Milton's blank verse is the stateliest, most variously tuneful,

and most relieved by varieties of pause, most sonorous with the

mysterious music of ancient names. All in this is perfect. The

verse-paragraphs--the opening paragraph is of thirty lines--could only

be arrayed by Milton. We do not often meet what seems to us a bathos,

as when Satan, fallen from heaven, "views the dismal situation". After

viewing the dismal situation Satan is himself again:--

All is not lost; the unconquerable will,

And study of revenge, immortal hate,

And courage never to submit or yield,

And what is else not to be overcome,

That glory never shall His wrath or might

Extort from me.

Milton is not pedantic, but as Homer has his catalogue of ships and

heroes, Milton outdoes him with _his_ catalogue of fallen angels, gods

of the nations, Moloch, Chemosh, Ashtoreth, Dagon, Osiris, Isis, Horns,

"the Ionian gods of Javan's issue," and they

who with Saturn old

Fled over Adria to the Hesperian fields,

And o'er the Celtic roam'd the utmost isles.

Milton's knowledge was equal to every demand, and his were

the unconquerable will

And courage never to submit or yield.

But, magnificent as he is, Milton has always his eye on that Achæan

"father of the rest," and he copies Homer's bridal-bed of Zeus and Hera

under foot the violet,

Crocus and hyacinth with rich inlay

Broidered the ground.

"And beneath them the divine earth sent forth fresh new grass, and dewy

lotus, crocus, and hyacinth." But Milton gives twenty lines where Homer

gives four.

In comparing the two greatest of epic poets--the first, Homer, with

the last, Milton,--we observe that each sums up in himself the whole

thought and experience, and the poetic expression of a world that

lies behind him. Each "takes his own where he finds it," "makes

all men's wit his own," as Ben Jonson said, in an invidious sense,

of Shakespeare. Homer has his debts to old nameless poets; Milton

displays his debts to Homer, and to Greek, Roman, and Celtic poets

and historians, to Anglo-Saxons, Dutch, Italians, to all song and all

learning, and all that he takes he transfigures, and rounds into a

harmonious whole, the immortal Epic.

"Paradise Lost" was published in 1667, four years after Milton's

third marriage. It is not apparent that he was in any danger from the

Government of the Restoration. Charles II avowed to Clarendon, in a

scribbled note now in the Bodleian, his constitutional dislike of

hanging men. The book did not sell badly for a Puritan poem produced

while the revel of the company of Comus was maddest, and, when Milton

died, Dryden, the literary dictator, gave due praise to the greatest of

literary epics, the loftiest, the most splendidly adorned; and poets

of the eighteenth century adored the style which became ridiculous, or

dull, in their imitations.

In "Paradise Regained," a sequel which Mr. Ellwood, a Quaker, reports

himself to have suggested to Milton, the great qualities of the poet

are unimpaired. His verse is that which he alone could wield. His

sonorous catalogues, the music of names, the eagle glance over all the

kingdoms of earth and the glory of them, the triumph of the pure spirit

over carnal joys; nay the haunting memories of old romance,

Of fairy damsels, met in forest wide,

By knights of Logres, or of Lyones,

Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore,

these are all present, all are captivating.

It is natural to wish that, while young, Milton had followed his

dominant motive into Arthur's fairy land, and told the story of Galahad

and the Holy Grail: the purity that wins the Beatific Vision.

His "Samson Agonistes," in the severest style of Greek tragedy, sets

forth his own strength foiled by blindness, mocked by the dull triumphs

of the wanton crowd, and triumphant in death. The occasional unrhymed

verse of the chorus, not in decasyllabic lines, stands for Milton's

curious antipathy for rhyme, in which, when he chose, he excelled. The

subtleties and sophistries of Delilah express his idea of one type of

womanhood, the other type shines in the steadfast love of the repentant

Eve. The poem, with all the strength, has less of the charm of Milton

than his other great works.

Milton died in 1674; a poet who in one sense might be styled

"self-taught," for while he was so deeply read, his verse was no echo,

nor ever can be re-echoed. It is foolish but natural to appraise the

relative greatness of great poets, but, Shakespeare apart, it is to the

lonely Milton that the world has always awarded the crown of England's

greatest.

Samuel Butler.

If we could take the "God-gifted organ-voice of England," Milton, as

representing the anti-Royalist parties in the Civil War, and Samuel

Butler, with his "Hudibras," as the representative of those who stood

for Church and King, we could not hesitate in our choice between the

two factions. But Milton's was a soul that dwells apart, making its

own special music, while Butler produced a unique epic-satire on the

furies and follies of the once triumphant Presbyterians, Independents,

and a multitude of wild contending sects. Of Samuel Butler's life but

little is known. Born at Strensham in Worcestershire in 1612, he was

educated at the school of Worcester, but could not afford to proceed

to either university. He was clerk to a justice of the peace, was

later in the service of the Countess of Kent, where he had leisure for

study, at Wrest in Bedfordshire, during the war, and in the same shire

resided with Sir Samuel Luke, an active Presbyterian, who, however,

was opposed to the Regicide. Butler thus saw plenty of the people

whom, in 1663, he satirized in the first part of "Hudibras". That

Presbyterian Don Quixote, with his Independent Squire, Ralph, is the

wildest caricature of a type, not of an individual, and the adventures

of the pair are merely burlesque. The discussions and descriptions are

a tempest of ridicule falling on the fallen Cause in showers of jigging

and strangely rhymed octosyllabics, often so piquant that many of them

are still commonly quoted though the historic allusions are forgotten.

The associations of ideas in the author's mind bring out a learning as

multifarious as that of Burton or of Browne; the book was adored at

Court, not least by the King, and was pirated; all three parts were put

forth by Walton's publisher, Richard Marriot, though they may have been

little to the taste of the pacific author of "The Compleat Angler".

Butler seems to have been no roysterer, but a retired, bookish,

sardonic humorist, who "asked for nothing and got nothing". The

Court wits who sought his acquaintance did not find in him what they

expected. He certainly received no notable rewards: and later poets

found in him the type of neglected merit. He died in London in 1680.

After a war of Religion in which all the countless factions felt

certain of their own infallibility, Butler, a disillusioned wit, saw

nothing in the strife but what the saintly Leighton called "a scuffle

of drunken men in the dark". The Parliamentarians

Call fire and sword and desolation

A godly thorough Reformation,

Which always must be carried on,

And still be doing, never done,

As if Religion were intended

For nothing else but to be mended...

They with more care keep holy-day

The wrong, than others the right way,

for Christmas was kept as a fast, and Good Friday as a feast. The

whole poem has rather less of a constructed plot than "Tristram

Shandy"; and the strange rhymes--as of _flambeau_ to "damn'd

blow"--tickled the merry Cavaliers more than they amuse later

generations. What is "topical" in "Hudibras" is, of course, transitory,

but much of permanent and brilliant wit remains and is current in

quotations: for example,

Compound for sins they are inclined to

By damning those they have no mind to:

Still so perverse and opposite

As if they worshipped God for spite.

Butler wrote other things, the best is a dialogue in which Puss and Cat

mimic the conversations of the lovers in the "heroic" tragedies of the

Restoration.

[1] All five wrote dramas, but none was a professional playwright.

CHAPTER XXV.

RESTORATION THEATRE.

In England, when the King came to his own again (29 May, 1660) and the

reign of the Saints was ended, it was certain that the Theatre also

would come to her own. The stage had been bad enough, in verse, taste,

and manners, before the doors were closed in 1642. When the dramatic

Muse returned, she brought with her, like the man in the parable, seven

other devils worse than herself. The morals and tastes of the town and

Court were what, after so many years of Puritan sway, they might be

expected to be. They are most livelily delineated in the "Diary" of Mr.

Pepys; and the drama of the Restoration was their child, and worthy of

them. At first the stage was occupied by the older plays of Fletcher,

Jonson, and Shirley; no new names of note appear till Dryden's "Wild

Gallant" failed in 1663, and Sir George Etherege's "Love in a Tub"

prospered in 1664.

No age will be content with old plays, the mould and fashion of the

time must be exhibited. Pictures of the brutal mirth and the horseplay

of triumphant licence, of the flirtations and intrigues of lackeys and

lords and ladies, all genteel and witty _à la mode_ of the Court and

town as we know them from Pepys and Grammont, were presented.

Everything must be "new". As we hear of "the new morality," "the new

theology," and so on, so, in "The Rehearsal" (1671), a burlesque by the

Duke of Buckingham and other hands, on the plays of the last ten years,

the word "new" is constantly reiterated. "You must know this is the new

way of writing, and these hard things please forty times better than

the old plain way of writing."

The butt of "The Rehearsal," Bayes, a mixture of Davenant with the

mannerisms of Dryden, keeps bragging that this or that absurdity is

"new". "New," certainly, and not worthy to wax old, was the extravagant

"heroic" tragedy, copying the flights of the French school of bombastic

romances, and written in rhyming couplets. The authors of "The

Rehearsal" stitch together scraps and parodies of the new plays, in

that which is being rehearsed, with plenty of farcical "business" under

Mr. Bayes, who gives amusing snatches of his "Ars Poetica," while there

are gibes at the new style of prologues and epilogues, which Dryden

wrote so copiously. But "The Rehearsal" is less witty than Sheridan's

"The Critic". As for the "new" rhyming "heroic" plays, Dryden ascribes

their origin to Davenant. Forbidden to act the old sort of plays under

the Reign of the Saints, he introduced examples of moral virtue, "writ

in verse" (in rhyme), "and performed in recitative music". He combined

the Italian opera with characters in the manner of Corneille. At the

Restoration, he turned his "Siege of Rhodes" into "a just drama," but

without "design and variety of characters". Dryden took the manner up,

and, inspired by Ariosto, made love and valour the theme of the new

heroic tragedy on a superhuman scale, and with supernatural incidents,

ghosts for example. Then came rant and extravagance expressed in rhymed

couplets, and even triplets, till Dryden returned to blank verse, and

Lee and Otway and others followed him. But the drama remained as heroic

and absurd as when Dryden wrote that masterpiece "The Conquest of

Granada". In this he has a ghost, the ghost of the mother of the heroic

Almanzor. Scott supposes that she was brought in to prove the courage

of her son, even in face of an apparition. Really, the courtesy of

Almanzor is more to be admired; the stage direction shows that he bowed

to the spectre!

Many critics of the age regarded the heroic tragedy with no more

respect than we are apt to do now. Dryden replied with arguments

which are not quite to the point. The heroic tragedy is a perfectly

legitimate form of art; the Greek tragedies deal with divine heroes

and gods, and Æschylus in "The Persians" does not disdain the ghost of

Darius, and in "The Eumenides" introduces the Furies. Dryden pleaded

for a similar licence in the heroic play, but all depends on the manner

of the doing. His ghosts are not majestic, like that of Darius; they

are absurd. For boldness of language he also claimed a privilege;

persons engaged in superhuman struggles may talk above the pitch of

ordinary men. But they must not, like the heroes of the Caroline

tragedies, soar or slip into bombast; they must rise on the wings of

poetry, not on bladders full of gas. "Are all the flights of heroic

poetry to be concluded bombast, unnatural, and mere madness because

they," the critics, "are not affected by their excellences?" asks

Dryden, in his "Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic Licence". "No, not

all," the critics might have answered, "but many of _your_ flights of

heroic poetry are bombast"; and they might, indeed they did, produce

examples. For instance, in his "The State of Innocence," in which,

accepting Milton's permission given in blank verse,

Ay, you may tag my verses if you will,

he rhymed "Paradise Lost" into an opera, Dryden wrote thus:--

Seraph and cherub, careless of their charge,

And wanton, in full ease, who live at large,

Unguarded leave the passes of the sky,

And all dissolved in hallelujahs lie.

