JOHN DRYDEN.

DRYDEN was now approaching the decline of life. After many successes and many failures, he had at length attained, by general consent, the first place among living English poets. His claims on the gratitude of James were superior to those of any other man of letters in the kingdom. But James cared little for verses and much for money. From the day of his accession he set himself to make small economical reforms, such as bring on a government the reproach of meanness without producing any perceptible relief to the finances. One of the victims of his injudicious parsimony was the poet laureate. Orders were given that, in the new patent which the demise of the crown made necessary, the annual butt of sack originally granted to Jonson, and continued to Jonson's successors, should be omitted.* This was the only notice which the king, during the first year of his reign, deigned to bestow on the mighty satirist who, in the very crisis of the great struggle of the Exclusion Bill, had spread terror through the Whig ranks. Dryden was poor and impatient of poverty. He knew little and cared little about religion. If any sentiment was deeply fixed in him, that sentiment was an aversion to priests of all persua sions, Levites, augurs, muftis, Roman Catholic divines, Presbyterian divines, divines of the Church of England. He was not naturally a man of high spirit; and his pursuits had been by no means such as were likely to give elevation or delicacy to his mind. He had, during many years, earned his daily bread by pandering to the vicious taste of the pit, and by grossly flattering rich and noble patrons. Selfrespect and a fine sense of the becoming were not to be expected from one who had led a life of mendicancy and adulation. Finding that, if he continued to call himself a Protestant, his services would be overlooked, he declared himself a Papist. The king's parsimony instantly relaxed. Dryden was gratified with a pension of a hundred pounds a year, and was employed to defend his new religion both in prose and verse.

*This fact, which escaped the minute researches of Malone, appears from the Treasury Letter Book of 1685.

Two eminent men, Samuel Johnson and Walter Scott, have done their best to persuade themselves and others that this memorable conversion was sincere. It was natural that they should be desirous to remove a disgraceful stain from the memory of one whose genius they justly admired, and with whose political feelings they strongly sympathized; but the impartial historian must with regret pronounce a very different judgment. There will always be a strong presumption against the sincerity of a conversion by which the convert is directly a gainer. In the case of Dryden there is nothing to countervail this presumption. His theological writings abundantly prove that he had never sought with diligence and anxiety to learn the truth, and that his knowledge both of the Church which he quitted and of the Church which he entered was of the most superficial kind. Nor was his subsequent conduct that of a man whom a strong sense of duty had constrained to take a step of awful importance. Had he been such a man, the same conviction which had led him to join the Church of Rome would surely have prevented him from violating grossly and habitually rules which that Church, in common with every other Christian society, recognizes as binding. There would have been a marked distinction between his earlier and his later composi tions. He would have looked back with remorse on a literary life of near thirty years, during which his rare powers of diction and versification had been systematically employed in spreading moral corruption. Not a line tending to make virtue contemptible, or to inflame licentious desire, would thenceforward have proceeded from his pen. The truth unhappily is, that the dramas which he wrote after his pretended conversion, are in no respect less impure or profane than those of his youth. Even when he professed to translate, he constantly wandered from his originals in search of images which, if he had found them in his originals, he ought to have shunned. What was bad became worse in his versions. What was innocent contracted a taint from passing through his mind. He made the grossest satires of Juvenal more gross, interpolated loose descriptions in the tales of Boccaccio, and polluted the sweet and limpid poetry of the Georgics with filth which would have moved the loathing of Virgil.

THE DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH.

THE name of this celebrated favorite was Sarah Jennings. Her eldest sister, Frances, had been distinguished by beauty and levity even among the crowd of beautiful faces and light characters which adorned and disgraced Whitehall during the wild carnival of the Restoration. On one occasion Frances dressed herself like an orange girl, and cried fruit about the streets.* Sober people predicted that a girl of so little discretion and delicacy would not easily find a husband. She was, however, twice married, and was now the wife of Tyrconnel. Sarah, less regularly beautiful, was perhaps more attractive. Her face was expressive; her form wanted no feminine charm; and the profusion of her fine hair, not yet disguised by powder, according to that barbarous fashion which she lived to see introduced, was the delight of numerous admirers. Among the gallants who sued for her favor, Churchill, young, handsome, graceful, insinuating, eloquent, and brave, obtained the preference. He must have been enamored indeed; for he had little property except the annuity which he had bought with the infamous wages bestowed on him by the Duchess of Cleveland; he was insatiable of riches; Sarah was poor; and a plain girl with a large fortune was proposed to him. His love, after a struggle, prevailed over his avarice; marriage only strengthened his passion; and, to the last hour of his life, Sarah enjoyed the pleasure and distinction of being the one human being who was able to mislead that far-sighted and sure-footed judg ment, who was fervently loved by that cold heart, and who was servilely feared by that intrepid spirit.

