He

gained him the discipleship and loving imitation of Pope. He thus became by accident, as it were, the literary father and chief model of the greatest poet of the next generation. If his fame had stood simply upon his merits as a poet, he would in all likelihood have been a much less imposing figure in literary history than he is now. The splendid force of his satire must always be admired, but there is surprisingly little of the vast mass of his writings that can be considered worthy of lasting remembrance. showed little inventive genius. He was simply a masterly littérateur of immense intellectual energy, whose one lucky hit was the first splendid application of heroic couplets to satire and religious, moral, and political argument. Upon this lucky hit supervened another, the accidental discipleship of Pope. Dryden lent his gift of verse to the service of politics, and his fame profited by the connection. It would be unjust to say that his fame was due to this, but it was helped by this; apart from the attachment of Pope, he owed to party also something of the favor of Johnson and the personal championship and editorial zeal of Scott.-MINTO, WILLIAM, 1877, Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, vol. VII.

His services had indeed been manifold and splendid. He had determined the bent of a great literature at a great crisis. He had banished for ever the unpruned luxuriance, the licence, the essentially uncritical spirit, which had marked. expression in the literature of Elizabeth and James, and he had vindicated the substitution of a style which should proceed on critical principles, which should aim at terseness, precision, and point, should learn to restrain itself, should master the mysteries of selection and suppression.

He had given us the true canons of classical translation. He had shown us how our language could adapt itself with precision to the various needs of didactic prose, of lyric poetry, of argumentative exposition, of satirical invective, of easy narrative, of sonorous declamation. He had exhibited for the first time in all their fulness the power, ductility, and compass of the heroic couplet; and he had demonstrated the possibility of reasoning closely and vigorously in verse, without the elliptical obscurity of Fulke

Greville on the one hand or the painful condensation of Davies on the other. Of English classical satire he had practically been the creator. . . He had reconstructed and popularised the poetry of romance. He had inaugurated a new era in English prose, and a new era in English criticism. He is one of those figures which are constantly before us, and if his writings in their entirety are not as familiar to us as they were to our forefathers, their influence is to be traced in ever-recurring allusion and quotation; they have moulded or leavened much of our prose, more of our verse, and almost all our earlier criticism.-COLLINS, JOHN CHURTON, 1878-95, Dryden, Quarterly Review; Essays and Studies, pp. 1, 2, 3, 4.

None of his moral qualities better consorted with his magnificent genius than the real modesty which underlay his buoyant self-assertion.-WARD, ADOLPHUS, WILLIAM, 1880, English Poets, ed. Ward, vol. II, p. 437.

By the suffrages of his own and succeeding generations, his place is first in the second class of English poets. Perhaps his fame would have suffered little, if he had written not one of his twenty-eight dramas. He could not produce correct representations of human nature, for his was an examining rather than a believing frame of mind; and he wrought literature more as one apprenticed to the business than as one under the control of inspiration: he attained, however, the excellences that lie on the lower grade of the satirical, didactic, and polemic. Not to be numbered with those who have sounded the depths of soul, he is incomparable as a reasoner in verse.-WELSH, ALFRED H., 1883, Development of English Literature and Language, vol. II, p. 63.

Let us remember the almost universal corruption of the time, and in special defence of Dryden the fact that, a great poet as he was, he wrote mainly as a journalist, so to speak. In the absence of other ways of reaching the public, his poems were written to order for direct, immediate political effect, and with the same unscrupulousness that is sometimes seen in a corrupt press. This by no means frees his conduct from blame, but it may possibly be in part an explanation. -PERRY, THOMAS SERGEANT, 1883, English Literature in the Eighteenth Century.

His drama, composed when the drama was most dependent upon the court, was written, rather in spite of his nature, to win bread and to please his patrons. His comedies are a lamentable condescension to the worst tendencies of the time. His tragedies, while influenced by the French precedents, and falling into the mock heroics congenial to the hollow sentiment of the court, in which sensuality is covered by a thin veil of sham romance, gave not infrequent opportunity for a vigorous utterance of a rather cynical view of life. The declamatory passages are often in his best style. Whatever their faults no tragedies comparable to his best work have since been written for the stage. The masculine sense and power of sustained arguments gave a force unrivalled in English literature to his satires, and the same qualities appear in the vigorous versification of the "Fables," which are deformed, however, by the absence of delicate or lofty sentiment. His lyrical poetry, in spite of the vigorous "Alexander's Feast," has hardly held its own, though still admired by some critics. His prose is among the first models of a pure English style.-STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1888, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XVI, p. 73.

