and it is manifest how these provocations, these manners of prostitutes, that interchange of exchanges and surprises, that carnival of rendezvous and suppers, the impudence of the scenes only stopping short of physical demonstration, those songs with their double meaning, that coarse slang shouted loudly and replied to amidst the tableaux vivants, all that stage-imitation of orgie, must have stirred up the innermost feelings of the habitual practisers of intrigue. And what is more, the theatre gave its sanction to their manners. By representing nothing but vice, it authorised their vices. Authors laid it down as a rule, that all women were impudent hussies, and that all men were brutes. Debauchery in their hands became a matter of course, nay more, a matter of good taste; they profess it. Rochester and Charles II. could quit the theatre highly edified; more convinced than they were before that virtue was only a pretence, the pretence of clever rascals who wanted to sell themselves dear.

VII.

1

Dryden, who was amongst the first to adopt this view of the matter, did not adopt it heartily. A kind of hazy mist, the relic of the former age, still floated over his plays. His wealthy imagination half bound him to the comedy of romance. At one time he adapted Milton's Paradise, Shakspeare's Tempest, and Troilus and Cressida. Another time he imitated, in Love in a Nunnery, in Marriage à la Mode, in The Mock Astrologer, the imbroglios and surprises of the Spanish stage. Sometimes he displays the sparkling images

VOL. II.

1 His Wild Gallant dates from 1662.

2 A

and lofty metaphors of the older national poets, sometimes the affected figures of speech and cavilling wit of Calderon and Lope de Vega. He mingles the tragic and the humorous, the overthrow of thrones and the ordinary description of manners. But in this awkward compromise the poetic spirit of ancient comedy disappears; only the dress and the gilding remain.

The new characters are gross and immoral, with the instincts of a lackey beneath the dress of a lord; which is the more shocking, because by it Dryden contradicts his own talents, being at bottom grave and a poet; he follows the fashion, and not his own mind; he plays the libertine with deliberate forethought, to adapt himself to the taste of the day. He plays the blackguard awkwardly and dogmatically; he is impious without enthusiasm, and in measured periods. One of his gallants cries:

"Is not love love without a priest and altars?

The temples are inanimate, and know not

What vows are made in them; the priest stands ready
For his hire, and cares not what hearts he couples;
Love alone is marriage."
"12

Hippolita says, "I wished the ball might be kept perpetually in our cloister, and that half the handsome

1 "We love to get our mistresses, and purr over them, as cats do over mice, and let them get a little way; and all the pleasure is to pat them back again.”—Mock Astrologer, ii. 1.

Wildblood says to his mistress: "I am none of those unreasonable lovers that propose to themselves the loving to eternity. A month is commonly my stint." And Jacintha replies: "Or would not a fortnight serve our turn ?"-Mock Astrologer, ii. 1.

Frequently one would think Dryden was translating Hobbes, by the harshness of his jests.

Love in a Nunnery, ii. 3.

1

nuns in it might be turned to men, for the sake of the
other." Dryden has no tact or contrivance. In his
Spanish Friar, the queen, a good enough woman, tells
Torrismond that she is going to have the old dethroned
king put to death, in order to marry him, Torrismond,
more at her ease. Presently she is informed that the
murder is completed.
What hinders now," says she,
"but that the holy priest, in secret joins our mutual
vows? and then this night, this happy night, is yours
and mine."2 Side by side with this sensual tragedy, a
comic intrigue, pushed to the most indecent familiarity,
exhibits the love of a cavalier for a married woman, who
in the end turns out to be his sister. Dryden dis-
covers nothing in this situation to shock him. He
has lost the commonest repugnances of natural modesty.
Translating any pretty broad play, Amphitryon for
instance, he finds it too pure; he strips off all its small
delicacies, and enlarges its very improprieties. Thus
Jupiter says:

"For kings and priests are in a manner bound,
For reverence sake, to be close hypocrites."

"4

And he proceeds thereupon boldly to lay bare his own

1 Love in a Nunnery, iii. 3.

2 Spanish Friar, iii. 3. And jumbled up with the plot we keep meeting with political allusions. This is a mark of the time. Torrismond, to excuse himself from marrying the queen, says, "Power which in one age is tyranny is ripen'd in the next to true succession. She's in possession."-Spanish Friar, iv. 2.

3 Plautus' Amphitryon has been imitated by Dryden and Molière. Sir Walter Scott, in the introduction to Dryden's play, says: "He is, in general, coarse and vulgar, where Molière is witty; and where the Frenchman ventures upon a double meaning, the Englishman always contrives to make it a single one."-TR.

4 Amphitryon, i. 1.