speaks, we seem to hear the voice of Milton's own spirit, subdued to a gentle melancholy:

My race of glory run, and race of shame;

And I shall shortly be with them that rest."

Before passing from this subject, let me briefly notice the service which Milton rendered to English poetry in that short series of short poems-his English` Sonnets, which Doctor Johnson was disposed to dismiss with contempt. Heretofore that form of verse had been appropriated almost exclusively to the expression of love or some tender emotion; but Milton showed that it could be made a high heroic utterance, as in that one on the massacre of the Piedmontese, which is a solemn cry to Heaven for vengeance that seems to echo over the Alps. This service in disclosing the hidden powers of the sonnet has been acknowledged by Wordsworth:

"When a damp

Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand

The Thing became a trumpet, whence he blew
Soul-animating strains-alas, too few!"

And Landor has finely put this page of literary history into three lines, (so much can a few words do in a master's hand!) when speaking of Milton, he says,

"Few his words, but strong,

And sounding through all ages and all climes,

He caught the sonnet from the dainty hand

Of Love, who cried to lose it; and he gave the notes

To Glory,"

Within the same twelve months in which Milton died, occurred the death of the Earl of Clarendon, who like Milton in this, that in a season of political adversity he sought employment in letters, gave to English prose what may be considered the first of the great English historiesthat wonderous portrait gallery, the "History of the Rebellion."

To the English prose of the same period belongs a very different work-associated also with the calamities of authors-the "Pilgrim's Progress," the great sacred prose fiction of our literature, which justifies the title given to John Bunyan by Disraeli, who calls him "the Spenser of the people." It is one of the few books which, translated into the various languages of Europe, has gained an audience as large as Christendom. In his own country, he caught the ear of the people by using the people's own speech-genuine, homely, hearty English-at

the time when the language was becoming vitiated, his simple rhetoric being as he describes it in rude verse:

"Thine only way,

Before them all, is to say out thy say

In thine own native language, which no man
Now useth, nor with ease dissemble can."

But the author who is most truly to be looked on as the representative of the latter part of the seventeenth century is Dryden, the laureate of the court of Charles the Second. That degenerate era is reflected both in the character of Dryden's writings and in their quick-earned popularity. Content to write for his own age alone, rather than for all after-time, a brief popularity has been followed by the utter neglect -— a wise neglect—of a very large portion of his voluminous productions. His genius did not raise itself above his times, but dwelling there, a habitation streaming with a thousand vices, his garland and singingrobes were polluted by the contagion.

For wellnigh fifty years Dryden was contemporary with Milton, living in the same city much of that time, and in occasional intercourse; and I cannot but picture to myself how different might have been the career of the young poet, how much purer and nobler the issues of his imagination, how much happier and more genial his life, and how far more honoured his memory, if, instead of setting himself in sympathy with the dominant influences and fashions of the day, and serving them, he had sought communion with the solemn solitude of Milton! How noble a spectacle it would have been for after-ages to contemplate the older bard, blind, poor, neglected, and with a grieved but unconquered spirit, the younger poet seated at the old man's feet, making himself a partner in his fallen fortunes, honouring and cherishing him, and at the same time fortifying his own heart, and enriching his own imagination! It would have been a filial piety, such as Milton gladly would have rendered to Spenser-homage such as Spenser would have paid to Chaucer.

But the soul of Dryden was not cast in heroic mould, nor was it susceptible of that purity, and innocence, and ardour of affection which is often associated with heroism. Dazzled by the prize of a speedy popularity, and losing sight of the poet's high spiritual ministry of "allaying the perturbations of the mind, and setting the affections in right tune," he turned to the base office of pampering the vices of an adulterate generation. Even when his youthful enthusiasm was fired with the ambition of composing an epic poem on King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (the same subject which had

attracted Milton's young imagination), the high design was swept from his thoughts by the corruption of the times-sacrificed to the ignominious thraldom he was held in by patrons who, exacting unworthy service, would not suffer him to put on the incorruption of a great poet's glory. In Walter Scott's indignant lines:

"Dryden, in immortal strain,

Had raised the table-round again,
But that a ribald king and court,

Bade him toil on, to make them sport;
Demanded for their niggard pay,

Fit for their souls, a looser lay,
Licentious satires, song and play;

The world defrauded of the high design,

Profaned the God-given strength, and marred the lofty line."

When we look at Dryden's vigorous command of language, in prose and verse, the poetic energy in those departments in which his genius moved most freely, we may well conceive that a higher region of authorship was in his reach, had he united with intellectual cultivation that moral discipline, which no endowment can dispense with, without grevious peril to its powers. In the following passage from his Edipus, there is a certain tone of reflection and imagery which is not without resemblance to the thought and language of Shakspeare:

"Ha! again that scream of woe!

Thrice have I heard, thrice since the morning dawn'd
It hollow'd loud, as if my guardian spirit

6

Called from some vaulted mansion, Edipus!"

