if he would attend to it, in the three kingdoms." He died, January 1684-85, of a chill caught in attending a sermon. The Essay on Translated Verse at once made its mark in English literature. Dryden tells us, in his "Preface to the Second Miscellany," that before beginning his own translation he pondered how he might best act upon the principles laid down by Roscommon; and Addison speaks of the poem as one of the few successful attempts at didactic writing in verse before the Essay on Criticism. Johnson, indeed, is inclined to disparage its merits he says that its maxims are too obvious to be of much value; but in point of fact the critical observations it contains, like those of the Essay on Criticism, are saved from commonplace by the spirit with which they are expressed, showing that the writer has assimilated and made part of himself truths which are generally only repeated by rote. The Essay is written without much method, and the points on which it touches often extend far beyond the limits of the nominal subject: all the latter part, for example, is given up to the advocacy of blank verse as a metrical instrument superior to rhyme. In the studied terseness of antithetical expression, as well as in the management of the cæsura, Roscommon's verse is nearer to Pope's manner than to Dryden's, and sententious passages like the following from the Essay on Translated Verse show that the author of the Essay on Criticism evidently learned something from him as well as from Mulgrave: Immodest words admit of no defence, Truth still is one; Truth is divinely bright; Take pains the genuine meaning to explore, 1 Spectator, 253. 2 Lives of the Poets, "Roscommon." Yet be not blindly guided by the throng; Examine how your humour is inclined, You grow familiar, intimate, and fond; Your thoughts, your words, your styles, your souls agree, The elevation of Roscommon's mind and his superiority to his corrupt age are shown both in his sympathy with great poets like Virgil and Milton and in his clear perception of the connection between national art and national morality. The following lines from the Essay on Translated Verse in praise of Virgil may be taken as a good specimen of his style :— The delicacy of the nicest ear Finds nothing harsh or out of order there. True poets are the guardians of a state, And, when they fall, portend approaching Fate. For that which Rome to conquer did inspire Was not the Vestal, but the Muse's fire. Such were the leaders of politics and fashion in the Court Party. Opposed to them was the large body which, representing different institutions in the nation as a whole, had, for one reason or another, espoused the cause of the Parliament in the Civil War. It included men moderate in opinion, similar in stamp to Essex and Hampden in the previous generation, between whom and leaders like Hyde and Falkland on the side of the King there was no irreconcilable difference of principle. The interests it defended were the security of property, the independence of corporations, and-however the fact might for the moment be disguised-the liberties of the National Church. At the meeting of the Long Parliament these seemed to be the principles at stake; but as parliamentary debate rapidly swelled into civil war, the favourers of compromise naturally gave place to the men of extreme opinions; and the progress of what was at first entitled to call itself the Country Party was from ecclesiastical tyranny to political anarchy, and from that to military despotism. At the Restoration the party comprised all that large section of the nation which had been brought over by the logic of events to the side of hereditary monarchy. But these, in consequence of the discredit of the parliamentary cause, were for the moment without leaders, and were further weakened by their association with political idealists, sectarian agitators, and Fifth-Monarchy fanatics. All that they could do was to watch with sullen anger the excesses of the Royalist reaction; but the volume of their brooding discontent afforded admirable materials for any intriguing statesman who, for his own purposes, might seek to translate the suppressed grievances of the nation into constitutional language. No better image of the elements composing the Country Party at the period of the Popish and Rye-House Plots can be desired than Dryden's brilliant description of them in Absalom and Achitophel; nor indeed can the fortunes of the party from the Restoration up to that point, and onward to the Revolution of 1688, be more intelligently studied than in the whole history of the great poet whose genius must form the subject of the next chapter. VOL. III 2 I CHAPTER XVI THE RESTORATION JOHN DRYDEN AND THE SATIRISTS OF THE COUNTRY PARTY: ANDREW MARVELL: JOHN OLDHAM JOHN DRYDEN was the eldest son of Erasmus Dryden (or as the family, an old one, then generally wrote the name, Driden) of Blakesley, near Tichmarsh, and of Mary, daughter of Henry Pickering, Rector (after the poet's birth) of Aldwinckle All Saints. On both sides his parents were of the Puritan connection. He was born, according to the inscription on his monument, in 1632,' and was educated first at Oundle School and then under Busby at Westminster. Thence he proceeded to Cambridge, where he was elected Scholar of the College, on the Westminster Foundation, on 2nd October 1650. He took his B.A. degree in January 1653-54, nothing of any interest being recorded of his life as an undergraduate, beyond the fact that he was "discommonsed" for a fortnight for disobedience and contumacy. In June 1654 his father died, leaving him two-thirds of his little estate at Blakesley, and after going there to settle his affairs, he returned to Cambridge, where he resided for the next few years, without, however, proceeding to his M.A. degree in that university. 1 Other accounts put his birthday on 9th August 1631: from his own statement in a letter addressed to his cousin, Mrs. Steward, he was sixty-seven in March 1688-89. "I am still," he says, "drudging at a Book of Miscellanies, which I hope will be well enough; if otherwise, three score and seven may be pardoned" (Scott's Dryden, vol. xviii. p. 153). But of course this may only mean that he was in his sixty-seventh year. Beyond the crude lines on the death of Lord Hastings, written while he was still at Westminster in Cowley's manner, none of Dryden's verse compositions up to the time of his leaving Cambridge have been preserved. The period was not favourable to the production of poetry of the fanciful and metaphysical order in which his early tastes had been trained. This had vanished for the time with the Court itself, and the verse written during the Protectorate-such as Andrew Marvell's Horatian Ode and the sonnets of Milton-exhibits a classical severity of style adapted to the stern character of Cromwell. Something of this manner, mixed with metaphysical hyperboles, quibbles, and puns, appears in the first published poem of Dryden's maturity, the Heroic Stanzas written after Cromwell's funeral in 1658 : When such heroic virtue heaven sets out, From this high spring our foreign conquests flow, He made us freemen of the Continent, And taught him first in Belgian walks to roar. That old unquestioned pirate of the land, Proud Rome, with dread the fate of Dunkirk heard, With the Restoration the metaphysical style revived in a new form. All the invention which in the old Provençal days had been employed in the exaltation of the beloved mistress was now absorbed in' the flattery of the King. The poets took for their models the Scriptores Panegyrici, who flourished in the Roman Empire between the reigns of Trajan and 1 Alexander VII. being then Pope. |