I can conceive nothing more sinister for the future of English literature than that to any great extent, or among any influential circle of reading and writing men, the majesty and sinewy force of the most masculine of all the English poets should be despised and rejected. Something of a temper less hurried than that of the man who runs and reads is no doubt required for the appreciation of that somewhat heavy-footed and sombre giant of tragic and of narrative song, John Dryden, warring with dunces, marching with sunken head-"a down look," as Pope described it-through the unappreciative flat places of our second Charles and James. Prosaic at times he is, slow, fatigued, unstimulating; but, at his best, how full of the true sublime, how uplifted by the wind of tragic passion, how stirred to the depths by the noblest intellectual and moral enthusiasm! For my own part, there are moments and moods in which nothing satisfies my ear and my brain as do the great accents of Dryden, while he marches down the page, with his elephants and his standards and his kettledrums,

"in the full vintage of his flowing honours." There must be something effeminate and feeble in the nervous system of a generation which cannot bear this grandiose music, this virile tramp of Dryden's soldiers and camp-followers; something singularly dull and timid in a spirit that rejects this robust intellectual companion. And, with all his russet suit of homespun, Dryden is imbued to the core with the truest and richest blood of poetry.GOSSE, EDMUND, 1889, What is a Great Poet? Questions at Issue, p. 102.

A writer, who in the matter of verbal and rhythmical construction, has been used as a "Gradus ad Parnassum" by such poets as Pope, Goldsmith, and Tennyson, and who is nothing less than the literary ancestor of Walter Scott, his chief admirer and editor, ought certainly to be more generally appreciated than he seems to be at present. If a young

lady should express a wish to become acquainted in a harmless way, with the general texture and spirit of Dryden's satire, we should refer her to the imitation of it in Tennyson's "Sea-dreams, with the comment at the end which so well illustrates the difference in the spirit of the time.-EVANS, JOHN AMPHLETT, 1890, Dryden, The Temple Bar, vol. 88, pp. 380, 381.

No fictitious character of his is a live one to-day; you can hardly recall one if you try. No couplet or verselet of his is so freighted with a serene or hopeful philosophy as to make our march the blither by reason of it down the corridors of time. No blast of all his fanfaron of trumpets sounds the opening of the gates upon any Delectable Mountains. A great, clever, Delectable Mountains. literary worker! I think that is all we can say of him. And when you or I pass under his monument in the corner of Westminster Abbey, we will stand bowed respectfully, but not with any such veneration, I think, as we expect to carry to the tomb of Milton or of Chaucer; and if one falls on Pope-what then? I think we might pause-waver; more polish here -more power there-the humanities not radiant in either; and so we might safely sidle away to warm ourselves before the cenotaph of Goldsmith.-MITCHELL, DONALD G., 1890, English Lands Letters and Kings, From Elizabeth to Anne, p. 247.

By him poetry was made subservient to

politics and to religious polemics, and addressing himself with his varied intellectual gifts to the leading topics of the day, literature, under his auspices, became for the first time a great political power.SWANWICK, ANNA, 1892, Poets, the Interpreters of Their Age, p. 245.

His faults were many, both as a man and as a poet, but he belongs to the race of the giants, and the impress of greatness is stamped upon his works. No student of Dryden can fail to mark the force and sweep of an intellect impatient of restraint. His "long-resounding march" reminds us of a turbulent river that overflows its banks, and if order and perfection of art are sometimes wanting in his verse, there is never the lack of power. Unfortunately many of the best years of his life were devoted to a craft in which he was working against the grain.-DENNIS, JOHN, 1894, The Age of Pope, p. 1.

On the whole, few poets have been more fortunate in their critics than Dryden.SYLE, L. DUPONT, 1894, From Milton to Tennyson, Notes, p. 26.

The poet makes cunning pivots and spring-boards out of identical words, on which, without any disgusting repetition, the verse circles, from whence it leaps, and on which the reader's eye and ear travel easily and pleasantly to the close. The individual line often attempts, and sometimes gains, that magnificent thunder and roll which, to one who has once discerned it, is the very hallmark of the Drydenian decasyllable. With such facilities he must have made his way at any time-how much more at that time, when the contemporary models we have mentioned were rapidly removed by death (except Waller, who lived longer, but produced nothing), when Milton was out of touch with the audience, and when there was no one else?-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1895, Social England, ed. Traill, vol. IV, p. 433.