Or is it but the work of melancholy?

When the sun sets, shadows that showed at noon
But small, appear most long and terrible;

So when we think fate hovers o'er our heads,

Owls, ravens, crickets, seem the watch of death;
Nature's worst vermin scare her godlike sons.
Echoes, the very leavings of a voice,
Grow babbling ghosts, and call us to our graves:
Each mole-hill thought swells to a huge Olympus,
While we, fantastic dreamers, heave and puff,
And sweat with an imagination's weight;
As if, like Atlas, with these mortal shoulders

We could sustain the burden of the world."

That one fine stanza in the Ode for St. Cecelia's Day, shows what:

lyric grandeur Dryden might have attained to:

"What passion cannot Music raise and quell?
When Tubal struck the chorded shell,

His listening brethren stood around,

And wondering, on their faces fell,

To worship that celestial sound;

Less than a god they thought there could not dwell,
Within the hollow of that shell,

That spoke so sweetly and so well."

In no respect did Dryden more rashly and fatally abandon the authority of his great predecessors, than in his attempt to introduce the rhymed tragedies. The introduction of rhyme into the dramatic poetry was a false substitute for that exquisite blank-verse which, in the hand of a great master, is at once so imaginative and natural, that it sounds like an ordinary speech idealized-the dialect of daily life in its highest perfection. But the rhymed dramatic dialect stood in no such near and truthful relation to the realities of life, as I may show, perhaps, by a reference to a variety of language occurring in Shakspeare. It will be remembered that the chief and best reputation of Dryden lies in this, that he enlarged the domain of English poetry by the production of the most nervous satire in verse that English literature had yet known. It has been said by Milton, in one of his prose works, that "Satire, as it was born of a tragedy, so ought it to resemble its parentage, to strike high, and adventure dangerously, at the most eminent eras among the greatest persons." Dryden's satire had this merit. It struck at Buckingham. It was also employed on the unworthy versifiers and scribblers, for authorship had degenerated to a low craft, with all its worst enviousness and meanness, in dismal contrast with that frank and hearty intercourse which distinguished the companionship of authors in an earlier generation, living in genial fellowship, and weaving even their inspirations together in partnership that was a brotherhood.

A literary life like Dryden's closed with an old age without dignity and without happiness-the remnant of life, worn out in his Egyptian bondage, embittered both by neglect and the memory of talents misspent in the service of a sensual and sordid king and corrupt courtiers. There was nothing of the grandeur of Milton's lonely old age; but, in the period of Dryden's desolation, we may trace the chastening of adversity in some strains of a higher mood, as in those admirable lines in which he tells of his effort at Christian forbearance when provoked to resent and retort. This passage is worthy of all praise, especially when we remember his power of satire, his unimpaired poetic invective, now controlled by a higher principle:

I

• If joys hereafter must be purchased here
With loss of all that mortals hold so dear,
Then welcome infamy and public shame,
And, last, a long farewell to worldly fame!
"Tis said with ease; but, oh, how hardly tried
By haughty souls to human honour tied!
Oh, sharp, convulsive pangs of agonizing pride!
Down then, thou rebel, never more to rise!

And what thou didst, and dost so dearly prize,
That fame, that darling fame, make that thy sacrifice,
'Tis nothing thou hast given; then add thy tears
For a long race of unrepenting years,—

"Tis nothing yet, yet all thou hast to give:

Then add those maybe years thou hast to live;

Yet nothing still: then, poor and naked, come,

Thy Father will receive his unthrift home,

And thy blest Saviour's blood discharge the mighty sin."

Hind and Panther, part 3.

The death of Dryden took place in the year 1700, and we pass into the literature of the eighteenth century, the first part of which is not unfrequently styled the Augustan age of Queen Anne. It was Augustan in that men of letters were basking in the sunshine of aristocratic patronage, and a courtly refinement succeeded to that grossness of manners and of speech which had disgraced society in the years just previous. Writers were no longer plunging in the mire of that obscenity which defiled the times of Charles the Second; but they were often walking in the dry places of an infidel philosophy. The religious agitation of the middle of the previous century had sunk down from the high-wrought power of fanaticism, first, into indecent profanity, and then, by degrees, into a more decorous, but cold, selfcomplacent scepticism. Enthusiasm of all kinds had burned out, and there was a low tone of thought and feeling in church and state-in the people, and, of consequence, in literature. There was no great British statesman-I mean no genuine, magnanimous statesman-from the time of Strafford, and Clarendon, and Falkland, and the great republican statesmen of the seventeenth century, down to a century later, when the first William Pitt, "the great Commoner," breathed a spirit of magnanimity once more into British politics.

The prose literature developed, in the reign of Queen Anne, a new agency of social improvement in the periodical literature, destined to acquire such unbounded influence in later times in the newspaper press and the leading Reviews. There is much to show that a more correct