"His ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest,

His name, a great example stands, to show
How strangely high endeavors may be blest,
Where piety and valor jointly go."

A short two years after, you will remember, and Charles II. came to his own and was crowned; and how does this eulogist of Cromwell treat his coronation? In a way that is worth our listening to; for, I think, a comparison of the Cromwellian verses with the Carolan eulogy gives us a key to John Dryden's character:

"All eyes you draw, and with the eyes, the heart:

Of your own pomp yourself the greatest part:

Next to the sacred temple you are led,

Where waits a crown for your more sacred head:
The grateful choir their harmony employ,

Not to make greater, but more solemn joy.
Wrapt soft and warm your name is sent on high,
As flames do on the waves of incense fly:
Music herself is lost, in vain she brings
Her choicest notes to praise the best of kings;

Her melting strains in you a tomb have found,
And lie like bees in their own sweetness drown'd."

No wonder that he came ultimately to have the place of Poet-laureate, and thereafter an extra £100 a year with it! No wonder that, with all his clever

ness- and it was prodigious- he never did, and never could, win an unsullied reputation for sterling integrity and straightforward purpose.

I know that his latest biographer and advocate, Mr. Saintsbury, whose work you will be very apt to encounter in the little series edited by John Morley, sees poems like those I have cited with other eyes, and fashions out of them an agreeable poetic consistency very honorable to Dryden; but I cannot twist myself so as to view the matter in his way. I think rather of a conscienceless thrifty newspaper, setting forth the average everyday drift of opinion, with a good deal more than everyday skill.

Meantime John Dryden has married, and has married the daughter of an earl; of just how this came about we have not very full record; but there were a great many who wondered why she should marry him; and a good many more, as it appeared, who persisted in wondering why he should marry her. Such wonderments of wondering people overtake a good many matches. It is quite certain that it was not a marriage which went to make a domestic man of him; and I think you will search vainly through his poems for any indication of those home

instincts which, like the "melting strains" he flung about King Charles,

"Lie like bees in their own sweetness drown'd."

The only positive worldly good which seemed to come of this marriage was an occasional home at Charlton, in Wiltshire - an estate of the Earl of Berkshire, his father-in-law where Dryden wrote, shortly after his marriage, his Annus Mirabilis, in which he gave to all the notable events of the year 1666 a fillip with his pen; and the odd conceits that lie in a single one of his stanzas keep yet alive a story of the capture by the British of a fleet of Dutch India ships:

"Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball,

And now their odors armed against them fly;
Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall,
And some by aromatic splinters die."

There are three hundred other stanzas in the poem, of the same make and rhythm, telling of fire, of plague, and of battles. I am not sure if anybody reads it nowadays; but if do you and it is not fatiguing-you will find wonderful word-craft in it, which repeats the din and crash of battle, and

paints the smouldering rage and the blazing power of the Great Fire of London in a way which certain boys, I well remember in old school days, thought represented the grand climacteric of poetic diction.

The London of Dryden.

But let us not forget where we are in our English story; it is London that has been all aflame in that dreadful year of 1666. Thirteen thousand houses have been destroyed, eighty odd churches, and some four hundred acres of ground in the central part of the city have been burned over. The fire had followed swiftly upon the devastating plague of the previous year, which Dryden had gone into Wiltshire to avoid. It is doubtful, indeed, if he came back soon enough to see the great blaze with his own eyes; "chemical fire," the poet calls it, and it licked up the poison of the plague; but it did not lick up the leprosy of Charles' court.

There was a

demand for plays, and for plays of a bad sort; and Dryden met the demand. Never was there an author more apt to divine what the public did want, and more full of literary contrivances to meet it

Dryden knew all the purveyors of this sort of intellectual repast, and all their methods, and soon became a king among them; and to be a king among the playwrights was to have a very large sovereignty in that time. Everybody talked of the plays; all of Royalist faith went to the plays, if they had money; and money was becoming more and more plentiful. There had been the set-back, it is true, of the Great Fire; but English commerce was making enormous strides in these days. There was a pathetic folding of the hands and dreary forecastings directly after the disaster, as after all such calamities. But straight upon this the city grew, with wider streets and taller houses, and in only a very few years the waste ground was covered again, and the new temple of St. Paul's rising, under the guidance of Sir Christopher Wren, into those grand proportions of cupola and dome, which, in their smoked and sooty majesty, dominate the city of London to-day.

Houses of nobles and of rich merchants which stood near to Cornhill and Lombard Street, and private gardens which had occupied areas thereabout now representing millions of pounds in

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