Dryden is an admirable example [of the man of letters]: ready to turn his hand to anything, swift in production, easy in manner, free from pedantry, yet accurate, and careful of pure diction; proud of his profession, not treating it as a plaything, like Byron and Scott, yet a man of the world, with his eyes open to what went on about him.-BRADFORD, GAMALIEL, JR., 1895, The American Man of

Letters, Types of American Character, p. 119.

The songs in Dryden's plays are cheerful and sprightly. In the higher graces of poetry they are infinitely inferior to Fletcher's, but they are very good of their kind. With all his consummate genius Dryden could not reproduce such strains as "Lay a garland on my hearse" or "God Lyæus ever young."—BULLEN, A. H., 1895, Musa Proterva, p. x.

Dryden was a great originator.BROOKE, STOPFORD A., 1896, English Literature, p. 178.

The recognizing and following of popular taste can easily become other than a merit; but it marks the true journalistic mind, which was Dryden's, and at another period he would have written very differently. In our own time we can conceive of his occupying such a position as Charles A. Dana, with his ability for polemic writing and leadership in diction, but with the literary side more emphasized, as in the case of Bryant. He has left much that will stand the test of any age, but his whole work must not be judged save in connection with the ferments in which his lot was cast.-GREGORY, WARREN F., 1896, ed. Dryden's Palamon and Arcite, Biographical Sketch, p. 25.

Though Dryden's poetry is not of the highest class, it is of the very highest kind in its class. Wherever the pure intellect comes into play, there he is invariably excellent. There is never any weakness; there is never any vagueness; there is never any deviation from the true path into aimless digression. His words invariably go straight to the mark, and not unfrequently with a directness and force that fully merit the epithet "burning" applied to them by the poet Gray. His thoughts always rise naturally out of the matter in hand; and in the treatment of the meanest subjects he is not only never mean, but often falls without apparent effort into a felicity of phrase which holds the attention and implants itself in the memory.-LOUNSBURY, THOMAS R., 1897, Library of the World's Best Literature, ed. Warner, vol. IX, p. 4931.

Dryden, a man of supreme talent rather than of great spontaneous genius, was preeminently a man of his age. He reflected its gayety, its brilliance, its wit, its immorality; he reflected, also, those nobler

and more serious elements of life which it did not utterly lack. He possessed, moreover, many noble qualities which raised him above the level of his age and made him worthy to rank with the great ones of our literature Strength and solidity of mind, accuracy and comprehensiveness of scholarship, astonishing fluency and versatility, masterly skill as a literary workman, brilliant wit, keenness of discrimination and insight, an imagination vivid if not original, a poetic sense real if not profound, -these are some of the qualities which made Dryden great. Nothing about him is more impressive than the range of his literary work, unless it be its excellence in every kind. . As a poet, he was first without even a near rival. No one was his equal as an original poet; no one was his equal as a translator. In imaginative prose, he must yield the palm to Bunyan; but as a literary critic, and master of a thoroughly modern prose style, he was first in his own time, and still commands the respect of the student of literature. It will thus appear that in each of the great departments of literature in his own. age his name must be placed in the first rank. Dryden is more, however, than the greatest figure in a comparatively inferior literary period. He is one of the great poets of English literature. Though not of supreme stature, he is still one of the race of giants.-CRASHAW, W. H., 1898, ed. Dryden's Palamon and Arcite, pp. 118, 119.

It was the fault of his age that he was not greater. No man can wholly detach himself from the influences by which he is surrounded; and Dryden came on the stage when a false taste prevailed, and when licentiousness gave moral tone to poetry. Living in the midst of burning religious and political questions, he was drawn into the vortex of controversy. He was always a partisan in some religious or political issue of the day. While this fact has given us some of the best satirical and didactic poems in our language, it did not contribute, perhaps, to the largest development of his poetical powers. . . . Dryden did not attain to the highest regions of poetry. He could not portray what is deepest and finest in human experience. His strong, masculine hands. were too clumsy. He has no charm of

pathos; he does not touch that part of our nature where "thoughts do often lie too deep for tears." But he was a virile thinker and a master of the English tongue. He had the gift of using the right word.-PAINTER, F. V. N., 1899, A History of English Literature, pp. 215, 226. He wrote a great number of plays, usually in rhyme. Of these "All's for Love," based on the Antony and Cleopatra story, is one of the best, but they all seem to us very tedious, and need be read only by those who wish to make a special study of the theatre of this time. atre of this time. Bits of splendid declamation can be found, -Dryden is always vigorous, -- but the plays are artificial structures, and their interest depended on a literary fashion which is past. There is not enough of the stuff of genuine human nature in them to give them vitality. At the same time we cannot fail to be struck with the excellence of the literary workmanship.-JOHNSON, CHARLES F., 1900, English and American Literature, p. 229.

