they contain few images from Nature,' but rather let us study them sympathetically, remembering Dryden's saying: Poetry, which is an image of Nature, must generally please, but 'tis not to be understood that all parts of it must please every man. JOHN DRYDEN. BORN in Northamptonshire in 1631. He came of a Puritan family, and accordingly was sent to Cambridge, where he took his degree in 1654. The political and religious tendencies of his later years estranged him completely from his University, causing him even to write, Oxford to him a dearer name shall be After the Restoration (1660) he took to the writing of plays, - almost the only means by which a professional author could then make a living. But his genius was not dramatic, and few of his many attempts in this line are now read, except as literary curiosities. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1670. He did not find his true vein until 1681, when he published the Absalom and Achitophel, the greatest of English satires in verse. Macflecknoe (1682) is hardly inferior. At the Revolution (1688) he was deprived of his position as Poet Laureate, and was compelled to return to the uncongenial task of playwriting. To many of his plays he prefixed introductions in which, for the first time in England, the laws of dramatic criticism were stated and discussed clearly and acutely. The prose style of these prefaces is clean-cut and modern, and entitles Dryden to the distinction of being the first to break away from the cumbersome periods in which English prose had heretofore obscured itself. His later years were spent upon his translation of Vergil and his Fables. His mind was always quick to welcome new ideas, and the work of his declining years, though in a lighter vein, shows no falling-off from the high standard of his prime. He died in 1700. CONTEMPORARIES-Milton, Charles II., Cowley, Addison, Swift, Pope. BIBLIOGRAPHY. LIFE AND TIMES. The complete works of Dryden are to be found in Saintsbury's edition of 18 vols., published by Paterson, of Edinburgh. This edition is a revision of Scott's; it is expensive, and hardly to be found, except in a large city or university library. As a partial substitute may be used (1) Saintsbury's Life in the E.M.L., a model short biography; (2) Christie's excellent edition of the Poems; (3) T. Arnold's edition of the Essay on Dramatic Poetry (Macmillan). Malone's edition of the prose works is not easy to procure, nor is Tonson's edition of the plays. TEXT. - Christie's (Macmillan). CRITICISM. Johnson; Lives of the Poets. Doctor is at his best. In the Dryden and the Pope the Macaulay; Essay on Dryden. Though written only three years after the Milton, this shows a great advance in critical judgment. Lowell; Essay on Dryden. The most satisfactory estimate, but fragmentary, like so much of Lowell's prose work. Dryden's best performances — the Absalom and Achitophel and the Fables -are barely touched on. On the whole, few poets have been more fortunate in their critics than Dryden. The three Essays mentioned above make a high average. Much less pleasing is Matthew Arnold, who in his Introduction to Ward's English Poets delivers himself of an extraordinary ex cathedra judgment on Dryden and Pope. See this judgment neatly disposed of in a reductio ad absurdum by Courthope in the Elwin and Courthope Pope, V. 16. William Congreve was the first comedy writer of his day. The best short account of him is by Swinburne in the Encyclopedia Britannica, article Congreve. See also Thackeray's Congreve and Addison, in his English Humorists. Congreve's first play, the Old Bachelor (1693) made a great hit. The Double Dealer, brought out the same year, scored only a succès d'estime. I-10. Strong were our sires; a reference to the Elizabethan dramatists, the last of whom (Shirley) lived until Dryden was a man of thirty-five. when Charles returned; Charles II. 1660. He was the last English king with any literary pretensions, and the praise Dryden awards him seems not undeserved. His native wit, his long residence in France, and his acquaintance with the comedies of Molière made him a critic of no mean ability. Janus, according to one legend, assisted Saturn to civilize the early inhabitants of Italy. II-19. Vitruvius. A famous Roman architect, a contemporary of Augustus. For Doric columns, see a picture of the Parthenon; for Corinthian, of the Madeleine; for Ionic, of the Temple of Wingless Victory on the Acropolis. 20-27. Fletcher; the friend of Shakespeare, with whom he is supposed to have written The Two Noble Kinsmen. Many of his plays were written with Beaumont; of these, The Knight of the Burning Pestle for humor and Philaster for pathos, are not unworthy of Shakespeare himself. Jonson; see notes on L'Allegro, 126134. The magnificent compliment in lines 26-7 owes something to the partiality of friendship. 28-34. Etherege; a friend of Dryden's; the earliest and not the least of the Restoration comedy writers. There has been preserved a letter in verse which Dryden wrote him when he was minister at Hamburg or Ratisbon. and a protégé of Dryden's. Southern; an indifferent play-writer 35-40. Fabius; Scipio; Hannibal. Consult a History of Rome under the years 206-205 B.C. Raphael, the great Italian painter, died 1520. · Sweet poetry and music and tender hymns drop from him; he lifts his pencil and something gracious falls from it on the How noble his mind must have been! It seems but to receive and his eye seems only to rest on what is great and generous and lovely.” Thackeray, Newcomes, Chapter xxxv. paper. successor. 