CHAPTER III.

DRYDEN, OR THE LITERARY MORALITY OF AN EPOCH.

Association of Intellectual and Material Elements in Civilization.-Social History and Intellectual History explain each other.-Machiavelli, Erasmus, D'Alembert.-Sforza, Henry VIII., Tom Paine.-English Society in the Seventeenth Century investigated.-Its Licentiousness not produced by the Commonwealth.-The two Eras contrasted in their Literature.-Bunyan.-Milton.-The Drama.-Its Power testified by Chesterfield, and its Immorality exemplified by the "Tatler" and the "Guardian."-Pope and Chesterfield influenced by it.-Dryden's position in the Movement. His provoking Character.-A Trimmer all his Life. His Conversion to Romanism examined, and Mr. Bell's theory.Hallam. Progress of Scepticism.-Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury.— Swift and Atterbury, Pope and Garth.-Critique on "The Hind and Panther."-Its Allegory defended.-Johnson.-Macaulay.-Dryden's striking Intellectuality.-His Conduct in the Literary Crisis, and Review of the Rise of Euphuism.-Singular inequality of his Genius.— His "Absalom and Achitophel."-His lenient View of Shaftesbury explained.-A Political Writer.-His Dramas Political Pamphlets — The Old Dramatists not Politicians.-Authorship of the "Essay on Satire."-Growth of French Tastes.-Oldham.-Butler.- Addison.The English Drama modelled on the French and Spanish.-Dryden's Theory of Tragedy founded on Ariosto.-Revolution in Taste in the next Generation curiously exemplified.- Low State of Criticism.— Rymer as a Critic.-Dryden's Prose Writings.-His Comedies.-His Controversy with Collier investigated. His "Virgil."-National Interest in it.-Compared with Pope's "Homer."

THE communion that exists between the elements of civilization is perhaps more generally acknowledged than investigated. Yet civil and intellectual society present a remarkable analogy in their history. Sometimes the analogy is not so plain. Sometimes the harmony of their development is interrupted, and for a moment their relation to each other seems rather reactionary than cooperative. But concord is soon restored. The anta

gonism is but temporary. The one element obeys the impulse which the other gives. The revolution on this side has ultimately procured a revolution on that. And the equipoise, only chronologically disturbed, is once more on the balance.

Nowhere is this law of association more potentially visible than in the phases of modern society; and indeed to study the composition of that society without a full appreciation of it, is to do violence to the unity and integrity of the philosophy of history. On this principle of affinity, literature is an index to civilization. An ode, a single ballad, the subtleties of a monastic doctor, the song of a troubadour, or the tale of a trouvere, thus acquire a gravity not comprehended by the ordinary reader. On the other hand, to the intelligent student a crusade and a miracle-play interpret each other. The twofold influence of a religion peculiarly objective, and a physical code peculiarly religious, is at once suggested to him. In the process of his researches, this idea of assimilation will be applied yet farther, to a greater refinement of adaptation. From contemplating its influence on the development of an era, he will ascend to trace its effects on the individual. Nor will he be long in identifying by way of specimen the intellectual causes. which have bequeathed to him the "Prince," the "Encomium Moræ," and the "Encyclopédie," with the moral causes which at similar intervals produced their counterparts in Sforza, Henry VIII., and Tom Paine. Among all the examples of social and intellectual reciprocity,· however, he will find none more prominent than that offered by the history of English society in the middle of the seventeenth century.

It is a common remark, that the licentiousness of the Restoration was the effect of the restraint of the Commonwealth. The fanaticism of one epoch, it is said,

nurtured, if it did not create, the infidelity of the other. The saints of to-day conceived the Atheists of to-morrow. The age of Puritan piety had been as episodical in England, as the age of academical Atheism afterwards was in France. The very exaggeration of the Puritan æsthetics had overthrown their system. The fervour of real sentiment had long since given place to the fancies of fashion. The symbols of a religion were depreciated to the mere external expressions of a mode. What had been begun in zeal was continued in affectation. There had been zeal, indeed, but it was emphatically a zeal not according to knowledge. Had the revolutionists been content with correcting the errors of a past generation, instead of prescribing rules for preserving the virtues of the present, had they cut off Charles's head, without cutting off their own beards, had they limited effectually the king's prerogative without corrupting the king's English, had they, in a word, been reformers without being Puritans, we should have had much less of vicious hypocrisy, and much less of open profligacy; much less of psalmsinging, but much less of sabbath-breaking; fewer religious meetings at Blackfriars, but fewer riotous assemblies at Whitehall; fewer such fanatics as Vane and Ireton, but fewer such debauchés as Rochester and Buckingham.

