introductory verses to the Duchess. His critical supremacy never seems to have experienced any considerable shock. His decision was a law to the witty, the imaginative, or the learned. A pinch out of his snuff-box, at Will's Coffee House, was equivalent to taking a degree in the academies of British intellect. Nor would it be just to omit the remarkable statement, that these honours were as meekly carried as they were universally acknowledged. Dryden was by nature sufficiently irascible; but he could bear to be contradicted, and even to be reproved. Collier, the notorious nonjuror, had attacked his literary criminalities, in terms not less severe than just; and the following forms a magnanimous reply in his preface to the Fables: "I shall say the less of Mr. Collier, because in many things he has attacked me justly; and I have pleaded guilty to all thoughts and expressions of mine which can be truly argued or accused of obscenity, profaneness, or immorality—and I RETRACT THEM. If he be my enemy, let him triumph: if he be my friend, as I have given him no personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance. It becomes me not to draw my pen in the defence of a bad cause, when I have so often drawn it for a good one." p. 74. It must be further remembered, that his reverend and wellmeaning antagonist could be a little coarse himself,- that "he had too much horse-play in his raillery," and that if his "zeal for God's house had not positively eaten him up, it had, at least, devoured some part of his good manners and civility." It is, however, most melancholy to perceive, that as the sands of life ran out, there appeared to be no suitable preparation, on the part of Dryden, for death, judgment, and eternity. His biographer coolly observes, that " as his career began upon the stage, it was in some degree doomed to terminate there." He had long suffered both by the gout and gravel; and latterly, erysipelas seized one of his legs. Lady Elizabeth thus addresses her son at Rome, describing the health of her partner, with an elegance of style and correctness of orthography, richly illustrative of aristocratic attainments and manners in that day: it is given literatim et verbatim: "Your father is much at woon as to his helth, and his defnese is not wosce, but much as he was when he was heare; give me a true account how my deare sone Charlles is head dus!" Such was the noble helpmate whom in evil hour the poor poet had selected to overshadow the evening of his existence. Meanwhile, he still carried on his controversies, in fresh prefaces to his own works, or those of others; and, we are sorry to say, apparently with no other object than "a palliation, if not the defence, of dramatic immorality." Even his last hours were embittered with this unseemly warfare: and so dearly had his pre-eminent reputation been purchased, that " nature, over F watched and worn out, was like a besieged garrison, forced to obey the call to arms, and defend" the bubble of literary fame, "even with the very latest exertion of the vital spirit." The approach of death was sudden, rather than gradual. An inflammation, in itself deemed unimportant, at the extremity of one of his toes, through the skin growing over the nail, became from neglect a gangrene. Amputation, when suggested, he decidedly declined; but calmly alluding to his age, remarked that "he did not care to part with one limb, to lead in his seventieth year an uncomfortable life on the rest." After a short interval, he expired on Wednesday morning, the 1st of May, 1700, in the catholic faith," with submission and entire resignation to the divine will, taking leave of his friends in so tender and obliging a farewell, as none but he himself could have expressed." Sir Walter Scott winds up the sad story as follows: "The death of a man like Dryden, especially in narrow and neglected circumstances, is usually an alarum-bell to the public. Unavailing and mutual reproaches for unthankful and pitiless negligence, waste themselves in newspaper paragraphs, elegies, and funeral processions; the debt to genius is then deemed discharged, and a new account of neglect and commemoration is opened between the public and the next who rises to supply his room. It was thus with Dryden; his family were preparing to bury him with the decency becoming their limited circumstances, when Charles Montague, Lord Jeffries, and other men of quality, made a subscription for a public funeral. The body of the poet was then conveyed to Physicians' Hall, where it was embalmed, and lay in state for twelve days after his decease. On the 13th day of May, the celebrated Dr. Garth pronounced a Latin oration over the remains of his departed friend, which were then, with considerable pomp, preceded by a band of music, and attended by a numerous procession of carriages, transported to Westminster Abbey, and deposited between the graves of Chaucer and Cowley." p. 76. Our glances at his most important works must, of necessity, be brief, and therefore very imperfect. His dramas have long been consigned to a merited oblivion; nor even were it otherwise, would a review of them either edify or amuse our readers. Doctor Johnson himself wished that no necessity had been imposed on the biographer "of following the progress of his theatrical fame, or tracing the meanders of his mind through the series of his dramatic performances." They, nevertheless, told very materially on the taste of his times. Theatrical harmony was tried on an enormous scale, in numerous rhyming plays, which instructed the ears of public audiences no longer to tolerate the ruggedness of Donne, or the limping, blundering measures of common contemporaries. Melody in versification thus beheld its claims asserted and established; a result which, whatever may be its value, no other man had accomplished in the same manner, or to the same extent, that Dryden had done it. His name stood first in English literature, from the year 1666, to the moment of his dissolution: nor was it at all limited to Britain. Rapin learned our language for the mere pleasure and satisfaction of reading Dryden's works. At Paris, there was one general sensation of sorrow at so great a genius being withdrawn from the world. At home, the poets were not silent, although their strains, until Pope arose, "only evinced their woful degeneracy from him whom they mourned." We must acknowledge him to have been the founder of our reformed school of poetry in modern times. His genius possessed that peculiar power which enabled it to reason, in the most appropriate language, even when upon the wing, and ascending into the sublimest altitudes. It was the same gift, as to the imagination, which Bacon and Newton enjoyed as to the understanding; which led the one into the recesses of philosophy, and the other into the cabinet of nature. Even the prose of this eminent bard is accurately stated to "bear repeated evidence" to his abilities