The spectacle of wanton seraphs lying dissolved in hallelujahs

naturally provoked laughter, but Glorious John did not see the

absurdity of the situation. He took his image from Virgil, he says,

where the Greeks enter Troy which "lay buried in sleep and wine".

But Trojans were not seraphs, and sleep and wine are not dissolving

hallelujahs. In the same way Virgil, following Homer, describes the

Cyclops as a monster of mountainous height, as in fact he was. Goliath

was only about ten feet high. But Dryden applauds Cowley for writing of

Goliath--

The valley, now, this monster seemed to fill,

And we, methought, looked up to him from our hill.

"The passage is horrible bombast," says Scott. Not living in an early

heroic age, in which exaggeration is natural and pardonable, but in the

age of scepticism and the Royal Society, Dryden exceeded the ancient

licence, and, as when a hero takes off his hat to his mother's ghost,

mingled modern manners with more than heroic audacities. Criticism

should look for beauties, not faults, said Dryden, but the critics

could reply that the whole scheme of the heroic drama was faulty. The

result is extravagance and rant, indeed rant was then the fault of the

actors on the French stage. Molière had to warn his company that a

King, conversing with his Minister, "does not necessarily speak like a

dæmoniac".

Turning to comedy, we find it but little instructed, in refinement,

creation of character, and wit, by the example of Molière.

Etherege's three plays "Love in a Tub" (1664), "She Would if She Could"

(1667), and "The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter" (1676), are the

work of a courtier and amateur concerning whose life and death little

is known. The merriment of "Love in a Tub" is a picture of contemporary

manners; compared with its prose, the rhyming ten-syllabled couplets of

the graver and sentimental characters are almost a relief.

The author (1635-1691?), in the Prologue, admits that "wit" (dramatic

genius in this case), "has now declined"; avers that "the older and

graver sort" would decry new plays in the manner of Fletcher and Ben

Jonson; and bids the audience "Only think upon the modern way of

writing". In an Epilogue to "Sir Fopling Flutter," Dryden characterizes

the hero admirably:--

True fops help Nature work, and go to school,

To file and finish God Almighty's fool.

If these' pieces have wit, they "have not wit enough to keep them

sweet".

Thomas Shadwell (1642-1692) was made immortal when he became the butt

of Dryden's satire. His plays are useful to students of contemporary

manners, and he was the Laureate of William and Mary in succession to

"Glorious John".

Sir Charles Sedley and Mrs. Aphra Behn have left nothing imperishable

but a few songs, the swan songs of the dying Muse of lyric.

All these playwrights had before their eyes the inimitable and immortal

comedies with which Molière was endowing the literature of France.

But, even when they tried to follow this model, their imitations were

barbarous: for compared with the literary taste and manners of the

Court of Louis XIV, those of the reign of Charles II were brutal.

The least unsuccessful of those who directed themselves by the light of

Molière was William Wycherley (1640?-1716?). Here we sketch his career

and that of his successors, reserving for a separate section the great

name of Dryden. Wycherley was of an old family in Shropshire, had a

handsome person, was brought up, in boyhood, at Paris, in the literary

circle of Madame de Montausier, later resided at Oxford, and, if we

could believe what Pope says that Wycherley reported of himself, wrote

his first play, "Love in a Wood," before he came to London, to the

Middle Temple. This would make Wycherley prior to Etherege, but either

his own or Pope's memory is supposed to have been incorrect. The play

was not acted till 1672: it was not much in advance of Etherege in

merit.

Of "The Gentleman Dancing Master" (1673), "The Country Wife" (1673),

and "The Plain Dealer" (1674) the last is by far the best. In the

Prologue, the line

And with faint praises one another damn,

was remembered, unconsciously, by Pope, in his "Damn with faint praise"

(in the character of "Atticus," Addison).

"The Plain Dealer" is a comedy of humours, like Jon son's, the chief

humorist being the benevolent railing Manly, taken from the Alceste

of Molière's "Le Misanthrope". Manly "of an honest, surly, nice

humour," is a gallant British sea captain, who holds all the world

in contempt but his friend and his love, who, of course, betray him.

He is beloved by Fidelia, who, for his sake, has abandoned her large

fortune, and taken service as a seaman with Captain Manly. Many scenes

of conversation, in imitation of Molière, are vigorous; one perhaps was

in Sheridan's mind when he wrote "The School for Scandal". Wycherley

defends his "Country Wife" from the assaults of a false prude, who, at

least, shows us that, even under Charles II, "The Country Wife" was

thought superfluously indecent. The Widow Blackacre, a female Peter

Peebles, a litigious she-lawyer, with her oaf of a son, is "in very

gracious fooling". The intrigue, and the part assigned to Fidelia, are

odious enough, and impossible enough, but the nobility of Fidelia is

demonstrated by allowing her, occasionally, to talk in blank verse.

When we remember Wycherley's French education, we may suppose that he

dealt so much in matter which a French audience would not have endured,

because he knew the taste of the theatre-going part of his countrymen.

Wycherley is said to have suffered much from a jealous wife of noble

birth, who caused him a world of legal troubles by the bequest of

her money. He married again at 75, and shortly afterwards died. The

most interesting thing in his later years was his acquaintance with

Pope, then a lad, and the characteristic use which Pope made of his

opportunity.

Congreve.

Heaven, that but once was prodigal before,

To Shakespeare gave as much, she could not give him more

than she conferred on Congreve. So wrote Dryden: and probably half

believed what he wrote. Dryden was a literary dictator; literary

opinion followed his lead; and there was a period when the town

recognized the equal of Shakespeare in the sprightly author of comedies

no longer ravishing.

William Congreve was born (1670) near Leeds: his family was of

Staffordshire. His father settling in Ireland, Congreve was educated

at the grammar school of Kilkenny, and at Trinity College, Dublin. He

was a very handsome man, with an air of greatness; he easily conquered

both the courtly and the literary world when he came to London; he won

the admiration and affection of the generous Dryden, who applauded

and opened the doors of the theatre to his first comedy, "The Old

Bachelor". The play is not better than a fair specimen of Wycherley's

manner, but "The Double Dealer" (1693) is much more readable and

interesting. The complicated passions of Lady Touchwood have a kind

of greatness, the more complicated plots of Maskwell nearly lead to

a sanguinary conclusion; Maskwell being as near an approach to the

regular villain of comedy as the conditions of comedy permitted. Lady

Froth is rather more learned than Mrs. Malaprop, and as vicious under

her zeal for astronomy and "mathemacular proof" as the unkindness

of man will allow her to be. The haughty refusal of Lord Froth to

laugh, even when he is amused, is amusing; Brisk and Careless are

agreeable rattles, Sir Paul Plyant is almost to an incredible degree

"an uxorious, foolish, fond old knight," and the heroine, Cynthia, is a

good girl. The constant bustle, and the involutions of a plot full of

surprises ought to have made the play more popular on the stage than it

was at first. Leigh Hunt, who edited "The Comedies of the Restoration"

(or rather of the date from the Restoration to Queen Anne), candidly

says, "speaking for ourselves, we can never attend sufficiently to the

plots of Congreve. They soon puzzle us and we cease to think of them."

The student who would enjoy Congreve must first peruse each play

very carefully, and make out a summary of the plot, with diagrams

illustrating the secret staircases, back doors, screens, and other

places of ambush: he must also master the details of the various

marriages which are arranged for the various heiresses, amiable

bankrupts, and old gentlemen. When the reader has thus given his full

attention to the details he may re-read the plays with more ease and

pleasure.

In "Love for Love" (1695) Sir Sampson Legend has some of the diverting

traits of Sir Anthony Absolute; there are unlooked-for glimpses of

romance in the assumed madness of his impoverished son Valentine (the

sympathetic rake of comedy--the Charles Surface of an earlier day). The

sailor son, Ben Legend, is the stock simple sailor, with some gross

sense under the breezy manners of the untutored mariner. Foresight,

with his rich collection of superstitions, is a "character part" of

interest to the folklorist; one scene between two moral sisters who

simultaneously detect each other's sins is diverting: the wit of Jeremy

the valet, however, does not come within sight of the wit of Molière's

Mascarille; and Miss Prue is a tomboy not remarkable for innocence.

The pearl of "The Way of the World" (1700) is the high-hearted

Millamant, who, when she at last rewards one of the thousands that

sigh for her, makes a very spirited private marriage contract with her

adorer. Her song,

If there's delight in love,'tis when I see

That heart, which others bleed for, bleed for me,

is famous among the lyrics of Congreve. We do not often care for

Congreve's characters, nor do they try to win our affection, but

Millamant conquers all hearts.

Congreve's tragedy in blank verse "The Mourning Bride," holds much the

same place in his plays as "Don Garcie de Navarre" does in those of

Molière.

After a long, fashionable, and applauded life, Congreve died in

1729, deeply lamented by the Duchess of Marlborough (daughter of the

great Duke), and by the once beautiful and delightful actress, Mrs.

Bracegirdle. He held rich sinecures under Government, as did other wits

while the Tories were in office.

Vanbrugh.

He writes your comedies, draws schemes, and models,

And builds Dukes' houses upon very odd hills

is a contemporary couplet which sums up a few of the accomplishments of

Sir John Vanbrugh. His family seem to have been Protestants driven from

Ghent in the wars of Alva. He was born in 1666[1] "in a French bastile"

he said. He was educated in France; entered the English army; produced

his first play, "The Relapse," in 1696, and was the architect of Castle

Howard, the Earl of Carlisle's house, in 1701. Carlisle procured for

him the herald's post of Clarencieux; as a Whig he was sent to carry

the Order of the Garter to the Elector of Hanover (later George I); he

built the palace of Blenheim, and, like all who met her, was insulted

by Sarah Duchess of Marlborough. He seems to have been friendly with

the wits of both parties, being as jovial as versatile. He died on 26

March, 1726.

"The Relapse, or Virtue in Danger," is a kind of continuation of Colley

Cibber's "Love's Last Shift"; as Fielding's "Joseph Andrews" continues

and burlesques Richardson's "Pamela". From the Preface we learn that,

as the second title leads us to think probable, "The Relapse" was

accused of obscenity and blasphemy. The Prologue, spoken by Miss Cross

on the first night, would, in our delicate age, clear all the women out

of the stalls and boxes. The piece opens with a long dialogue in blank

verse, between Loveless, a newly married rake, rejoicing in

the happy cause of my content,

and Amanda, his bride, that Sappy cause. They are going to town, and

Amanda is afraid that Loveless's Virtue will Relapse. An amusing

character is Lord Foppington, a knight newly made a peer; "While I was

but a knight I was a very nauseous fellow," he confesses. He holds

an absurd levee with his tailor, wigmaker, and hosier, and snubs

his brother, Tom Fashion, who is penniless. Through an old nauseous

match-maker, Coupler, Tom learns that the peer is contracted to a

rustic heiress, whom he has never seen, Miss Hoyden, daughter to Sir

Tunbelly Clumsey. Tom decides to go down, personate his brother, and

marry the wealthy Miss Hoyden. Yet he has a qualm of conscience and

will give Foppington another chance.

