated any serious subject with any sense of the dignity of his calling. One effect of the Restoration had been to lower the standard of poetry, and in this respect Dryden did nothing toward raising it. Too little ambitious of true fame, and too needy ever to have leisure for attempting to execute any great and worthy design which he may have conceived, he contented himself with subjects of temporary interest, and was beholden, perhaps, for his popularity, as much to the subjects as to the ability with which they were treated. What he

called the legislative 15 style of his poetry, being addressed to the judicious, could, if it found fit audience, find but few; but when he seasoned it with political satire, then, indeed, numbers who were incapable of appreciating in any degree its literary excellence, were delighted to see their own opinions triumphantly asserted. The Religio Laici might deter common readers by its very title, as if it were intended only for the learned; the Hind and Panther fell upon what to him were "evil days." But Mac Flecknoe was the talk of coffee-houses and of all literary circles; and Absalom and Achitophel had a greater sale in the country 16 than any work which was at that time remembered.

"The fury of a civil war, and power, for twenty years together, abandoned to a barbarous race of men, enemies of all good learning, had buried the muses,' Dryden said, "under the ruins of monarchy; yet," he adds, "with the restoration of our happiness, we see revived poesy lifting up its head, and already

15 "The expressions of a poem designed purely for instruction ought to be plain and natural, and yet majestic; for here the poet is presumed to be a kind of lawgiver, and those three qualities which I have named are proper to the legislative style. The florid, elevated, and figurative way is for the passions; for love and hatred, fear and anger, are begotten in the soul by showing their objects out of their true proportion, either greater than the life or less; but instruction is to be given by showing them what they naturally are. A man is to be cheated into passion, but to be reasoned into truth.”—Preface to Religio Laici.

16 Johnson's father, who was "an old bookseller in the country, told him he had not known it equalled by any thing except Sacheverel's trial."

shaking off the rubbish which lay so heavy on it." Alas! the only poetry which lifted up its head, was that which was heard in meetings where

Flowing cups went freely round,

With no allaying Thames 17;

and it had been well if there it had been only such as might allowably and blamelessly be addressed to

Careless heads with roses crown'd,

And hearts with loyal flames 17;

but the corruption of manners which ensued upon the Reformation, when profligacy succeeded to puritanism in natural course, was felt immediately in this branch of literature. It led, as it ever must lead, to a corruption of taste. Inflated tragedies, comedies so grossly indecent that, if it were possible for them now to be brought upon the stage, they would be driven off with hootings of execration, lewd tales in verse, songs, epigrams, and satires, in which ribaldry or malignity served for condiment; occasional verses, the best of which deserved to be remembered no longer than while the occasion which called them forth was recent; -for such poetry, fit and large audience might be found, but for any thing better, the public, or as it was then called, the Town, had neither inclination nor capacity. The age from Dryden to Pope is the worst age of English poetry.

Dryden himself lowered its tone, even while he improved the style of versification. He never aimed at any high mark. His good sense prevented him from over-valuing himself, and aspiring to become eminent

17 Lovelace.

either as a sublime or a pathetic poet. When he wrote for popular applause, he thought of the public with the Romish priests, populus vult decipi et decipietur; he knew that, on the stage, bombast might pass for poetry, as tinsel served for gold; and confessing that there were passages in his tragedies which called vengeance upon him for their extravagance, and which he repented of among his sins, he said, "All I can say for those passages is, that I knew they were bad enough to please, even when I wrote them 18." In satire, on the contrary, he felt his strength; and in that legislative or didactic strain wherein he excelled all predecessors in his own language, he has not been excelled by any who have followed him. In this he addressed himself exclusively to the understanding; there was nothing for the imagination, nothing for the feelings. But there was no mannerism in his style that could be aped, no mechanism that could be discovered and imitated, no artifices that could be copied, and not many of those expressions and turns of phrase which they who mistake memory for invention might add to their stock of common places. His ease, and vigour, and perspicuity were not attainable by imitative talents. Prior was the only one of his immediate successors who equalled him in ease; but when Prior in his greatest work attempted to improve upon Dryden's versification, the attempt would have been more successful if it had been less evidently elaborate.

Pope carefully studied both these poets, and perhaps did not disdain to study and profit by the only respectable poem of Sir Richard Blackmore. Black16 Epistle Dedicatory to the Spanish Fryar.