We now possess, thanks to Mr. Christie and Mr. Ker, scholarly, if not irreproachable, editions of Dryden's poems and of his chief prose writings. His dramas, which, aside from their historical importance, contain much of his best poetry, have yet to be made generally accessible. But a greater need than this remains to be supplied. Despite the seamy side of his character, which is only too obvious, Dryden had a personality full of grace and charm, which reveals itself to sympathetic readers of his works, and for which illustration might be found in contemporary literature. But he has been unfortunate in his biographers. Even Johnson and Scott, of whom most might have been expected, dwell too exclusively on the literary and political aspects of his career. Hence Dryden, who should be as well loved as Dr. Johnson or Charles Lamb-to choose widely different illustrations is known to the "average man" only as a political and religious turn-coat, who wrote satires on forgotten men and dead issue. Some true lover may yet produce an imaginative portrait of Dryden such as Carlyle has given us of Burns, showing him as the "high and remarkable man" he really was.-NOYES, G. R., 1900, Dryden as a Critic, The Nation, vol. 71, p. 232.

PERSONAL

Pierce do tell me, among other news, the late frolick and debauchery of Sir Charles Sidley and Buckhurst, running up and down all the night, almost naked through the streets; and at last fighting and being beat by the watch and clapped up all night, and how the king takes their parts; and my Lord Chief Justice Keeling hath laid the constable by the heels to answer it next Session, which is a horrid shame. --PEPYS, SAMUEL, 1668, Diary, Oct. 23.

Think, if you please, that this dedication is only an occasion I have taken, to do myself the greatest honour imaginable with posterity; that is, to be recorded in the number of those men whom you have favoured with your friendship and esteem. For I am well assured, that, besides the present satisfaction I have, it will gain me the greatest part of my reputation with after ages, when they shall find me valuing myself on your kindness to me; I may have reason to suspect my own credit with them, but I have none to doubt of yours. And they who, perhaps, would forget me in my poems, would remember me in this epistle.-DRYDEN, JOHN, 1673, The Assignation, Dedication to Sir Charles Sedley.

I am glad the town has so good a taste as to give the same just applause to S Charles Sidley's writing which his friends have always done to his conversation. Few of our plays can boast of more wit than I have heard him speak at a supper. Some barren sparks have found fault with what he has formerly done, only because the fairness of the soil has produced so big a crop.

I daily drink his health my Lord Dorset's, your own, and all our friends'. -ETHEREDGE, SIR GEORGE, 1687, The Letterbook. Gosse, Seventeenth-Century Studies, p. 262.

Sedley had a more sudden and copious

wit, which furnished a perpetual run of discourse; but he was not so correct as Lord Dorset, nor so sparkling as Lord Rochester.-BURNET, GILBERT, 1715–34, History of My Own Time.

When his comedy of "Bellamira" was played, the roof fell in, and he was one of the very few that were hurt by the accident. A flatterer told him that the fire of the play had blown up the poet, house, and all. "No," he replied, "the play was so heavy that it broke down the house, and buried the poet in his own rubbish."-CAMPBELL, THOMAS, 1819, Specimens of the British Poets.

Profligate and debauched Sedley certainly was. His disgraceful frolic at the Cock Tavern, in Bow Street, Covent Garden, on which his genius has conferred an unfortunate notoriety, is not only too indecent to bear repetition, but was an insult even to the age in which he lived.— JESSE, JOHN HENEAGE, 1839-40, Memoirs of the Court of England During the Reign of the Stuarts, Including the Protectorate, p. 328.

One of the most brilliant and profligate wits of the Restoration. The licentiousness of his writings is not redeemed by much grace or vivacity, but the charms of his conversation were acknowledged even by sober. men who had no esteem for his character. To sit near him at the theatre, and to hear his criticisms on a new play, was regarded as a privilege. Dryden had done him the honour to make him a principal interlocutor in the dialogue on dramatic poesy. The morals of Sedley were such as, even in that age, gave great scandal.-MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON, 1843, Catharine Sedley, Critical and Historical Essays.

Sir Charles Sedley was a fashionable wit, and the foulness of his words made even the porters of Covent Garden pelt him