Arrived in town, Loveless and Amanda drop blank verse for prose. Amanda

confesses her distaste for the obscenities of, the stage. Loveless

admits that he has admired a lady at the play; Amanda flutters with

jealousy; her cousin, Berinthia, enters; she is the woman admired

by Loveless. Enter Lord Foppington bent on the conquest of Amanda.

He dislikes the quiet of a country life: "For 'tis impossible to be

quiet without thinking; now thinking is to me the greatest fatigue in

the world". His lordship is a lover of books, of their bindings, "The

inside, I must confess, I am not altogether so fond of". For this he

gives his exquisite reasons, and describes the glories of his everyday

occupations. From 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. he drinks. "Thus, ladies, you

see my life is a perpetual round of delights." This peer is worth a

wilderness of Sir Fopling Flutters. On Sundays, "a vile day I must

confess," Foppington imitates the course of Mr. Badman. He ends by

making a declaration to Amanda, who replies with a box on the ear.

Loveless and Foppington fight, Foppington falls, exclaiming "Ah,--quite

through the body. Stap my vitals!"

Like Shakespeare, Vanbrugh "has brave notions," and like him, as

Ben Jonson said, "he needs to be stopped" before swords are drawn

in ladies' company. His Lordship, of course, is no more killed than

was the Master of Ballantrae when the sword hilt "dirled on his

breast-bone".

Berinthia and Amanda now discuss not "the practical part of unlawful

love," "_that_ is abominable"; "but for the speculative; that, we

must all confess, is entertaining". Amanda admits an interest in a

speculative inquirer, her husband's friend, Mr. Worthy, and, most

unnaturally, for she is very jealous, invites Berinthia, a merry widow,

to be her guest.

Lord Foppington, happily recovered, airs his original philosophy of

life for his brother's edification. "Look you, Tam, of all things that

belong to a woman I have an aversion to her heart. For when once a

woman has given you her heart, you can never get rid of the rest of her

body." This philosopher declines to give Tom a penny, and Tom returns

to the raid upon Miss Hoyden and her fortune.

Loveless is now found--ah! woful change--not only talking in blank

verse--indicative of a serious passion--with Berinthia, but kissing

her: the discovery is made by Worthy, her old lover. "O God!" exclaims

Berinthia. Worthy now knows that Berinthia adores Loveless, and

Berinthia--that Worthy adores Amanda. They contrive a plot against

Amanda very worthy of their ingenuous principles.

We next find Tom at Sir Tunbelly Clumsey's door, which is garrisoned

like the Tower, and all to seclude that Danaë, Miss Hoyden. Both Tom

and Miss Hoyden are eager to be married with no more delay than Tom

Jones and Sophia, but Sir Tunbelly is more set on ceremonies than

Squire Western.

The proceedings of Berinthia now justify the censures of the moralist,

and "turning the other page," as Chaucer recommends, we find Tom

and Miss Hoyden privately married by Chaplain Bull, when Foppington

arrives with two coaches and twenty foot-men, the military skill of

Sir Tunbelly, convinced that the newcomer is an impostor, enables him

to rout Lord Foppington's guard and arrest his person. Presently a Sir

John Friendly arrives; he knows and recognizes the genuine Foppington,

who has admirably preserved the calm dignity of his philosophy. The

blushless Hoyden now avows to her Nurse and the Chaplain her resolve to

prevent trouble by at once wedding the real Lord Foppington.

Meanwhile, by aid of virtue and blank verse, Amanda converts the

passion of Mr. Worthy into profound admiration and esteem. The natural

denouement follows: Miss Hoyden is recognized as Mrs. Tom Fashion, and

Lord Foppington, who would have gone to the guillotine as gallantly as

any gentleman, congratulates his brother: "Dear Tam, you have married

a woman beautiful in her person, charming in her airs, prudent in her

conduct, constant in her inclinations, and of a nice morality. Split my

windpipe!"

Vanbrugh's quality, his absence of sentiment, his large and lively

handling of old comic types, may be guessed at from this brief analysis

of his first play. He was thought to have surpassed it in "The Provoked

Wife" (1697) and "The Confederacy" (1705). He also adapted pieces by

Molière, and a French writer nearly forgotten, Boursault.

George Farquhar.

George Farquhar, born 1678, at Londonderry, was the son of a clergyman,

and was a University wit of Trinity College, Dublin. He early became

an actor, and early left the stage; it is said because he had done

accidentally what Mr. Lenville proposed to do of set purpose to

Nicholas Nickleby, severely wounded a fellow-player in a stage duel. He

then obtained a commission in the army, and wrote plays, "A Trip to the

Jubilee," "Sir Harry Wildair," "The Way to Win Him," "The Recruiting

Officer," "The Beaux' Stratagem" (1707), and others; the characters,

such as Scrub, Sergeant Kite, Archer, Lady Bountiful, Captain Plume,

and others, were great favourites with Sir Walter Scott, and by him

are often quoted. Farquhar died young, at about the age of 30. George

Farquhar with his gaiety, his gallantry, his happy military swagger,

his heroes who are not lost to honour, his plots, so comprehensible,

and sources of so many merry adventures, wins more sympathy and

affection,--dying in the arms of Victory as he did, during the triumph

of his last and best play,--than any of the other comic writers of the

Restoration.

Otway.

Otway, like most dramatists of his day, cannot be fairly judged by

his printed works. They want the splendid costumes and _decor_, the

setting of the stage, and the pathos and brilliance of the beautiful

actresses, for Otway was most successful in such tender and distraught

heroines as Belvidera and Monimia. Born in 1652, Thomas Otway, the

son of the rector of Woolbeding, in Sussex, entered Christ Church,

Oxford, in 1669, but soon left it, on the death of his father, for

London. Here he hung about the Duke of York's Theatre, where he failed

as an actor. In 1675 he produced a play, "Alcibiades," though, as he

says in a preface to his "Don Carlos," "I might as well have called it

'Nebuchadnezzar,'" for Alcibiades acted in a way not consistent with

his character. The caprice of the witty, miserable Earl of Rochester

won the good will, if nothing more substantial, of the Duke of York for

the poet, who dedicates to him the heroic play of "Don Carlos" (1676).

In this, according to Otway, Dryden declared that "I know not a line

I would not be author of," so the play must have been, and in fact

was, a success. It is written in rhyming couplets, and even triplets;

the rhymes are often surprisingly bad. The history of the death of

Don Carlos, who was mad, is obscure, and Otway treats it with extreme

poetic licence. Philip of Spain is here a tender, though avenging,

father and husband, who repents and rants monstrously, though rant is

not the common fault of Otway. There is tenderness and pathos enough to

account for the popularity of the play; moreover Otway was known to be

hopelessly in love with Mrs. Barry, the beautiful actress; Rochester

who presently satirised Otway, being his rival. After a luckless

campaign with Monmouth in Flanders, Otway, following Dryden's example,

abandoned rhyme for blank verse in "The Orphan" (1680), based on a

stock situation in a novel of the seventeenth century. The intrigue,

though the crucial situation is not acceptable now on the stage,

is ingeniously contrived to bring out the characters of the rival

brothers, and Monimia, a very pathetic character, must have drawn many

tears. There is the usual number of deaths in the last act. The blank

verse has no great distinction, and abounds in redundant feet. Otway,

in fact, did not take by literary perfections, but "The Orphan" has no

lines so far below the tragic level as the words of the Queen in "Don

Carlos".

How hard it is his passion to confine,

I'm sure 'tis so if I may judge by mine!

The phrase of Monimia when she learns the depth of her misery, "Oh,

when shall I be mad indeed!" is of other metal.

In 1682, Otway produced his "Venice Preserved," certainly his best

play, which long held the stage, and was acted now and then up to the

middle of the nineteenth century. The conspirators in the play may be

said to rant, but moderation of language does not mark the eloquence of

violent revolutionaries with the most bitter personal wrongs to avenge.

Belvidera may be "stagey," but she has genuine tenderness and pathos;

there is dramatic development of character in Jaffier; "the moving

incident" is abundant; the absence of poetry was not marked or missed.

The scenes with Antonio, a caricature of the Shaftesbury of Titus

Oates's plot, with his "I'll prove there's a plot with a vengeance, a

bloody, horrid, execrable, damnable, and audacious plot," must have

delighted audiences who had just escaped from Oates's reign of lies and

terror. The bloody ghosts who appear in the conclusion are an unhappy

reversion to the devices of Chapman. Otway wrote other things, the

comedy of "The Soldier's Fortune," for example, which, even then, was

"so filthy, no modest woman ought to be seen at it," as, Otway tells

us, a woman of "a nice morality" declared. Certainly Otway had no real

comic genius. Before he wrote "Venice Preserved" Otway was destitute,

till relieved by the Duchess of Portsmouth, to whom the play is

dedicated. On the death of Charles II the Duchess ceased, it appears,

to succour the poet, who died in deep distress, in April, 1685; as to

the manner of his death, stories vary. Probably he was not a careful

liver; profits from plays were slight; and patrons were niggardly.

Otway is undeniably more coherent, more capable in construction than

the majority of the tragedians from Chapman to Ford; but he did not

inherit that remarkable, if occasional, gift of greatness in style

which was their common portion.

Nat Lee.

The reader of the plays in which Nat Lee (1653-1692) employs blank

verse, finds it much more satisfactory in its cadences and in movement

than the blank verse of Otway. There is something of the old ring in

For I am doz'd so weary with complaining.

That I could stand and listen to the winds,

or

For straight when the sick priest had breathed his last,

The sacred oil which for a hundred years

Supplied the sun behind the golden veil,

Went out and all the mystic lights were quenched.

Undeniably there was poetry in Lee, but to the pathos, concentration,

and construction of Otway he does not attain. He was born in

Hertfordshire, and educated in Westminster, and Trinity, Cambridge.

He was at intervals insane, and while reading the speeches of his

characters we sometimes seem to "stand and listen to the winds" of a

wild night of autumn.

There is a kind of furious magnificence in the tempestuous tirades of

Pharnaces with which the play of "Mithradates" opens, and throughout

the terrors of that piece "The old winds cease not blowing and all the

night thunders". The same vigour displays itself in his first tragedy

(1675), written partly in "new" rhymed heroic couplets. The ghost of

Caligula would

Burn palaces; like Thunder I would rove,

Tear the tall woods, and rend each sacred grove.

Lee is, by the way, far too prodigal of his ghosts. His age, at all

events the theatre-going part of his contemporaries, was apt to jest

at ghosts, following Webster and Wagstaffe, and unconvinced by Henry

More, Glanvill in "Sadducismus Triumphatus," and the other founders of

"Psychical Research".

