With nature's mother wit, and arts unknown before.
Let old Timotheus yield the prize,

Or both divide the crown:

He raised a mortal to the skies;
She drew an angel down.

Dryden's dramatic pieces number about thirtytragedies, comedies, tragi-comedies and operas. The earliest was The Wild Gallant, a comedy (1662), the latest, Love Triumphant, a tragi-comedy (1694). The larger, and by far the best part of his prose writings are of a critical character.

ON SHAKESPEARE.

Shakespeare was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily; when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it, too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation. He was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is everywhere alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid-his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him; no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets, "Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.” The consideration of this made Mr. Hales of Eton say that there was no subject of which any poet ever writ but he would produce it much better done in Shakespeare; and however others are now generally preferred before him, yet the age wherein he lived, which had contemporaries with him, Fletcher and Johnson, never equalled them to him in their esteem; and in the last king's court, when Ben's reputation was at its highest, Sir John Suckling, and VOL. VIII.-23

with him the greater part of the courtiers, set our Shakespeare far above him.- Essay on Dramatic Poesy.

On the last day of April, 1700, the Postboy announced that "John Dryden, Esq., the famous poet, lies a-dying;" and he died at three o'clock on the next morning. The body was embalmed, and lay in state for several days at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. The pompous public funeral took place in Westminster Abbey on May 13, the body was interred in the Poets' Corner, by the side of the graves of Chaucer and Cowley. It was not until twenty years afterward that a modest monument was put up at the expense of Lord Mulgrave, afterward Earl of Buckinghamshire.

U CHAILLU, PAUL BELLONI, a Franco-American explorer; born at Paris, July 31, 1835; died at St. Petersburg, Russia, April 30, 1903. His father had established himself as a trader on the West Coast of Africa, where Paul joined him at an early age. In 1852 he went to the United States, with a large cargo of ebony, and published several papers relating to the Gaboon country. In 1855 he returned to Africa and spent three or four years in exploring the almost unknown region lying about two degrees on each side of the equator. He returned to America in 1859, taking with him a large collection of curiosities, stuffed birds, and animals, among which were several skins and skeletons of the gorilla, a huge ape. In 1861 he published an account of these expe

ditions under the title Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. The truthfulness of his narrative was sharply questioned by some English savants; and to vindicate himself Du Chaillu went again to Equatorial Africa, and travelled there for two years (1863-65). He returned to America, and in 1867 published A Journey to Ashango-Land, and Further Penetration into Equatorial Africa. During the next twelve years he resided in America, having been naturalized as a citizen of the United States. He delivered lectures on his travels and prepared several small books, in which many of his experiences are related for juvenile readers: Stories of the GorillaCountry (1868); Wild Life under the Equator (1869); Lost in the Jungle (1869); My Apingi Kingdom (1870); The Country of the Dwarfs (1871). Subsequently he made several Winter and Summer tours in Sweden, Norway, Lapland, and Finland, an account of which he published in 1881, in two large volumes, entitled The Land of the Midnight Sun. He also wrote The Viking Age (1889); Ivor the Viking (1893); The Land of the Long Night (1900), and In African Forests and Jungles (1903).

THE FIRST GORILLA.

We started early, and pushed for the most dense and impenetrable part of the forest, in hopes to find the very home of the beast I so much wished to shoot. Hour after hour we traveled, and yet no signs of gorilla; only the everlasting little chattering monkeys and not many of these and occasionally birds. Suddenly Miengai uttered a little cluck with his tongue, which is the native's way of showing that something is stirring and that a sharp lookout is necessary. Presently I noticed, ahead of us seemingly, a noise as if of some one breaking down branches or twigs