THE RESTORATION. We have now reached the year of that event which occupied so many lyres and awakened so many darts and flames in poetic bosoms, namely, the restitution of the monarchy, the return of the exiled Stuart as King Charles the Second. This date, 1660, is usually given in text-books of literature as marking the commencement of the change to the classical style. As well might we call the platform of the railway-station at St Lazare the point of division between England and France. In 1660 the journey was complete, the change was made. Not one of the odes and pæans which welcomed the Stuarts back, but proved, by the internal evidence of each of its lines, that the old order of poetry had given way to the new. Perhaps not in all cases was the panegyrist conscious of his voice; sometimes he may even have supposed himself to greet Charles II. in the accents dear to the court of Charles I. In vain; the new form compelled him, the new order of ideas inspired him. That worthy Conservative woman, the Matchless Orinda, with every desire to be writing in the good old Royalist way as Donne and Herrick wrote, snatches her lyre and strikes the rebellious strings. This is the sort of music which they utter : "You justly may forsake a land which you Shot all her poison'd arrows here, or hence1." We need no more; we see that Waller has bewitched her, that she is totally ensnared. It may be that my readers have been awaiting the introduction of a great name into this discourse, which hitherto has scarcely been mentioned. I may be asked, where is Dryden, the accredited source and leader of the classical movement? My answer is, that in tracing the rise of that movement, and in examining its early development, I do not discover the influence of Dryden. In guiding the movement when it was once organized, in lending to it the force and prestige of his commanding genius, in forging the distich anew and in directing it as a missile is directed by a powerful machine, in all this Dryden took a foremost part, but he was not an inventor or a primal force in the new 1 To the Queen Mother's Majesty, 11 1-4. Jan. 1, 1661. scheme. When in the course of events he began to follow it, he was long attracted to the most volatile part of it, the heresy of Cowley. A glance at dates is here most valuable. Dryden was born in 1631, more than a quarter of a century later than Waller; he was but a child when the epochmaking volumes of the school were published, and when at last he began himself to be a poet,-for he was slow and laborious in development,-he came forward as the most absurd of Marinists. His lines on the death of Lord Hastings have supplied matter for mirth to critic after critic; the terrible series of similes by which the symptoms of the smallpox are described, are well known, and offensive beyond measure. Here is a less hackneyed fragment, in which Dryden plays with the notion that Lord Hastings' death was premature: "Thus fades the oak in the spring, in the blade the corn, Or to hang an antiquary's rooms withal." In taste, in language, above all in versification, this belongs to the first decades of the century; it is almost Elizabethan. Dryden's next departure was in the direction of Davenant, whose Gondibert affected him to the exclusion of almost every other influence in the Heroic Stanzas of 16591, and in the Annus Mirabilis of 1666. In his Astræa Redux he is feeling after the new prosody, with only doubtful success, and his verse is first worthy to be named with that of Waller and Denham in the Coronation Panegyric. But by this time the Restoration was already a part of history, and we feel that Dryden, as Eusden said, "Faintly distinguished in his thirtieth year," is by no means to be counted among those who led the van of classicism. Of course a man so intelligent and so worldly as he would not long resist the dominant stream of his generation. Milton, awakening from his long indifference to verse, might disdain to observe the change in taste which had taken place; but Dryden was of a temperament less sublime and less austere, and his finger was ever upon the pulse of public feeling, guiding it, indeed, in one sense, but none the less directed by it in another. It is time, however, if Dryden is excluded from our attention in this place, for us to turn to those 1 It is noticeable that in this, his earliest publication, Dryden was associated with Sprat and with the veteran Waller. |