In 1677, Lee, with "The Rival Queens," made a success which long held

the stage, and the names of Statira and Roxana, rivals for the love

of Alexander the Great, live in memory. Dryden wrote the prologue of

the piece, protesting that he was not "logrolling," and comparing the

poet to "Titian and Angelo". Lee loved a ghost, and that of Philip of

Macedon "shakes his truncheon at 'em," at the conspirators against

Alexander, whom two queens adore with furious passion. Statira's first

words demand

a knife, a draught of poison, flames!

but, instantly relenting, for she has heard that Alexander loves

Roxana, she praises the faithless conqueror:--

Not the Spring's mouth, nor breath of jesamin,

Nor violets' infant sweets, nor opening buds,

Are half so sweet as Alexander's breast.

Though "well-matched for a pair of quiet ones," Statira, of the two, is

of milder mood.

The staging of the play must have been arduous, a battle of crows and

ravens fills the air, an eagle and dragon meet and fight; the eagle and

birds drop dead, the dragon flies away, and "soldiers walk off, shaking

their heads," and no wonder! especially as the ghost of Philip is still

walking, and a "monstrous child" is weeping blood into a silver bowl

and throwing the gore over the percipients. When the jealous Roxana

reaches Babylon, she is as passionate as Statira, and cries to the

spectators,

Away, be gone, and give a whirlwind room!

The two queens meet with gentle words, but when their blood is up

their language is on the level of the situation. Roxana is the readier

with her knife; the dying Statira forgives her; Alexander dies in a

delirium, with a lucid interval at the close.

Dryden and Lee worked together in "The Duke of Guise" (assassinated

by order of Henri III) and in "Œdipus". The last is worth reading as

an example of the taste of the time. The foundation is the "Œdipus

Tyrannus" of Sophocles, from which passages are translated in blank

verse. In the preface we learn that Corneille's "Œdipe" "is inferior

to the original". The "Œdipus" of Lee and Dryden goes very far

beyond,--and in that sense surpasses--the masterpiece of the Athenian.

"All that one could gain out of Corneille was that an episode must

lie, but not his way." For "custom has obtained that there must be

an underplot of second persons," as, alas! there is, while the

over-elaboration of the loves of Œdipus and Jocasta, "very curious and

disgusting," would have seemed to Sophocles the work of Læstrygonians

or some such uncouth barbarians. Jocasta murders all her children--she

hangs the girls and stabs the boys, which proves that the taste of

Englishmen was infinitely more brutal than that of the prehistoric

framers of the original legend. Œdipus, after putting out his eyes as

in the Greek, commits suicide--by jumping out of an upper floor window!

The love affair of Eurydice, and the charge against her of being the

murderess of Laius, are supremely absurd, while the ghost of Laius

drives about in a chariot with those of three of his retainers. Even

this nonsense is capped by a song about fiends who use red-hot tongs,

and boiling cauldrons, and torture "with molten lead in it".

Lee and Dryden seem to have stimulated each the other's ambition to

outdo the worst excesses of the most frantic Elizabethan playwrights.

They knew, of course, that Œdipus, in the Attic myth, did not kill

himself, like a distraught housemaid, by jumping out of a window;

they knew that he lived, and that the children of Jocasta lived and

furnished the materials for two noble dramas of Sophocles. But they

thought that the blood could not be spread too thick.[2]

Dryden.

Though Dryden was a dramatist of the Restoration, he was so much else,

was a link so strong in the golden chain of our poetry and prose, that

he must be considered apart from smaller wits.

John Dryden was born in 1631, at Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire. His name

is common in Teviotdale: his family was landed, and had a baronetcy:

in Scotland it is not a landed name. From Westminster school Dryden

went to Trinity, Cambridge, where he was known to Mr. Samuel Pepys. He

entered in 1650, at 19, an age later than was usual. For some reason he

did not like his University.

Thebes did his green unknowing youth engage,

He chooses Athens in his riper age,

that is Oxford, the home of lost causes, like his own. In 1663 married

Lady Elizabeth Howard; wrote plays for a livelihood (his rents were

small); in 1670 became Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal: acted,

we may say, in both capacities in his great satires of the troubles

following on the Popish Plot and other poems down to the birth of the

Prince of Wales (10 June, 1688), and, after the Revolution, supported

himself by play-writing, translating Virgil, by his "Fables," and other

works, till his death on 1 May, 1700.

Setting aside Milton, who dwelt apart, Dryden was by far the greatest

man of letters of the Restoration and the reign of our Dutch deliverer.

Under Dryden, and to a great extent through his versatile and manly

genius, English literature matured and clarified itself. Though not

averse to far-fetched "conceits" in his early poems, Dryden shook

them off; he made the heroic couplet the instrument for Pope and his

successors, he gave it a nobility, a richness and depth of music which

it had not possessed: it was stronger, more varied, more poetical, in

his hands than in those of Pope. Prose, touched by him, became much

more lucid and rapid than it had been in the long involved periods of

Clarendon, if not so purely simple as the prose of Swift.

It was, in a sense, the misfortune of Dryden that he was the poet of an

age immersed in its own complicated and exciting, and now, to all but

careful historical students, not easily understood affairs. We have no

adequate and intelligent history of the Restoration. Dry den's verses,

for the most part, are "topical," deal with events of the day: there is

little time for meditation on what is universal; he is an urban poet,

too: nature and landscape are rarely handled by him. If our ideal of

poetry is derived from study of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson,

and other recent moderns, we do not and cannot find in Dryden what

they have taught us to desire and expect. His themes are of his time

and of the men and the political passions of his time. His plays, many

of them rhymed, are but little read; nobody strongly recommends his

comedies, which are more coarse than comic; he did not, himself, think

that comedy set his genius.

His lyrics, though spirited, have not the sweet spontaneity of the true

English lyric from "Love has come with Lent to town" to those of the

best nineteenth century makers. To read his best satires with entire

enjoyment we need to be well acquainted with the obscure intrigues of

an age of plots, royal, political, and religious. Yet, through all his

poetic work, from his early "Heroic Stanzas" on the death of Cromwell,

down to "Alexander's Feast," we see the note and hear the voice of a

great poet; a voice new, noble, sonorous, and his own. There is, in

almost all that Dryden did, in his criticism in prose not less than in

his verse, a kind of conquering supremacy, an ease, an impetus, and a

consciousness of his own greatness which is not arrogance, but lends

facility and a triumphant speed to his verse; while his criticism is

that of zest, of delight in excellence wherever he finds it; from

Homer to Virgil, from Virgil to the then little understood Chaucer, to

Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.

His "Heroic Stanzas" (published in 1659) in quatrains, may or may not

have been inspired by appreciation of Cromwell; Dryden's kinsfolk

were Presbyterian and Parliamentarian; but his heart and natural

inclinations as a man and a poet, were more engaged (1660) in his

"Astræa Redux," and verses to Charles II on his coronation. Dryden,

like Waller, was (to our taste) more successful in praising the

great usurper than the Merry Monarch. The first stanza in the poem

on Cromwell strikes a ringing and a novel note, but the reader also

requires a footnote on Roman imperial funereal ritual before he can

understand what is meant. To say of Cromwell,

To our crown he did fresh jewels bring,

while, in fact, he sold the jewels, was to invite satire; to talk of

Stanching the blood by breathing of the vein,

was thought an odd way of alluding to regicide: though Dryden may

perhaps have spoken of the wars in general.

Her safety rescued Ireland to him owes

is a strange compliment to the man of the Drogheda massacre. Dryden, at

this time, wrote as a Protestant; much later he was reconciled to the

ancient Church.

His "Astræa Redux," and poem on the Coronation of Charles II show his

early mastery of the heroic couplet. Scott thought that in these poems

the Muse awoke, like the Sleeping Beauty of the fairy tale "in the same

antiquated and absurd vestments in which she had fallen asleep twenty

years before". This means that the so-called "metaphysical" style of

far-fetched conceits and comparisons (which Sir Walter heartily hated)

still prevailed. There are, indeed, traces of the habits attributed by

fable to elephants, and remote classical allusions, and abrupt changes

of metaphor from anatomy to bait-fishing (of which Dryden was fond) and

it is rather absurd to make a ship of war "groan beneath the weight" of

a lad like the Duke of Gloucester! But the verse is excellent, and the

spirit high and joyous, as became the great occasion. As much may be

said of the lines addressed to Clarendon.

In the "Annus Mirabilis" (1667), concerning the naval war with Holland

and the Great Fire of 1666, Dryden reverted to the quatrains made

fashionable by Davenant's "Gondibert". Mr. Pepys, of the Admiralty,

thought this "a very good poem," it came home to his bosom and

business, and, as a poem of war, is much superior to Addison's

"Campaign". There are still conceits, as when Dutch mariners killed on

board a ship laden with spices and Oriental porcelain "by shattered

porcelain fall," or "by aromatic splinters die". To appreciate the

poem the reader needs a good chart and an intimate knowledge of naval

history, but the vigour of the verses on the fire carries them on like

the conflagration itself. The "Prayer of Charles II" is royal, and

worthy of David, to whom Dryden had already compared him in "Astræa

Redux," as later in "Absalom and Achitophel". Indeed Charles in certain

points of conduct resembled the Psalmist.

For some fifteen years Dryden was now to be occupied with play-writing,

and his tragedies and comedies, as his latest editor says, supply the

historian with "the most troublesome and perhaps the most thankless...

part of his task". But Dryden does not live by the merits of his

dramas. When we have said that Scott, with all his zeal for old plays,

did not like Dryden's, it is clear that people less omnivorous in

literature and less devoted to the drama, will leave them alone.

Of Dryden's first comedy, "The Wild Gallant," 1663, Mr. Pepys said it

was "so poor a thing as I ever saw in my life". It was condemned, but

was amended and repeated. The judgment of Mr. Pepys was well deserved.

The play is in prose.

"The Rival Ladies" (published 1664) was reckoned "innocent and most

pretty witty" by Pepys: it is partly in poor blank verse, partly in

rhymed couplets: in the preface Dryden says that Waller "first showed

us to conclude the sense, most commonly in distiches, which, in the

verse before him, runs on for so many lines together, that the reader

is out of breath to overtake it". The plot is reckless of probability,

but, on the whole, the thing is not coarse as well as shocking to the

credulity of the reader.

In "The Indian Queen" (1664) Dryden added some scenes to a "heroic"

play by Sir Robert Howard, and is credited with the part of Montezuma.

The "heroic" play resembled the immense extravagant romances of the day

("Gondibert" is a versified romance of this kind); written by Mdlle. de

Scudéry and her imitators. Intricate prolonged extravagance was then

characteristic; and Sir George Mackenzie ("Bluidy Mackenzie"), who

wrote such a romance about the civil war, reckoned these heroic tales

the final and perfect type of the novel.

"The Indian Emperor," in rhyme (1665), was a contribution by Dryden

to this class of drama. Cortez and Pizarro go conquering together,

which is odd, "in a pleasant Indian country," within two leagues of

Mexico. The High Priest's morning sacrifice has disposed of 500 human

victims--love scenes with ladies of such Mexican names as Almeria

and Cydaria follow; Cortez and Pizarro approach in arms, Cydaria and

Cortez fall in love, in a song, and after much heroic passion, all

ends happily for the lovers. The merits of the versification and the

rhetoric are great; Montezuma is racked on the stage; and holds a

dialogue about religion, in fine distiches, with his equally tormented

High Priest. The priest expires, but Cortez releases Montezuma, and

throws the blame on Pizarro.

