any one read the following passage without thinking of the treaty of Dover and the closed exchequer, of Madam Carwell's twelve thousand a year, and Lord Russell's scaffold, and he assuredly will not fail to recognise their beauty :

Methinks I see those crowds on Dover's strand,
Who in their haste to welcome you to land
Choked up the beach with their still-growing store,
And made a wilder torrent on the shore:

While, spurred with eager thoughts of past delight,
Those who had seen you court a second sight,
Preventing still your steps, and making haste
To meet you often wheresoe'er you past.
How shall I speak of that triumphant day
When you renewed the expiring pomp of May ?
A month that owns an interest in your name;
You and the flowers are its peculiar claim.
That star, that at your birth shone out so bright
It stained the duller sun's meridian light,
Did once again its potent fires renew,
Guiding our eyes to find and worship you.

The extraordinary art with which the recurrences of the you and your—in the circumstances naturally recited with a little stress of the voice-are varied in position so as to give a corresponding variety to the cadence of the verse, is perhaps the chief thing to be noted here. But a comparison with even the best couplet verse of the time will show many other excellences in it. I am aware that this style of minute criticism has gone out of fashion, and that the variations of the position of a pronoun have terribly little to do with "criticism of life;" but as I am dealing with a great English author whose main distinction is to have reformed the whole formal part of English prose and English poetry, I must, once for all, take leave to follow the only road open to me to show what he actually did.

The other smaller couplet-poems which have been

mentioned are less important than Astræa Redux, not merely in point of size, but because they are later in date The piece on the coronation, however, contains lines and passages equal to any in the longer poem, and it shows very happily the modified form of conceit which Dryden, throughout his life, was fond of employing, and which, employed with his judgment and taste, fairly escapes the charges usually brought against "Clevelandisms," while it helps to give to the heroic the colour and picturesqueness which after the days of Pope it too often lacked. Such is the fancy about the postponement of the ceremony

Had greater haste these sacred rites prepared
Some guilty months had in our triumph shared.
But this untainted year is all your own,

Your glories may without our crimes be shown.

And such an exceedingly fine passage in the poem to Clarendon which is one of the most finished pieces of Dryden's early versification

Our setting sun from his declining seat

Shot beams of kindness on you, not of heat:
And, when his love was bounded in a few
That were unhappy that they might be true,
Made you the favourite of his last sad times,
That is, a sufferer in his subjects' crimes:
Thus those first favours you received were sent,
Like Heaven's rewards, in earthly punishment.
Yet Fortune, conscious of your destiny,
Even then took care to lay you softly by,

And wrapt your fate among her precious things,
Kept fresh to be unfolded with your King's.
Shown all at once, you dazzled so our eyes

As new-born Pallas did the god's surprise;

When springing forth from Jove's new-closing wound,
She struck the warlike spear into the ground;
Which sprouting leaves did suddenly enclose
And peaceful olives shaded as they rose.

For once the mania for simile and classical allusion has not led the author astray here, but has furnished him with a very happy and legitimate ornament. The only fault. in the piece is the use of "did," which Dryden never wholly discarded, and which is perhaps occasionally allowable enough.

The remaining poems require no very special remark, though all contain evidence of the same novel and unmatched mastery over the couplet and its cadence. The author, however, was giving himself more and more to the dramatic studies which will form the subject of the next chapter, and to the prose criticisms which almost from the first he associated with those studies. But the events of the year 1666 tempted him once more to indulge in non-dramatic work, and the poem of Annus Mirabilis was the result. It seems to have been written, in part at least, at Lord Berkshire's seat of Charlton, close to Malmesbury, and was prefaced by a letter to Sir Robert Howard. Dryden appears to have lived at Charlton during the greater part of 1665 and 1666, the plague and fire years. He had been driven from London, not merely by dread of the pestilence, but by the fact that his ordinary occupation was gone owing to the closing of the play-houses, and he evidently occupied himself at Charlton with a good deal of literary work, including his essay on dramatic poetry, his play of the Maiden Queen, and Annus Mirabilis itself. This last was published very early in 1667, and seems to have been successful. Pepys bought it on the 2nd of February, and was fortunately able to like it better than he did Hudibras. "A very good poem," the Clerk of the Acts of the Navy writes it down. It may be mentioned in passing that during this same stay at Charlton Dryden's eldest son Charles was born.

D

Annus Mirabilis consists of 304 quatrains on the Gondibert model, reasons for the adoption of which Dryden gives (not so forcibly perhaps as is usual with him) in the before-mentioned letter to his brother-in-law. He speaks of rhyme generally with less respect than he was soon to show, and declares that he has adopted the quatrain because he judges it "more noble and full of dignity" than any other form he knows. The truth seems to be that he was still to a great extent under the influence of Davenant, and that Gondibert as yet retained sufficient prestige to make its stanza act as a not unfavourable advertisement of poems written in it. With regard to the nobility and dignity of this stanza, it may safely be said that Annus Mirabilis itself, the best poem ever written therein, killed it by exposing its faults. It is indeed, at least when the rhymes of the stanzas are unconnected, a very bad metre for the purpose. For it is chargeable with more than the disjointedness of the couplet, without the possibility of relief, while on the other hand the quatrains have not, like the Spenserian stave or the ottava rima, sufficient bulk to form units in themselves, and to include within them varieties of harmony. Despite these drawbacks, however, Dryden produced a very fine poem in Ammus Mirabilis, though I am not certain that even its best passages equal those cited from the couplet pieces. At any rate in this poem the characteristics of the master in what may be called his poetical adolescence are displayed to the fullest extent. The weight and variety of his line, his abundance of illustration and fancy, his happy turns of separate phrase, and his singular faculty of bending to poetical uses the most refractory names and things, all make themselves fully felt here. On the other hand there is still an undue tendency to conceit and exuberance of simile. The famous lines

These fight like husbands, but like lovers those;

These fain would keep, and those more fain enjoy;

are followed in the next stanza by a most indubitably "metaphysical" statement that

Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall
And some by aromatic splinters die.

This cannot be considered the happiest possible means of informing us that the Dutch fleet was laden with spices and magots. Such puerile fancies are certainly unworthy of a poet who could tell how

The mighty ghosts of our great Harrys rose

And armed Edwards looked with anxious eyes;

and who, in the beautiful simile of the eagle, has equalled the Elizabethans at their own weapons. I cannot think, however, admirable as the poem is in its best passages (the description of the fire for instance), that it is technically the equal of Astræa Redux. The monotonous recurrence of the same identical cadence in each stanzaa recurrence which even Dryden's art was unable to prevent, and which can only be prevented by some such interlacements of rhymes and enjambements of sense as those which Mr. Swinburne has successfully adopted in Laus Veneris-injures the best passages The best of all is undoubtedly the following:

In this deep quiet, from what source unknown,
Those seeds of fire their fatal birth disclose;
And first few scattering sparks about were blown,
Big with the flames that to our ruin rose.

Then in some close-pent room it crept along
And, smouldering as it went, in silence fed;
Till the infant monster, with devouring strong,
Walked boldly upright with exalted head.