41-48. Edward. In 1327, Parliament deposed the weak and incompetent Edward II. and declared his son, Edward of Windsor, If we exclude Oliver Cromwell, Edward III. is probably the ablest Englishman that has ever sat upon the English throne. Tom the First. Dryden was succeeded in the position of Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal by Thomas Shadwell, an indifferent Whig poet whom he had mercilessly satirized as Macflecknoe. Tom the Second must be Thomas Rymer, who was made Historiographer Royal on Shadwell's death in 1692, Nahum Tate becoming Poet Laureate. 51. 49-63. wear (54); this infinitive must be connected with line first attempt; Congreve's comedy The Old Bachelor. regular, as explained by the next line, refers to the Unities of Time, Place, and Action, which the French critics derived (or thought they derived) from the Poetics of Aristotle and the usage of the Attic dramatists. The Unities require that the events in a play shall be only such as could happen within one revolution of the sun; that the scene must not be shifted from one place to another and that nothing shall be introduced that does not further the development of the main plot. The success of the Shakesperian drama, in which the first two Unities are disregarded, shows that with the exception of the last they are of little importance now, whatever value they may have had in forming critical opinion in the past. (For a brief but admirably philosophic discussion of the Unities, see Coleridge's Lecture on The Progress of the Drama.) Shakespeare; this coupling of Congreve with Shakespeare seems humorous to us, though it probably did not impress Congreve in that way. 64-77. 'tis impossible you should proceed. Dryden was mistaken here. In 1695 Congreve produced his best comedy, Love for Love. For keen wit and brilliant dialogue nothing was written in England to equal this until Sheridan's School for Scandal (1777). th' ungrateful stage. In the year previous to this, Dryden's twentysixth play, Cleomenes, had proved almost a failure. defend... your departed friend. Congreve, in one of the few respectable acts of his life, proved himself worthy the appeal here made him, by bringing out a fine edition of Dryden's plays. After allowing a little for the equation of personal friendship, you will find in this poem acute criticism, fine feeling, strong and harmonious versification. What other excellencies can you point out? ALEXANDER'S FEAST. The legend of Saint Cecilia's martyrdom has been told by Chaucer, with true mediæval crudeness, in The Seconde Nonnes Tale. She is not there spoken of as the patron saint of music, nor is it clear that in the Golden Legend (thirteenth century), upon which Chaucer's tale is based, her musical powers are even referred to. A misunderstanding of 'cantantibus organis illa in corde suo soli Domino cantabat' ('While the organs were playing she was singing in her heart to God alone'), seems responsible for her fame as a musician and as the inventress of the organ. The 22d of November is her day, and was celebrated by musical societies in London. Dryden wrote the Ode in 1687 as well as in 1697; Pope in 1708. 1-19. Persia won. 331 B.C. Consult a History of Greece under the year Their brows with roses, etc. You can see illustrations of this in many of the Alma-Tadema pictures. 20-46. Timotheus, the Theban, of whom nothing is known save that he was a musician at the court of Alexander. The more famous quire; of the two spell Timotheus of Miletus died in 357 B.C. ings 'quire' and 'choir' (both from the Latin chorus), the former is much the older in English. seats in this sense by Vergil and Horace. sublime; here used in its literal sense. rectly Olympias, the mother of Alexander. tated from the Iliad, i. 528-30: abodes; sedes is used belied disguised. Olympia; more corLines 39-41 are imi He spoke and awful bends his sable brows, (Pope.) Phidias is said to have patterned his Olympian Jove upon scription in these lines of Homer. For a cut of this figure, Myths, p. 54. the de see Cl 47-65. With the magnificent vigor of this stanza compare the more romantic and delicate treatment of the same theme by Keats in the fourth book of Endymion : tone. Like to a moving vintage down they came, Crown'd with green leaves, and faces all on flame; honest = Latin 'honestus,' in its poetical meaning of 'fair-seeming,'handsome.' hautboys, a corruption of the Frenchhaut' (high) and bois' (wood); the wood instrument of high pitch or The Italian form, Oboe, is now common in English. 66-92. Lines 70-73 illustrate the poverty of modern English in pronominal forms. His and he in 70 and 71 must refer to Alexander; the first his in 72 to Timotheus, the second his to Alexander. He in 73 takes us back to Timotheus again. strain. Compare the use of this word in Lycidas 19. ing; compare Lycidas 12. line 1. 25-6. Muse = song, welter Darius; see note on Persia won, Lines 77-8 are perhaps an echo from Par. Lost, vii. though fallen on evil days, On evil days though fallen 93-122. Lydian measures; compare L'Allegro 136. trouble; from the Witches' Refrain in Macbeth iv. I. Double, double toil and trouble; toil and Honour but an empty bubble; might serve as text for Falstaff's seems to me to be a marvellous false friend; ay, truly, a very follows you to the grave. I go to the No, David. Now, that's just the place |