"The Conquest of Granada" (1670) was a yet more triumphant play of

the heroic variety; "The Rehearsal," a satirical piece, partly by

the Duke of Buckingham, partly by collaborators, derided "Bayes" (as

we have seen); and as Dryden received the Laureate's bays in 1670,

he is, at least, in part, the object of the mockery. He took it very

unconcernedly, and went on writing heroic plays, but in 1677-1678, in

"All for Love," abandoned rhyme for blank verse. "The Spanish Friar"

(1681) was a "topical" play, full of the Protestantism of Oates's

Popish Plot.

The sequels of the Whig and Protestant lunacy of the Popish Plot,

and the political turmoil and Whig conspiracies in the interests

of Monmouth, and against the succession of the Duke of York (James

II.), found Dryden on the side of the King, and gave occasion for

his greatest works, the political satires, "Absalom and Achitophel"

(Monmouth and Shaftesbury) and "The Medal" (1681-1682), while more

amusing if less monumental, is "Mac-Flecknoe," the attack on the Whig

playwright and versifier, Shadwell. "The Hind and Panther" (the Roman

and Anglican Churches) is not very appropriate in its allegory, but

magnificent in many passages of verse. Dryden came into the religion of

the Duke of York, apparently from conviction, and so threw in his lot

with a doomed cause. After the Revolution of 1688, no longer Laureate,

he simply worked hard at literature for his livelihood. He translated

Virgil with much spirit, into rhymed ten syllabled couplets; and wrote

that Ode to the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew which contains his

repentance for the prostitution of the Muse throughout the revel of the

Restoration.

O gracious God I how far have we

Profaned thy heavenly grace of poesy!

Made prostitute and profligate the Muse,

Debased to each obscene and impious use,

Whose harmony was first ordained above

For tongues of angels and for hymns of love.

Dryden's old age, as the dictator to the wits at Will's Coffee House,

was tranquil and happy: he had sown his literary wild oats, his life

was one of peaceful and honoured industry, without failure of mental

force. He died in May, 1700, and was buried near Chaucer in Westminster

Abbey, with strangely maimed rites, according to Farquhar, the author

of "The Beaux' Stratagem," who was present.

Dryden's prose, chiefly critical, was addressed to that part of the

literary world, the Court and the Town, and the Templars, which was

mainly interested in the theatre. He could thus write with freedom,

alertness, and gaiety, to appreciative readers concerned with the

problems of the drama. It had almost expired by a kind of natural

decay, moral and literary, before the theatres were closed by the

Puritans. Now writers of plays looked back on the glories of the

"former temple," to Jonson, Fletcher, and Shakespeare, and also looked

abroad to the French stage then flourishing under Corneille and

Molière. Which was the better way? Was the rhyme of French tragedy,

and of many French comedies, to be imitated? It was imitated, and in

his rhymed tragedies Dryden acquired his mastery of the couplet. What

was to be said for and against the English practice of an upper and an

under plot? What were the famous "unities" of time, place, and action?

Should deaths be merely reported or presented on the stage? Dryden

observes that the audiences used to laugh at dying scenes in tragedies:

"it is the most comic part of the whole play".

Having such topics to discuss, Dryden adopted the prose style so

justly appreciated, though it was the reverse of his own manner, by

Dr. Johnson. Dryden's prefaces to his plays "have not the formality of

a settled style, in which the first half of the sentence betrays the

other. The clauses are never balanced, nor the periods modelled: every

word seems to drop by chance, though it falls into its proper place.

Nothing is cold or languid; the whole is airy, animated, and vigorous;

what is little is gay; what is great is splendid."

The most famous essays are those of "Dramatic Poesy," and "The

Preface to the Fables," adaptations or "translations" of Chaucer and

Boccaccio. The former essay is, in form, a dialogue, held in a boat

on the Thames, while the thunder of the guns, in a great naval battle

against the Dutch (3 June, 1665) dies away from the English shores,

with promise of an English victory. The speakers are Lord Buckhurst,

Sir Robert Howard, Dryden's brother-in-law, the poet himself, and

Sir Charles Sedley, the gayest of the four, though his knowledge of

Aristotle's "Poetics" is far from adequate. The speeches are rather

long; there is no rapid interchange of opinions. In Dryden's lips are

placed the words, "Shakespeare was the man who of all modern, and

perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul".

Yet "he is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into

clinches, his serious swelling into bombast". Dryden, here, and in

"The Preface to the Fables," was much more keen to praise Shakespeare

than to blame him: in the second place the zest with which he applauds

Shakespeare and Chaucer (whose scansion, unluckily, he did not

understand), is worthy of himself and of them. He translated Virgil,

but, when he did some Homeric passages into English, we see how

entirely the Greek, to his taste, overcomes the Mantuan poet. "I have

found, by trial, Homer a more pleasing task than Virgil... the Grecian

is more according to my genius than the Latin poet."

Dryden himself, at the meeting of the ways of the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries, belonged by genius more to the past than the

immediate future. His criticisms are like the conversation of a great

artist, speaking of his art, and also (Dr. Johnson thought him too

copious on this subject) of himself. But here Johnson resembles Dryden

when he rebukes Andromache, at her last leave-taking with Hector, for

speaking of her utter bereavement of father and brothers by the spear

of Achilles. "The devil was in Hector," says Dryden, "if he knew not

all this matter, as well as she who told it him, for she had been his

bed-fellow for many years together"--an error in fact, and an example

of Dryden's occasional frivolity.

The work of Thomas Southerne has for long been neglected, though

Garrick, by making excisions and modifications, restored part

of it to the stage. Southerne was born before the Restoration

(1660), and lived to see the last effort of the Stuart cause

crushed in 1746. Born in Dublin, he went to Oxford, neglected

the law, gave his first play in 1682, paid court to the Duke

of York, got a commission in the Duke of Berwick's regiment,

and wrote, in 1687, a play, not acted till 1721, in which he

satirized Mary, the daughter of James II. Dryden doubled, in

Southerne's case, the price of a prologue, raising it from £5

to £10, but Southerne raised the gains of authors, getting £700

for a single piece, while Dryden never received more than £100.

Southerne's new comedies were popular after the Revolution

of 1688. The plot of his "Innocent Adultery" (dear to Lydia

Languish) was taken from a novel, by Mrs. Aphra Behn--the play,

in 1758, was revived by Garrick;--from Mrs. Behn also Southerne

dramatized "Oroonoko, or the Loyal Slave". This piece, with the

licentious comic scenes removed, was revived in 1759, and a new

age saw how Southerne

"Touch'd their fathers' hearts with gen'rous woe,

And taught their mothers' youthful eyes to flow,"

though

"With ribald mirth he stained his sacred page".

In 1725, the poetic fire of Southerne died out in "Money the

Mistress". The author was liked by everybody, even by Pope, known

to all as "honest Tom," and addressed by the Earl of Orrery in

a letter as "My Dear Old Man". Southerne did not affect the

development of the stage, and the better part of his "Oroonoko"

is due to Mrs. Behn: people who laughed at the sub-plot were

easily amused.

Of Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718) space suffices only for the

statement that he was made Poet Laureate under George I.,

edited Shakespeare, and wrote "Jane Shore," "in imitation of

Shakespeare's style". Here is a sample of the imitation:--

"If poor, weak woman swerve from Virtue's rule,

If strongly charmed she leave the thorny way,

And in the softer paths of pleasure stray,

Ruin ensues, reproach and endless shame,

And one false step entirely damns her fame."

The blank verse too is remote from the Shakespearean.

The stage (like the world after the death of Donne's Miss Drury)

continued to exist after the death of Steele. Young and Johnson,

Thomson and John Home wrote tragedies, and acting comedies abounded,

but we do not find comedies that live and give pleasure in the reading

till we come to Goldsmith and Sheridan.

[1] In 1664 in the Parish of St. Nicholas Aeons (_see_ "Diet, of Nat.

Biog." referring to the list of Baptisms in that Church).

[2] In the Achæan myth, first mentioned in the "Iliad," we read that

"Œdipus fell," the Greek word is that used for falling in battle.

CHAPTER XXVI.

AUGUSTAN POETRY.

Alexander Pope.

Alexander Pope, the son of Catholic parents in the trading class,

was born in the year of Revolution, 1688. His education was private,

priests were his tutors, but he acquired Latin, and was from childhood

a great reader of poetry, and an imitator of what he read. He was not

born deformed, but overstudy, perhaps, or unnoted accident, made him

the stunted and crooked thing that he became, while his health, and the

hideous personal insults which his enemies used as freely as Hazlitt

did in later times, exasperated his temper.

His parents withdrew to Windsor Forest, a centre of Catholic families

like the Blounts and Englefields. Pope was early introduced to the

coffee-house wits by the most chivalrous and accomplished of men,

Charles Wogan, who, in 1719, rescued from prison in Austria, and

brought to her affianced prince in Italy, Clementina Sobieska, mother

of Prince Charles.

Pope corresponds very early, on literary subjects, with the veteran

Wycherley (of whom Pope's account is, as always, quite untrustworthy)

and with "knowing Walsh". He taught himself verse by translating the

Latin poet Statius, and at 21 published, in 1709, his "Pastorals,"

"written at the age of 16," according to Pope.

It is not possible here to examine all Pope's statements about

his works, all his really ingenious ways of fishing for fame, of

mystifying; and, with none of the coarseness of our contemporary

literary advertisement, of acting as his own interviewer and his own

advertiser. He had no need to practise these arts, but his methods are

amusing as exposed by his learned and hostile editor, Elwin. Pope's

great delight was in literary quarrels, and he managed to pick some

very pretty quarrels out of remarks on his pastorals and those of

Philips which appeared in "The Guardian". Pope preluded his pastorals

by an essay on pastoral poetry in general; a _genre_ of which it may

be said that Theocritus (using literary models, such as Stesichorus,

and also familiar with the songs of Sicilian peasants) introduced it

in immortal poems; Virgil imitated Theocritus: and Pope thinks that

Virgil "refines upon his original, and in all points when judgment is

principally concerned, he is much superior to his master". It would

have been pleasant to set down Pope to the construing of a few passages

from Theocritus. Pope kept pretty close to his originals: and follows

his own advice "the numbers should be the smoothest, the most easy and

flowing imaginable". The brevity of the pastorals, their smoothness,

and their avoidance of the "burning questions" of the day, so commonly

intruded into Elizabethan pastorals, permit Pope's to be read with ease

and even with pleasure.

In the "Essay on Criticism" (1711) we find Pope with an ambition to

reform the world of literature. It is not easy to find out exactly what

he would be at, for he uses such terms as "Nature," "wit," "judgment,"

in various ways. Nature seems permanent enough, but human views of

"Nature" differ perpetually, and when Pope says, "First follow Nature,"

what does he mean by "Nature"? Why are "wit" and "judgment" "at

strife"? The poet refers them to Nature as interpreted by Greek art for

a verdict; and of Greek art he knew very little. Read Homer and Virgil,

especially Virgil, he says. The poem, though it teaches us little about

criticism, is full of lines so witty and so pointed that they are now

proverbial.