But though in effect it has thus been usual to charge the Commonwealth with the follies of the Restoration, the change of manners was too emphatic to be accounted for on the principle of a simple antithesis. It is not possible that, except (to use a pathological term) there had been a prior disposition, the body politic should have taken the disease with so much readiness and in so virulent a type. Those who are accustomed to study with attention the history of their country, must have discovered that, as far back as the beginning of the sixteenth century,

symptoms of a social reaction had manifested themselves. The nation, it was observed, divided in their theological and political opinions, had early assumed external characteristics by which those opinions might be known and testified. All along the history of the reigns of Elizabeth, James, and Charles, may be traced, with topographical accuracy, the movements of the two sections, who developed themselves the more distinctly, the one under the Commonwealth, the other at the Restoration. The same gloomy affectations, the same spiritual eccentricities that distinguished the Puritan when Puritanism was triumphant at Whitehall, distinguished his ancestor when Puritanism shrank from the eye of Parker and Whitgift; and was to be looked for, not in the lobbies of the Royal Palace, but concealed in barns and under hedgerows, or stowed away in the holds of vessels bound for the distant settlements of the Mississippi and the Connecticut.

The propensity to place an excessive emphasis on the coarse jollity of the Restoration as the product of the Commonwealth, has not been without prejudice to the truth. It should rather seem that the social revolution was the result of a prior constitutional taint-that the sins of the children were begotten of the sins of the father, that to the Roaring-boys, Roysterers, and Bonaventuras of the one period, we are indebted for the Scourers, Ballers, and Mohawks of the other, and to the rope-dancers, bear-baitings, ruffles and ringlets of the First Charles, for the Clevelands, the Lucy Walters, and the Nell Gwynns, of the Second. It cannot be denied, indeed, after an impartial survey of the tendency of the manners of the whole European aristocracy of the sixteenth century,-after a review ever so rapid, of the morality which presided at the courts of Francis, of Leo, of Mary, in Scotland, and of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth in

England, that the rough and homely virtues of the old territorial Feudalism had expired with it, and that the society which had witnessed the orgies of the Field of the Cloth of Gold,-which had produced the just retribution of Luther, and the unjust execution of More, the mysterious loves of Mary, and the mysterious amours of Leicester, was guilty of no very extravagant contrast, when it left the historian to befoul his page with such intrigues as the intrigues of the Cabal, and with such fabrications as the fabrication of the Black Box. The generation which had given cause for the disclosures of the English ambassador, Throgmorton, at the Court of Scotland, may well take the place of whipping-boy to the generation that had listened to the disclosures of the French ambassador, Barillon, at the Court of England.

That such immorality was allowed to go unimpeached must, in part, be ascribed to the absence of any legitimate organ of restraint. Profligacy, when it found itself irresponsible to public opinion, soon grew insubordinate. The moral balance, which the presence of a middle class too rich to be made the victims of vice, and too poor to indulge in its extravagances, maintains, was as yet inefficient. With a prerogative comparatively free and untrammelled, accidental qualifications in Charles cooperated. His personal endowments, his misfortunes, his good nature under them, acted strongly on the judgment of a people always ready to overlook peccadilloes that resulted in the head rather than in the heart. After the Revolution, and the recognition of a Third Estate, when the moral boundary that separated Blackfriars from Whitehall had disappeared; after the publication of the Spectator," it is only in the episodical disorganization attendant on a change of dynasty, that we find courtiers such as those that figure in the pages of Burnett, or

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