In a worldly sense, the fidelity of Churchill's love was amply rewarded. His bride, though slenderly portioned, brought with her a dowry, which, judiciously employed, made him at length a duke of England, a sovereign prince of the empire, the captain-general of a great coalition, the arbiter between mighty princes, and, what he valued more, the wealthiest subject in Europe. She had been brought up from childhood with the Princess Anne, and a close friendship had arisen between the girls. In character they resembled each other very little. Anne was slow and taciturn. * Grammont's Memoirs; Pepys' Diary, Feb. 21, 1684-5.

To those whom she loved she was meek. The form which her anger assumed was sullenness. She had a strong sense of religion, and was attached, even with bigotry, to the rites and government of the Church of England. Sarah was lively and voluble, domineered over those whom she regarded with most kindness, and, when she was offended, vented her rage in tears and tempestuous reproaches. To sanctity she made no pretence, and, indeed, narrowly escaped the imputation of irreligion. She was not yet what she became when one class of vices had been fully developed in her by prosperity, and another by adversity, when her brain had been turned by success and flattery, when her heart had been ulcerated by disasters and mortifications. She lived to be that most odious and miserable of human beings, an ancient crone at war with her whole kind, at war with her own children and grandchildren, great indeed and rich, but valuing greatness and riches chiefly because they enabled her to brave public opinion, and to indulge without restraint her hatred to the living and the dead. In the reign of James she was regarded as nothing worse than a fine, high-spirited young woman, who could now and then be cross and arbitrary, but whose flaws of temper might well be pardoned in consideration of her charms.

It is a common observation, that differences of taste, un. derstanding, and disposition, are no impediments to friendship, and that the closest intimacies often exist between minds each of which supplies what is wanting to the other. Lady Churchill was loved and even worshipped by Anne. The princess could not live apart from the object of her romantic fondness. She married, and was a faithful and even an affectionate wife; but Prince George, a dull man, whose chief pleasures were derived from his dinner and his bottle, acquired over her no influence comparable to that exercised by her female friend, and soon gave himself up with stupid patience to the dominion of that vehement and commanding spirit by which his wife was governed. Children were born to the royal pair, and Anne was by no means without the feelings of a mother; but the tenderness which she felt for her offspring was languid when compared with her devotion to the companion of her early years. At length the princess became impatient of the restraint which etiquette imposed on her. She could not bear to hear the words Madam and Royal Highness from the lips of one who was more to her than a sister. Such words were indeed necessary in the gal

lery or the drawing-room, but they were disused in the closet. Anne was Mrs. Morley; Lady Churchill was Mrs. Freeman; and under these childish names was carried on, during twenty years, a correspondence on which at last the fate of administrations and dynasties depended. But as yet Anne had no political power and little patronage. Her friend attended her as first lady of the bed-chamber, with a salary of only four hundred pounds a year. There is reason, however, to believe that, even at this time, Churchill was able to gratify his ruling passion by means of his wife's influence. The princess, though her income was large and her tastes simple, contracted debts which her father, not without some murmurs, discharged; and it was rumored, that her embarrassments had been caused by her prodigal bounty to her favorite.*

At length the time had arrived when this singular friendship was to exercise a great influence on public affairs. What part Anne would take in the contest which distracted England was matter of deep anxiety. Filial duty was on one side. The interests of the religion to which she was sincerely attached were on the other. A less inert nature might well have remained long in suspense when drawn in opposite directions by motives so strong and so respectable. But the influence of the Churchills decided the question, and their patroness became an important member of that extensive league of which the Prince of Orange was the head.

AUBREY DE VERE, EARL OF OXFORD.

THE noblest subject in England, and, indeed, as Englishmen loved to say, the noblest subject in Europe, was Aubrey de Vere, twentieth and last of the old Earls of Oxford. He derived his title through an uninterrupted male descent from a time when the families of Howard and Seymour were still obscure, when the Nevilles and Percies enjoyed only a provincial celebrity, and when even the great name of Plantagenet had not yet been heard in Eng

It would be endless to recount all the books from which I have formed my estimate of the duchess's character. Her own letters, her own vindication, and the replies which it called forth, have been my chief materials.