In 1713 he published "Windsor Forest," admired by Swift, his life-long

friend; with Addison he was on apparently good terms, but he was

already suspicious. He attacked Dennis, who had assailed Addison's

"Cato," and he did so in a style which Addison, through Steele,

repudiated. Addison's praise of Philips's pastorals, with their

Fairies, to Pope appeared dispraise of his own; and in an article

in "The Guardian" he made fun of Philips with ingenious irony of

commendation.

Pope's great work, his version of the "Iliad," appearing in portions

(1715-1720), met a kind of challenge in Tickell's version of the First

Book. Addison spoke well of Tickell's specimen; did he write it, or

inspire it, or set it up as a rival to Pope's? Pope, much later, told

his own story of his wrongs and of his noble and dignified treatment

of Addison. His most loyal biographer cannot accept the tale: at all

events Pope wrote, and much later published, his famous verses on

Addison (Atticus). (Published, 1722, after Addison's death.) The two

men ceased to be friends, but Addison never hit back. Pope had also

suspected him for doubts as to the wisdom of adding to the first shape

of "The Rape of the Lock" (1712) the machinery of Sylphs and Gnomes

in the second form (1714). The addition was deservedly successful,

but Addison might well hesitate to recommend a change in that tiny

mock-epic of a quarrel about the stealing of a lock of hair. It is

perfection in its way, in its wit, sauciness, and gaiety.

The "Iliad," a terrible task for Pope, executed through long years of

advice from all quarters, of doubt, and of weariness, was a triumph,

celebrated in charming verses by Gay's "Welcome to Mr. Pope on His

Return from Greece". In that strange age the noble, the great, the

beautiful swelled Pope's triumph; literature was fashionable. Pope's

"Iliad" can never be superseded as a masterpiece of English literature.

He was no scholar, but he had many friends to help him, and his plan

was to give the spirit of the Epic, as he conceived it, in a form which

his age could appreciate. It is almost as if he had taken Homer's

theme and written the poem himself. The minor characteristics of the

antique manner are gone; but his age would have thought them barbarous

and fatiguing. Wherever there is rhetoric, as in the speeches of the

heroes, Pope is magnificent; where there are pictures of external

nature he is conventional. But he is never slow. His conventions were

those of his age, and are extinct, but time cannot abate the splendour

of his spirit.

In doing the "Odyssey," of which the first part appeared in 1725, he

was aided by Fenton and Broome, who, under his supervision, wrote

exactly like himself. With them, too, there were quarrels; they were

not paid in what they reckoned a satisfactory style. Pope received

about £10,000 in all for Homer, a large sum in those days, and not

likely to be equalled by the gains of any later translator of Homer. He

dabbled in the shares of the South Sea Bubble, and appears to have been

rather a winner than a loser.

He had accumulated quarrels to his heart's content, hence "The

Dunciad" of 1728-1729: a satire on minor men of letters, in which he

shows wit and ill-nature enough, with a vein of true poetry in the

conclusion; but the dirt and the personalities are now rather amazing

than agreeable; while the necessary notes below drive the text into

the garrets of the page. Not even Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had

laughed at Pope's attempts to make love to her, escaped a flick of the

whip of scandal in "The Dunciad". Perhaps Pope had not been gently

treated, but nobody admires his revenges. The business of publication

was managed with all the intricate wiles and subterfuges in which

he took such strange delight. One of his butts, Cibber, retorted in

kind, and was successful in giving pain: Theobald, a useful editor of

Shakespeare, Pope assailed, because Theobald had not spared the errors

in his own edition (1728).

His later works, Epistles to Burlington and Arbuthnot, "The Essay on

Man," the "Imitations of Horace," are full of the wit and polished

verse that were natural to Pope, and were fostered by his friendships

with St. John (Bolingbroke), Swift, Gay, and Arbuthnot; friendships

that never failed, and eternally testify to the better part in Pope,

despite his tempers of malice and his feline arts. His enthusiasm

for Atterbury, exhibited in letters written before the bishop's too

well-merited exile, is the most romantic point in his career. Late in

life he was kind to Johnson and Thomson; he had been a good son; his

character greatly irritated his most learned editor, Mr. Elwin; but

nobody suffered so much from his faults of jealousy and suspiciousness

as Pope himself. He died on 30 May, 1744.

Ever since the romantic movement of the early nineteenth century,

people have asked "Was Pope a poet?" He was, in the highest degree,

the kind of poet that his age and the English society of his age

desired and deserved; a town poet--where rural nature is concerned,

conventional and unobservant; where Man is concerned a poet of Man,

literary, political, and fashionable. In the great fight over Pope's

claim to be a poet, of 1819, when Bowles was the assailant, Byron

was the champion of Pope: Byron himself being a satirist and a poet

of mankind, urban, political, and fashionable, as well as piratical.

Horace was busied with the same field of human nature (not with the

desperate pirate and remorseful Giaour) but nobody has asked "Was

Horace a poet?"

Pope wrote in reaction against the conceited poetry of the seventeenth

century; he did well, though the manner was already dead, but he never

came within sight or hearing of the inspired songs of Lovelace and

Carew. The world of Pope was in many ways a limited and evanescent

and artificial world; but in his verse it lives eternally, and that

is enough for his fame, and testimony sufficient to his genius. He

brought his instrument, the decasyllabic couplet, to the perfection

required for his purpose, each couplet existing in and for itself.

But in reading him we feel that "paper-sparing Pope" wrote down his

best passages, detached, on the backs of letters; they are separate

inspirations, and are fitted into the whole like fragments of a mosaic:

for example the lines on Atticus are fitted into "The Epistle to

Arbuthnot". His rhymes, as "fault" to "thought," are not the things on

which he bestowed most pains.

Concerning other poets--Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare--we feel that, in

any age of literature, in any period of taste, under any conventions,

they must have been great. Pope, on the other hand, cannot easily be

thought of as having the capacity for greatness, except in the literary

conditions of the early eighteenth century. But in that period he was

supreme.

Prior.

From the galaxy of wits who dined with Harley and St. John and

were addressed in that splendid society by their Christian names,

Jonathan or Mat, Matthew Prior stands somewhat apart. His duties as a

diplomatist carried him abroad; he owed his diplomatic posts to his

wit, not to his birth, which Queen Anne spoke of as unpleasantly

obscure. He was born on 14 July, 1664, at Wimborne or Winburn, in

Dorsetshire; Westminster was his school, and St. John's, Cambridge, his

college. Here he took his degree, in 1686, and obtained a fellowship

in 1688. He attracted the notice of the Whigs by parodying Dryden's

"Hind and Panther," in "The Town and Country Mouse," aided in the jest

by Charles Montagu. Dryden is very improbably said to have wept; the

Whigs, at all events, laughed, and in 1691 made Prior secretary to the

Embassy in Holland. He held the same post at Versailles later; at this

time he was a sincere eulogist of our Dutch deliverer, William III,

whom he celebrated in "The Carmen Seculare" (1700), indeed constantly,

like Horace, he "praising his tyrant sung". Reviewing history, he

places William before a number of Roman heroes, and, remembering that

William's wife is a Stuart, bids the god Janus

Finding some of Stuart's race

Unhappy, pass their annals by.

But, as thou dwell'st upon that heavenly name

To grief for ever sacred, as to fame,

O! read it to thyself: in silence weep!

Is the name Charles or Mary? At this time there was a fashionable cult

of Mary Stuart. This long ode, granting the mythology, has considerable

merit, though, says Dr. Johnson, "Who can be supposed to have laboured

through it?" Not the Doctor, as he candidly confesses.

Under Queen Anne, Prior was tempted over to the Tory party, and his

doings, as a negotiator with France, were thought, and perhaps not

unjustly, to smack of Jacobitism. He was in Paris when Beatrix Esmond's

Duke of Hamilton was about to go thither on a mission, and there seems

little doubt (from a record by Lockhart of Carnwath, the leader of

the Scottish Cavaliers) that Hamilton was to bring over to England,

in disguise, the exiled son of James II, "the Pretender," as Colonel

Esmond does in Thackeray's novel. But Hamilton fell in a duel with

Mohun, and that chance was lost.

As _acknowledged_ ambassador, Prior was at the French Court from

August, 1712, to August, 1714, when the death of Queen Anne scattered

the Tories. Early in 1715 he was locked up on suspicion of treason, and

was not released till three years later.

The hope of the Whigs was to decapitate Harley, who lay in the Tower;

but Harley could have involved Marlborough, possessing a fatal letter

of his, and finally Prior and Harley were released. He had now no

resources except his college fellowship, but his friends by securing a

large subscription for his poems, and by the generosity of the family

of Harley, placed him beyond want. He died on September 18, 1721.

Prior does not live by his "Alma, or the Progress of the Mind," a long

poem in rhymed eight syllable couplets, in the manner of Butler's

"Hudibras". This work is a kind of comic history of Psychology, and

ends with Barry Lyndon's rhyme to Aristotle, "Here, Jonathan, your

master's bottle!" Prior's "Solomon," on the vanity of knowledge,

pleasure, and power, in heroic rhymed verse, is best remembered for

two lines to Abra, and might, so easily does the author take his

theme, be called the vanity of melancholy, though it closes in serious

admonitions to "the weary King Ecclesiast".

Prior's tales in the manner of Fontaine's "Contes," are lively, like

these; and like these, may have seemed coarse to such a moralist as Sir

Richard Steele.

Prior, in fact, lives by his merry, tender, light, and bright social

verses, in tripping measures, for example, "Thus Kitty, beautiful and

young" (for Gay's patroness, the Duchess of Queensberry), "To a Child

of Quality," "The Merchant, to Secure His Treasure," "Dear Chloe,

how blubber'd is that pretty face," and many other things; the best

reminding us more of the charming trifles in the Greek Anthology than

of Horace.

Gay.

The spoiled improvident child in the group of wits was John Gay, to

whom Pope and Swift were attached by the most tender affection. Gay

was an author who never aimed high, but who almost always hit his mark

and pleased the Town. But his success was so much the consequence of

choosing the happy moments, his poems are so completely poems of his

age, that he is now praised at a venture rather than read. He was born

at Barnstaple, in Devonshire (1685); though of an old family he "was

without prospect of hereditary riches," and was "placed apprentice with

a silk-mercer" in London.

Perhaps some fair customer discovered that he had a soul above silk;

the Duchess of Monmouth, the heiress of the Scotts of Buccleuch, made

him her secretary (1712). Becoming acquainted with Pope, Gay dedicated

to him (1713) his "Rural Sports" in the usual heroic rhymed couplets.

Gay's descriptions of nature, and his praises, are more genuine than,

in that age of the Town, such things usually were. He writes of angling

"with his eye on the object," in Wordsworth's phrase. His remarks on

fishing with the worm, a theme unworthy of the Muse, are judicious. As

to fly fishing, Gay is among those who advocate a search for the insect

in the waters and an exact imitation. He would have us fish "fine and

far off," with "a single hair" next the hook, and perhaps he is the

first to recommend the use of the "dry" or floating fly: "Upon the

curling _surface_ let it glide," not sunk. The catching of a salmon is

not ill described, but as Gay retains his "single hair," he must always

have been broken if he did happen to hook a fish. For his own part,

he never uses either worm or the natural fly: never tries for coarse

fish--pike, perch, and so forth,--and this justifies the affection of

his friends.