in acquiring and arranging knowledge rational or moral, in handling hypotheses by which natural results may be illustrated or explained, or in expatiating generally throughout the universe of science. In his poetry, the lights of fancy shed around a perpetual illumination, although from an innate want of sympathy with sentimental passion, or spiritual refinement, we too often feel, that it is rather the glare of nocturnal bonfires, than as if the intellectual firmament were really glorified through the day by solar radiance, or at night with the gentle moon resplendently "walking in her brightness." John Dryden, in fact, was a secularized poet. His etherealism had quenched much of its original brilliancy in the muddy waters which defile the purlieus of playhouses, and the palaces of kings. The angel of genuine religion will rarely trouble those polluted cisterns, or transform them, as by the touch of miracle, into a purifying pool of Siloam. Hence, he contracted mental coarseness, or gross indelicacy, for which, in proportion to his apostasy from God and nature, he could contrive no other covering besides the absurdities of romance or chivalry. Force, vigour, animation, he never lost; nor can any eulogium be more just than that pronounced by Doctor Garth, when he declares, "I cannot pass by this admirable person without endeavouring to make our country sensible of the obligations we are under to his muse. If we trace him from the first productions of his youth, to the last performances of his age, we shall find, that as the tyranny of rhyme never imposed on the perspicuity of sense, so a languid sense never wanted to be set off by the harmony of rhyme. And as his earlier works wanted no maturity, so his latter wanted no force or spirit. The falling off of his hair had no other consequence than to make his laurels be seen the more." His celebrated ode on the Feast of Alexander has placed him by the throne of Pindar, in the lyrical department of our poesy. It may be said to stand alone in its glory, when we remember the loftiness of its language, the simplicity of its ideas, its exquisite harmony and variety. It combines the sublime and beautiful of a number of agitated minds, all obedient to the influence of a present and potent enchanter. "The change of tone, in the harp of Timotheus, regulates the measure and the melody, and the very language of every stanza." According to one account, it was struck off in a single night; but according to another, the author spent an entire fortnight on its composition. Neither statement, in our judgment, need be questioned. The former period gave it conception, birth, and a certain sort of completion; the latter polished it into inimitable perfection. Amongst his satires, we have already alluded to the most remarkable. It was, perhaps, to this walk of literature more particularly, that what an ancient said of Rome being adorned by Augustus, Johnson applied to English poetry as improved by Dryden-" he found it of brick, and left it of marble." This reformation not merely proceeded from an excellent ear, and a superlative capability of gratifying it, but from the most correct taste, connected with an analytical discernment of those nerves which will convey agony to the heart, as well as from a close, accurate, and continued study of his native language. It is indeed to be regretted, that such energy of thought, such force of expression, such ratiocination, penetrated by passion, should have been expended upon the gratification of personal spleen or party spirit. We often wish, perhaps, for more worthy subjects of reproach than Settle and Shadwell," yet we cannot account the amber less precious, because they are grubs and flies that are enclosed within it." So says Sir Walter Scott, in the plenitude of his scorn, with regard to almost every object that lay without the gilded pale of a profligate aristocracy. If there is to be any comparison amongst wicked men, Elkanah and Mac Flecnoe appear to have been tolerable specimens of humanity by the side of Buckingham, Rochester, and Shaftesbury! As a narrative poet, Dryden commenced with his Annus Mirabilis, in which occur many wonderful stanzas, such as those especially which describe the fire of London, or the conflagration of the vessels at sea after the great naval engagement of the Dutch war. There are, however, various hyperbolical absurdities; nor had he, as yet, formed his versification, or "settled his system of propriety." It is written throughout in quatrains, upon the plan of Gondibert, by Sir William Davenant. His Fables altogether constitute a congeries of masterpieces. When he composed them, he was in the autumn of his years, in the sense of maturity, and not of decay. His greatest success, however, even here, is when he avoids dwelling on the pathetic; for although, as Johnson remarks, with regard to another poem, the Threnodia Augustalis," he is often petrified with grief, yet sometimes the marble trickles into a joke." In the Knight's Tale he has only modernized Chaucer; yet, at the same time, it is to such an extent of excellence, that his merit becomes almost more than equal to that of mere rude originality. He strikes his pen into the mine of antique barbarism; and lo! golden effusions gush forth at every stroke. Passages might easily be adduced from the Flower and the Leaf, from Guiscard and Sigismonda, or from Theodore and Honoria, which would delight our readers; but, as a specimen, we must limit ourselves to an extract from the last, describing the approach of an apparition, and its effects upon animated and inanimated nature, even before it becomes visible: "While listening to the murmuring leaves he stood, At once the wind was laid; the whispering sound A sudden horror seized his giddy head, And his ears tingled, and his colour fled! Seemed threatened, though unseen to mortal eye." An interesting parallel might be drawn, had we room for it, between the ancient father of English poetry, and its more modern reformer. The former abounded in images, but the latter was more choice in his selection of them. The picturesque accompaniment to the statue of Mars, however, in Chaucer, has escaped Dryden : "A wolfe did stand before him at his feet, With eyen red, and of a man he eat!" His pieces under the titles of Religio Laici, and the Hind and Panther, will now be studied oftener by the curious or the metaphysical, than by those who merely read poetry for recreation. They shew how easily the most powerful mind may entangle itself in sophistical toils of its own weaving." It seems not a little remarkable that he believed in the chimeras of alchymy, and the jargon of judicial astrology. We find him even casting a horoscope for his favourite son; so that peculiar influences must be always allowed for, both upon his understanding and imagination. His biographer conceives that a slight degree of credulity, whilst it crushes and cows a mind of |