bold opening, in which the stately march of the verse is not to be disguised by all the frippery of erudition which loads it :

And now 'tis time; for their officious haste,

Who would before have borne him to the sky,
Like eager Romans, ere all rites were past,
Did let too soon the sacred eagle fly.

The whole poem contains but thirty-seven of these stanzas, but it is full of admirable lines and thoughts. No doubt there are plenty of conceits as well, and Dryden would not have been Dryden if there had not been. But at the same time the singular justness which always marked his praise, as well as his blame, is as remarkable in the matter of the poem, as the force and vigour of the diction and versification are in its manner. To this day no better eulogy of the Protector has been written, and the poet with a remarkable dexterity evades, without directly denying, the more awkward points in his hero's career and character. One thing which must strike all careful readers of the poem is the entire absence of any attack on the royalist party. To attempt, as Shadwell and other libellers attempted a quarter of a century later, to construe a famous couplet

He fought to end our fighting, and essayed
To staunch the blood by breathing of the vein-—

into an approval of the execution of Charles I., is to wrest the sense of the original hopelessly and unpardonably. Cromwell's conduct is contrasted with that of those who "the quarrel loved, but did the cause abhor," who "first sought to inflame the parties, then to poise," &c., i.e. with Essex, Manchester, and their likes; and it need hardly be

said that this contrast was ended years before there was any question of the king's death. Indeed, to a careful reader nowadays the Heroic Stanzas read much more like an elaborate attempt to hedge between the parties than like an attempt to gain favour from the roundheads by uncompromising advocacy of their cause. The author is one of those "sticklers of the war" that he himself describes.

It is possible that a certain half-heartedness may have been observed in Dryden by those of his cousin's party. It is possible, too, that Sir Gilbert Pickering, like Thackeray's Mr. Scully, was a good deal more bent on making use of his young kinsman than on rewarding him in any permanent manner. At any rate, no kind of preferment fell to his lot, and the anarchy of the "foolish Ishbosheth soon made any such preferment extremely improbable. Before long it would appear that Dryden had definitely given up whatever position he held in Sir Gilbert Pickering's household, and had betaken himself to literature. The fact of his so betaking himself almost implied adherence to the royalist party. In the later years of the commonwealth, English letters had rallied to a certain extent from the disarray into which they were thrown by the civil war, but the centres of the rally belonged almost exclusively to the royalist party. Milton had long forsworn pure literature, to devote himself to official duties with an occasional personal polemic as a relief. Marvell and Wither, the two other chief lights of the Puritan party, could hardly be regarded by any one as men of light and leading, despite the really charming lyrics which both of them had produced. All the other great literary names of the time were, without exception, on the side of the exile. Hobbes was a royalist, though a somewhat singular one, Cowley

of

was a royalist, Herrick was a royalist, so was Denham, so was, as far as he was anything, the unstable Waller. Moreover, the most practically active author of the day, power the one man of letters who combined the organizing literary effort with the power of himself producing literary work of merit, was one of the staunchest of the king's friends. Sir William Davenant, without any political concession, had somehow obtained leave from the republican government to reintroduce theatrical entertainments of a kind, and moderate royalists, like Evelyn, with an interest in literature and the arts and sciences, were returning to their homes and looking out for the good time coming. That Dryden, under these circumstances, having at the time a much more vivid interest in literature than in politics, and belonging as he did rather to the Presbyterian faction, who were everywhere returning to the royalist political faith, than to the Independent republicans, should become royalist in principle was nothing surprising. Those who reproach him with the change (if change it was) forget that he shared it with the immense majority of the nation. For the last half-century the literary current has been so entirely on the Puritan side that we are probably in danger of doing at least as much injustice to the royalists as was at one time done to their opponents. One thing in particular I have never seen fairly put as accounting for the complete royalization of nearly the whole people, and it is a thing which has a special bearing on Dryden. It has been said that his temperament was specially and exceptionally English. Now one of the most respectable, if not the most purely rational features of the English character, is its objection to wanton bloodshed for political causes, without form of law. It was this beyond all question that alienated

the English from James the Second, it was this that in the heyday of Hanoverian power made them turn a cold shoulder on the Duke of Cumberland, it was this which enlisted them almost as one man against the French revolutionists, it was this which brought about in our own days a political movement to which there is no need to refer more particularly. Now it must be remembered that either as the losing party, or for other reasons, the royalists were in the great civil war almost free from the charge of reckless bloodshedding. Their troops were disorderly and given to plunder, but not to cruelty. No legend even charges against Astley or Goring, against Rupert or Lunsford, anything like the Drogheda massacre -the effect of which on the general mind Defoe, an unexceptionable witness, has preserved by a chance phrase in Robinson Crusoe-or the hideous bloodbath of the Irishwomen after Naseby, or the brutal butchery of Dr. Hudson at Woodcroft in Dryden's own county, where the soldiers chopped off the priest's fingers as he clung to the gurgoyles of the tower, and thrust him back with pikes into the moat which, mutilated as he was, he had managed to swim. A certain humanity and absence of bloodthirstiness are among Dryden's most creditable characteristics,' and these excesses of fanaticism are not at all unlikely to have had their share in determining him to adopt the winning

1 The too famous Political Prologues may, perhaps, be quoted against me here. I have only to remark: first, that, bad as they are, they form an infinitesimal portion of Dryden's work, and are in glaring contrast with the sentiments pervading that work as a whole; secondly, that they were written at a time of political excitement unparalleled in history, save once at Athens and once or twice at Paris. But I cannot help adding that their denouncers usually seem to me to be at least partially animated by the notion that Dryden wished the wrong people to be hanged.

side when at last it won. But it is perhaps more to the purpose that his literary leanings must of themselves have inevitably inclined him in the same direction. There was absolutely no opening for literature on the republican side, a fact of which no better proof can be afforded than the small salary at which the first man of letters then living was hired by a government which, whatever faults it had, certainly did not sin by rewarding its other servants too meagrely. That Dryden at this time had any deep-set theological or political prejudices is very improbable. He certainly had not, like Butler, noted for years the faults and weaknesses of the dominant party, so as to enshrine them in immortal ridicule when the time should come. But he was evidently an ardent devotee of literature; he was not averse to the pleasures of the town, which if not so actively interfered with by the Commonwealth as is sometimes thought, were certainly not encouraged by it; and his friends and associates must have been royalists almost to a man. So he threw himself at once on that side when the chance came, and had probably thrown himself there in spirit some time before. The state of the literature in which he thus took service must be described before we go any further.

The most convenient division of literature is into poetry, drama, and prose. With regard to poetry, the reigning style at the advent of Dryden was, as everybody knows, the peculiar style unfortunately baptized as "metaphysical." The more catholic criticism of the last 100 years has disembarrassed this poetry of much of the odium which once hung round it, without, however, doing full justice to its merits. In Donne, especially, the king of the school, the conceits and laboured fancies which distinguish it frequently reach a hardly surpassed height of poetical