In "The Shepherd's Week" (1714) his Idylls describe real peasants with

their folklore superstitions, but Virgil, or Theocritus, is still

imitated. The pastoral is an extinct species of literature, but Gay's

were more natural and popular than Pope's. Dedicated to St. John, in

verses celebrating the recovery of Queen Anne, who presently died,

the poems were ungrateful to the Hanoverian Court, and Gay lost the

secretaryship to an ambassador.

Gay's "Welcome from Greece, to Mr. Pope on his having finished his

translation of the 'Iliad,'" has already been mentioned as one of the

most charming relics of that golden age of letters, wit, and friendship.

Friendship did not aid wit, when Pope and Arbuthnot took hands in,

and ruined, Gay's "Three Hours after Marriage," a comedy which was not

comic (1717). In 1720 his collected poems brought Gay £1000: but a gift

of stock in the South Sea Bubble was profitless, as Gay would not sell

out in time. In 1727 he was offered by George II a Court place so small

and ludicrous that it was declined.

Gay next made an immense but not a lucrative success with "The Beggar's

Opera," which had an unexampled run of seven weeks. A sequel was not

licensed by the censor; Gay was recouped by a subscription, and fell

out of Court favour. The Duchess of Queensberry (Prior's Kitty),

carried him to her place in the country, and here he was petted till

his death, which seems to have been caused by indolence and the

pleasures of the table.

His "Trivia; or the Art of Walking the Streets of London," is a

vivacious picture of the crowds, dirt, and bustle: his "Fables," though

original and witty, are, like pastorals, an obsolete form of literary

entertainment. He wrote his own epitaph,

Life is a jest, and all things show it,

I thought so once, but now I know it.

He took a different view of this important theme in "Thoughts on

Eternity".

Ambrose Philips.

But for his friendship with Addison and the collision of his

"Pastorals," with those of Pope, producing Pope's famous ironical

review, Ambrose Philips (1675-1749) would scarcely be remembered. The

modern art of "booming" was illustrated in Philips's case. A whole

'Spectator' was devoted to a puff of his adaptation ("The Distressed

Mother") of the "Andromache" of Racine: and another told how it

affected Sir Roger de Coverley. As has occasionally happened more

recently, though advertised by Addison, and by his own threat to birch

Pope, "Philips became ridiculous, without his own fault, by the absurd

admiration of his friends," and his Christian name, Ambrose, became the

ludicrous nickname, Namby-pamby. But for Philips there was not lacking

a patron, Boulter, Primate of Ireland, and in Ireland places were found

for the exile. Philips translated several Odes of Pindar, and though he

had not the pinion of the Theban eagle, the sentiments of Pindar are

plainly visible in his versions.

Tickell.

Among the minor stars in the golden galaxy of Queen Anne's reign

scrutiny detects Thomas Tickell. (Born in Cumberland in 1686,

educated at Queen's, Oxford.) He is best remembered in connexion with

Pope's story that to damage his translation of the "Iliad," Addison

translated the First Book and published it, averring that Tickell was

the author. That Addison was guilty of a villainous action is, says

Macaulay, highly improbable, that Tickell was capable of a villainy

is highly improbable, that the twain were united in a base conspiracy

is improbable "out of all whooping". But that Pope's mind, resentful,

brooding, and inventive, came to believe in the conspiracy, is,

unfortunately, only too natural. We know the figments of all sorts

which the imagination of Shelley imposed on him: they were, at least,

more romantic than the figments of Pope. In both cases there is a

resemblance to the fancy of persecutions which haunts the insane.

Tickell had the honour and happiness to be a friend of Addison, and

wrote verses commendatory of his opera, "Rosamond," and of his tragedy,

"Cato". His translation of the First Book of the "Iliad" is really

good, when we consider the poetic conventions of the age, and the

inevitable use of the rhyming heroic couplets. He who would estimate

the difficulties of Pope's and Tickell's task, should endeavour,

himself, to do a few of the lines of Homer into the classical metre of

Queen Anne's day. When Tickell makes Agamemnon, speaking of Chryseis,

say

Not Clytæmnestra boasts a nobler race,

A sweeter temper, or a lovelier face,

he is comically remote from what Agamemnon does say in Homer, and

the sweetness of Clytæmnestra's temper was never famous. Tickell's

"Thou fierce-looked talker with a coward soul" is much less spirited

and literal than Pope's "Thou dog in forehead and in heart a deer"

("Drunkard, with eyes of dog and heart of deer," is the literal

version). Tickell, more bound by the taste of his age than Pope,

shirks the dog and deer. None the less Tickell's version is spirited

and lucid; the course of events can be easily followed: the reader is

enabled to understand the tragic situation from which the whole epic

evolves itself. If Pope had not written, if Tickell had finished his

version as well as he began it, he would have satisfied public taste,

and won considerable fame.

Tickell, following Addison, was a Whig, "most Whiggish of Whigs," Swift

said. This makes his line on "An Original Picture of King Charles I,

Taken at the Time of His Trial," all the more curious. The portrait, of

which several replicas exist, was mezzotinted from the All Souls' copy

in Tickell's day, about 1714. (Bower was the painter.)

How meagre, pale, neglected, worn with care,

What steady sadness and august despair!

says Tickell. The look is one of melancholy scorn rather than of

despair. Tickell falls foul of the artist:

Thy steady hands thy savage heart betray,

Near thy bad work the stunn'd spectators faint,

Nor see unmoved what thou unmoved could'st paint.

Bower, in fact, produced the most sympathetic portrait of the King.

Tickell proceeds to curse Cromwell, bless the Restoration, and salute

Queen Anne as a Stuart.

Not much Whiggery here! But when the Hanoverian dynasty and the Whigs

came in, Tickell was strong on the winning side. His "Epistle from a

Lady in England to a Gentleman at Avignon," from a Jacobite lady to a

gentleman at James's Court, is very prettily written, and the following

lines are true.

Then mourn not, hapless prince, thy kingdoms lost;

A crown, though late, thy sacred brows may boast;

Heaven seems, through _us_, thy empire to decree,

Those who win hearts have given their hearts to thee,

On his side "James reckons half the fair".

Say, will he come again?

Nay, Lady, never.

Say, will he never reign?

Ay, Lady, ever,

sings a modern poet, whose heart is true to George? However, Tickell's

lady reflects that the Hanoverian sway is good for trade, and in the

end prefers London to Avignon.

In 1717 Addison made Tickell his under-secretary--Tickell had always

been his "understudy". In 1740 Tickell died, in the enjoyment of one of

these lucrative places which rewarded the loyalty of literary Whigs.

With Tickell, the name of Thomas Parnell (1679-1718) goes naturally.

He was a minor light among the wits; was befriended by Swift, and is

remembered for "The Hermit," "The Night-Piece on Death," and one or two

other effusions.

CHAPTER XXVII.

AUGUSTAN PROSE.

Steele.

Steele and Addison are the Twins among the stars of the age of Queen

Anne. Swift impresses us as a greater genius than either Steele or

Addison, but he is not loved, and he is not read as they are. Their

lives, till two or three years before Addison's death, were united.

They were schoolfellows at Charterhouse, fellow-undergraduates at

Oxford, each was apt to take a hand in the other's play when the stage

attracted them; they wrote together in the two famous journals, "The

Tatler" and "The Spectator," which Steele created; some essays therein

are a patchwork of pieces from both hands. They were both anxious to

cleanse the stage; to bring decent morals and manners into fashion In

the original manuscript of Steele's comedy, "The Conscious Lovers"

(1722), are rough notes for a preface, written after Addison's death,

"The fourth act was the business of the play. The case of duelling I

have fought nor shall I ever fight again... Addison told me I had a

faculty of drawing tears... Be that as it will, I shall endeavour to do

what I can to promote noble things...."

Both men were moralists, but while Addison was the more moral, Steele

was infinitely the more greatly given to moralizing. His heart was in

the right place. He honoured women and pure affection, and temperance,

and the wedded state. But his many brief notes to his second wife

"Prue" (Miss Scurlock), written from all manner of places and at all

sorts of hours, prove that poor Prue had often to dine alone. Business

detained her Richard; he came home with the milk, and had a terrible

headache next day. With the posts which he held under Government,

with what he gained by his pen (and he was the owner of his own paper,

and his own paymaster), with Mrs. Steele's fortune, they had resources

enough, but Richard at intervals sends Prue a guinea or two; Richard is

constantly in hiding from the bailiffs; is never out of debt; sometimes

there is no coal, candle, or meat in the house. Steele was the most

affectionate of men and the most generous. He boasted that the world

owed Addison's essays to him, because he had made Addison overcome his

laziness, and he told the world how greatly Addison was his superior.

He wishes that they might write together some work to be called "The

Monument," the memorial of their friendship. He took the side of poor

discharged soldiers, whipped from parish to parish for their poverty.

He adored children; his tears were as ready and heroic as the tears of

Homer's warriors. But when he yielded to the temptations of the bottle

and of extravagance, his wife and children had to suffer just as much

as if Richard, in place of being a Christian Hero, had been no better

than the wicked. Like Balzac he was a man of debts and of projects;

he even wasted money on alchemy, and had a scheme for getting wealth

in connexion with a lottery, a scheme which even then was found to

be illegal. Mr. Swinburne called Steele "a sentimental debauchee,"

and indeed he shone more in preaching than in practice. Addison calls

him "poor Dick," he is "poor Dick" to all the world now, if he were

Sir Richard "to all Europe". But, when lip preached, he meant what he

said, and his pleasant sermons, or rather pleas for goodness, kindness,

faith, did "promote noble things," and he left the world more decent

and more human than he found it.

Steele was born in Dublin in 1672; his family were not Celtic Irish

folk; his father was in what is reckoned the less noble branch of the

legal profession. When Sir Richard assumed heraldic bearings he calmly

annexed those of another family of Steele, as the elder Osborne, in

"Vanity Fair," was supplied by his coachbuilder with the arms of the

House of Leeds. Like the cousin of Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff, in "The

Tatler" (No. 14), he was guilty of "treason against the Kings at Arms".

Of his childhood we know only what he tells in that pathetic passage

about his father's funeral: "I had a battledore in my hand and fell

a-beating the coffin, and calling papa, for, I know not how, I had some

idea that he was locked up there.... My mother was a very beautiful

woman, of a noble spirit, and there was a dignity in her grief amidst

all the wildness of her transport, which methought struck me with an

instinct of sorrow that, before I was sensible what it was to grieve,

seized my very soul and has made pity the weakness of my heart ever

since" ("Tatler," No. 181). "Hence it is that in me good nature is no

merit, but having been so frequently overwhelmed with her tears before

I knew the cause of any affliction... I imbibed consideration, remorse,

and an unmanly gentleness of mind, which has since ensnared me into

ten thousand calamities...." So a "Night of Memories and Sighs" is

consecrated by Richard to his beloved dead, "when my servant knocked at

the door with a letter, attended by a hamper of wine, of the same sort

with that which is to be put on sale at Garraway's coffee house. Upon

the receipt of it I sent for three friends.... We drank two bottles a

man," and, as Mr. Arthur Pendennis says, found that there "was not a

headache in a hogshead".

