Dryden's youthful friend Southern. "I remember," says this person, "plain John Dryden, before he paid his court with success to the great, in one uniform clothing of Norwich drugget. I have ate tarts with him and Madam Reeve at the Mulberry Garden, when our author advanced to a sword and a Chedreux wig." Perhaps there is no more curious instance of the infinitesimal foundation on which scandal builds than this matter of Dryden's immorality. Putting aside mere vague libellous declamation, the one piece of positive information on the subject that we have is anonymous, was made at least seventy years after date, and avers that John Dryden, a dramatic author, once ate tarts with an actress and a third person. This translated into the language of Mr. Green becomes the dissoluteness of a libertine, spurred up to new debaucheries.

It is immediately after the marriage that we have almost our first introduction to Dryden as a live man seen by live human beings. And the circumstances of this introduction are characteristic enough. On the 3rd of February, 1664, Pepys tells us that he stopped, as he was going to fetch his wife, at the great coffee-house in Covent Garden, and there he found "Dryden, the poet I knew at Cambridge," and all the wits of the town. The company pleased Pepys, and he made a note to the effect, that "it will be good coming thither." But the most interesting thing is this glimpse, first, of the associates of Dryden at the university; secondly, of his installation at Will's, the famous house of call, where he was later to reign as undisputed monarch; and thirdly, of the fact that he was already recognized as "Dryden the poet." The remainder of the present chapter will best be occupied by pointing out what he had done, and in brief space afterwards, did do, to earn that title, reserving the important subject of

his dramatic activity, which also began about this time, for separate treatment.

The lines on the death of Lord Hastings, and the lines to Hoddesdon, have, it has been said, a certain promise about them to experienced eyes, but it is of that kind of promise which, as the same experience teaches, is at least as often followed by little performance as by much. The lines on Cromwell deserve less faint praise. The following stanzas exhibit at once the masculine strength and originality which were to be the poet's great sources of power, and the habit of conceited and pedantic allusion which he had caught from the fashions of the time :

:

Swift and resistless through the land he passed,
Like that bold Greek who did the East subdue,
And made to battle such heroic haste

As if on wings of victory he flew.

He fought secure of fortune as of fame,

Till by new maps the island might be shown
Of conquests, which he strewed where'er he came,
Thick as the galaxy with stars is sown.

His palms, though under weights they did not stand,
Still thrived; no winter did his laurels fade.
Heaven in his portrait showed a workman's hand,
And drew it perfect, yet without a shade.

Peace was the prize of all his toil and care,
Which war had banished, and did now restore :
Bologna's walls so mounted in the air

To seat themselves more surely than before.

An impartial contemporary critic, if he could have anticipated the methods of a later school of criticism, might have had some difficulty in deciding whether the masterly

plainness, directness, and vigour of the best lines here ought or ought not to excuse the conceit about the palms and the weights, and the fearfully far-fetched piece of fancy history about Bologna. Such a critic, if he had had the better part of discretion, would have decided in the affirmative. There were not three poets then living who could have written the best lines of the Heroic Stanzas, and what is more, those lines were not in the particular manner of either of the poets who, as far as general poetical merit goes, might have written them. But the Restoration, which for reasons given already I must hold to have been genuinely welcome to Dryden, and not a mere occasion of profitable coat-turning, brought forth some much less ambiguous utterances. Astræa Redux (1660), a panegyric on the coronation (1661), a poem to Lord Clarendon (1662), a few still shorter pieces of the complimentary kind to Dr. Charleton (1663), to the Duchess of York (1665), and to Lady Castlemaine (166-?), lead up to Annus Mirabilis at the beginning of 1667, the crowning effort of Dryden's first poetical period, and his last before the long absorption in purely dramatic occupations which lasted. till the Popish Plot and its controversies evoked from him the expression of hitherto unsuspected powers.

These various pieces do not amount in all to more than two thousand lines, of which nearly two-thirds belong to Annus Mirabilis. But they were fully sufficient to show that a new poetical power had arisen in the land, and their qualities, good and bad, might have justified the anticipation that the writer would do better and better work as he grew older. All the pieces enumerated, with the exception of Annus Mirabilis, are in the heroic couplet, and their versification is of such a kind that the relapse into the quatrain in the longer poem is not a little surprising.

But nothing is more characteristic of Dryden than the extremely tentative character of his work, and he had doubtless not yet satisfied himself that the couplet was suitable for narrative poems of any length, notwithstanding the mastery over it which he must have known himself to have attained in his short pieces. The very first lines of Astræa Redux show this mastery clearly enough.

Now with a general peace the world was blest,

While ours, a world divided from the rest,

A dreadful quiet felt, and worser far
Than arms, a sullen interval of war.

Here is already the energy divine for which the author was to be famed, and, in the last line at least, an instance of the varied cadence and subtly-disposed music which were, in his hands, to free the couplet from all charges of monotony and tameness. But almost immediately there is a falling off. The poet goes off into an unnecessary simile preceded by the hackneyed and clumsy "thus," a simile quite out of place at the opening of a poem, and disfigured by the too famous, "an horrid stillness first invades the ear," which if it has been extravagantly blamed -and it seems to me that it has-certainly will go near to be thought a conceit. But we have not long to wait for another chord that announces Dryden :

For his long absence Church and State did groan,
Madness the pulpit, faction seized the throne.
Experienced age in deep despair was lost

To see the rebel thrive, the loyal crost.

Youth, that with joys had unacquainted been,
Envied grey hairs that once good days had seen.
We thought our sires, not with their own content,
Had, ere we came to age, our portion spent.

Whether the matter of this is suitable for poetry or not is

one of those questions on which doctors will doubtless disagree to the end of the chapter. But even when we look back through the long rows of practitioners of the couplet who have succeeded Dryden, we shall, I think, hardly find one who is capable of such masterly treatment of the form, of giving to the phrase a turn at once so clear and so individual, of weighting the verse with such dignity, and at the same time winging it with such lightly flying speed. The poem is injured by numerous passages introduced by the usual "as" and "thus" and "like," which were intended for ornaments, and which in fact simply disfigure. It is here and there charged, after the manner of the day, with inappropriate and clumsy learning, and with doubtful Latinisms of expression. But it is redeemed by such lines as

When to be God's anointed was his crime;

as the characteristic gibe at the Covenant insinuated by the description of the Guisean League

As holy and as Catholic as ours;

as the hit at the

Polluted nest

Whence legion twice before was dispossest;

as the splendid couplet on the British Amphitrite

Proud her returning prince to entertain
With the submitted fasces of the main.

Such lines as these must have had for the readers of 1660 the attraction of a novelty which only very careful students of the literature of the time can understand now. The merits of Astrea Redux must of course not be judged by the reader's acquiescence in its sentiments. But let