The fluid, in fact, as we know from the advertisement in this number of

"The Tatler," was "extraordinary French claret". Dick conscientiously

tested its merits, and gave it a puff in addition to the advertisement

which was paid for. Thus he "promoted everything noble," including

the vintage of Bordeaux, and, as Thackeray saw, there is no more

characteristic essay of Steele's than this meditation on death and

grief and loyal memory: _à léal souvenir!_

Steele lost his mother also in his childhood. He had an uncle, Henry

Gascoigne, who, like Swift's uncle, provided for his education, but

more generously. Attached to "Erin's high Ormonde," Gascoigne obtained

for Steele a nomination to Charterhouse (1684) (Thackeray's school),

where Steele met Addison, and their friendship began. In 1689 Steele

went up to Christ Church, Addison being at Magdalen; in 1691 Steele

gained a "postmastership" (a scholarship) at Merton, a college to

which he was warmly attached, presenting its ancient library with

the volumes of "The Tatler". He left just before his Schools (that

is his examination for a degree). In 1694 he entered the Duke of

Ormonde's Guards as a trooper, apparently gentlemen did this as a way

of approaching a commission. Steele got his as a reward for a poem on

the death of Queen Mary--the piece was dedicated to Lord Cutts, Colonel

of the Coldstreams. He befriended Steele, who, stationed at the Tower,

made the acquaintance of Congreve and the wits, and defeated Captain

Kelly in a duel. Probably the contrast between the delicacy of Steele's

sentiments, and his vein of sincere piety, on one hand, with his

addiction to mundane pleasures, on the other, made him as notable in

his regiment as Aramis, Abbé d'Herblay, among the Musketeers of Louis

XIV.

Steele, when once he took a pen in his hand, wrote much against

duelling, exposing the ludicrousness of the institution. His remarks

had no effect; what killed the duel in England was the use of the

pistol: unromantic, fatal, and fortuitous. His duel may have made

men more wary of bantering Steele, but his "Christian Hero," a work

of military devotion (1701) lowered his character in the regiment.

To restore it he wrote his comedy "The Funeral" (1701); to show that

blasphemy and intrigue were no necessary components of a play: for

he was wholly of the party of Jeremy Collier. The idea of the plot,

the revival of Lord Brampton while his coffin is waiting for him, and

his watching of the manœuvres of his hateful widow, while his fair

ward, Lady Sharlot, escapes in the coffin from her enemies (a common

situation in ancient ballads) is too grotesque. But the scenes with the

hired mutes, with the poor broken soldiers, with Lady Brampton and her

maid, are very amusing. Steele's exposure of the low tricks of lawyers,

his appeal for cheap and accessible justice for all, are much in,

Dickens's manner, and the loves of Lord Hardy and Lady Sharlot are as

pure as bonny Kilmeny, while Lady Sharlot, in her encounter with Lady

Brampton, gives proof of high spirit, and Lady Harriet is a flirt as

harmless as lively.

Like the other wits, Steele was presented with lucrative posts, such

as the editorship of the colourless official "Gazette". In the same

year, 1707, he married his second wife, Miss Scurlock, the adored Prue,

a woman of some property. He had a house at Hampton Wick, horses,

gardeners, footmen, everything handsome about him. In 1709 he founded

"The Tatler," a folio sheet of printed matter, appearing thrice a week

and containing news, political and social, correspondence, and the

charming essays which soon became most important. Steele wrote 188 of

these papers, Addison, forty-two, in thirty-six both men took a hand.

Swift wrote very seldom. The essays, with those which he wrote in "The

Spectator," and in other papers, are the foundation of the fame of

Steele. They vary much in theme and style. To digest the "Iliad" into a

journal, and reckon up the days of the events, cannot have much amused

the public. There is plenty of dramatic criticism. Steele openly avows

that he is a member of the Society for the Reformation of Manners;

blames the plays of Wycherley and the rest, and calls in the name of

Virtue for frequent representations of Shakespeare. "The apt use of

the theatre is the most agreeable and easy way of making a polite and

moral gentry, which would end in making the rest of the people regular

in their behaviour," a pleasing opinion which is not quite justified by

experience.

Dick was a constant patron of the best plays, but regular his

behaviour was not. Various, excellent, and amiable as are Steele's

essays, neither in style nor in thought do they wear quite so well as

Addison's. Yet it is scarcely just to draw a distinction which may rest

only on individual taste.

"The Tatler's" last appearance was on 2 January, 1711. Steele ended

with a paper in which he generously attributes to his friend the essays

which he deemed of most value. On 1 March the first number of "The

Spectator" appeared--it ceased to exist on 6 December, 1712. Steele's

new journal, "The Guardian," lasted for six months in 1713; he was

elected as member for Stockbridge, and then came a quarrel of Whig and

Tory with Swift, who wrote in "The Examiner". The arrival of George I

from Hanover procured various lucrative posts, a patent for a theatre,

and a knighthood for Steele: he edited "The Englishman," and attacked

Swift's fallen friends, Harley and St. John; and in 1716 he got an

income of £1000 a year as one of the commissioners of the estates

forfeited by the Scottish Jacobites who were out for their King in

the rising of 1715. This was not a pleasant appointment to a man of

feeling. Of the coolness between Steele and Addison we speak elsewhere.

In 1722 Steele's "Conscious Lovers," with another attack on duelling

was acted with success, and dedicated to the "gracious and amiable

sovereign," George I. Cibber the actor added scenes rather more gay

than the rest, for so moral is this drama that Fielding's Parson Adams,

in "Joseph Andrews," said "it contains some things almost solemn

enough for a sermon". His connexion with the theatre brought Steele

into more than one lawsuit; his failing health, and the assiduities

of his creditors caused him to prefer to reside in Wales; he died in

Carmarthen on I September, 1729. Like Goldsmith, Charles Lamb, Walton,

and Scott, he has made all his readers his friends, and if his plays

are not acted much, the Lydia Languish of Sheridan, and the Tony

Lumpkin of Goldsmith, are reflections from his Biddy and Humphrey in

"The Tender Husband," a not successful comedy of 1705.

Addison.

There were few forms of literature, from the sacred hymn to the

libretto of an opera, in which Addison did not adventure himself with

success more than respectable. It is, however, as an essayist that he

survives, and is read and admired. Born on 1 May, 1672, he was the

eldest son of the Rev. Lancelot Addison, who, after acting as chaplain

to the garrisons of Dunkirk and, later, of Tangier, obtained the small

living of Milston, married the sister of a bishop, and in 1683 received

the Deanery of Lichfield. He was something of a Jacobite, and as an

author had pleasing traits of humour and irony. His son Joseph passed

through two local schools, and thence to Charterhouse (Thackeray's

school) whence first to Queen's, then to Magdalen, Oxford, where he

held a demyship (scholarship), and was later a Fellow.

"Addison's Walk" is in the little wood round which two branches of the

Cherwell meander with a mazy motion. Addison was soon admired for the

excellence of his Latin verses: he made Dryden's acquaintance, and

complimented him in verse; he began a translation of Ovid for Tonson,

in the usual ten-syllable rhyming couplets.

Some of the stories of the Metamorphoses remain, with notes of literary

criticism, including a compliment to William III. "The smoothness of

our English verse," he casually remarks, "is too much lost by the

repetition of proper names," which, in fact, are sonorous ornaments of

the verse of Milton, Scott, Tennyson, and others. But Addison, bent on

"smoothness" had not yet come to appreciate Milton; still less, in his

early "Account of the English Poets," Spenser, who

Can charm an understanding age no more.

The young champion of smoothness and common sense unblushingly rhymed

"success" to "verse".

Reluctant to take Orders, without which his Fellowship must lapse,

Addison, through Congreve, was introduced to Charles Montagu (later

Halifax) who, with Somers, wished to enlist Addison for his powers as a

writer. They obtained for him a travelling pension of £300 yearly, and

in December, 1699, left Marseilles for Italy.

His published remarks on Italy, written in a simple and easy style,

are of interest mainly because they are so unlike modern ecstasies

about the country. What most pleased Addison was to compare the scenes

and towns which he saw, with the descriptions of them which, in Latin

authors, he had read. To the natural beauties of the land, and to the

works of Christian art, he is almost blind; Paul Veronese leaves him

cold; at Verona he says nothing of the tomb of Romeo and Juliet, which,

perhaps, was not yet shown. At Venice he is most concerned about the

military strength of the place; "Tintoret is in greater esteem than in

other parts of Italy," and that is enough about Tintoret! The Venetian

comedies "are more lewd than in other countries". Addison paid a good

deal of attention to ancient coins; and Pope wrote commendatory verses

for his "Dialogues on Medals," and hoped that, on medals, Addison and

Craggs will be represented: Craggs's effigy is to have an inscription

in six heroic lines. Though the Dialogues be antiquated as archæology

the description of collectors of coins is amusing: one of the speakers

hastens to add that the science "must appear ridiculous to those who

have not taken the pains to examine it". Addison, in a kind humorous

way, strove to convince his age that ignorance is not the best judge of

the historical, social, and artistic value of numismatics.

Returning to England in 1703 Addison was poor, and had no prospect

of employment. The Whigs, however, wanted to make the most of

Marlborough's victory at Blenheim. Strange as it seems to us, poetry

had influence, a poet was needed, Halifax recommended Addison; the

Chancellor of the Exchequer found him "up three pairs of stairs,"

and "The Campaign" was written. The scene is familiar to readers of

"Esmond". Thackeray, devoted to Addison as he was, asks "how many

fourth form boys at Mr. Addison's school of Charterhouse could write

as well as that now?" as well as Addison writes in several passages of

"The Campaign". Probably no fourth form boys would write

With floods of gore that from the vanquished fell,

The marshes stagnate, and the rivers swell.

However the simile of the Angel has been reckoned fine, and the poem

"fulfilled the purpose for which it was written. It strengthened the

position of the Whig Ministry" (what a task for the Muse!) and obtained

patent places for the poet. As Under-secretary of State, Addison

had leisure to write the libretto of "Rosamond," an opera, in which

Queen Eleanor does not poison Rosamond, but gives her, like Juliet, a

sleeping draught. The King says

O quickly relate

This riddle of fate!

My impatience forgive

Does Rosamond live?

Eleanor explains the situation:--

Soon the waking nymph shall rise

And, _in a convent placed_, admire

The cloistered walls and virgin choir:

With them in songs and hymns divine

The beauteous penitent shall join.

Finally the King and Queen sing

Who to forbidden joys would rove

That know the sweets of virtuous love?

Who indeed?

The rise of Blenheim Palace is prophesied, and Marlborough is flattered

ingeniously by the Muse of Whiggery. The "understanding age" was not

charmed: it was not absolutely destitute of humour. Nor was Addison.

The intentionally funny parts of the opera, though not so comic as the

serious passages, are not unworthy of Sir W. S. Gilbert. Sir Trusty,

finding Rosamond's corpse, as he supposes, says

The King this doleful news shall read

In lines of my inditing;

Great Sir

Your Rosamond is dead,

As I'm at present writing.

Addison's unacknowledged comedy, "The Drummer," based on the famous

rapping spirit at Tedworth (1662), was a failure, and died on its third

night (1715).

Of his lucky tragedy, "Cato," he seems to have written four acts in

Italy. As early as April, 1711, Addison confided his ideas on Tragedy

to the Town ("Spectator," No. 39). They show us how far the wits of

"the understanding age" of Anne, had moved from the taste of the

Restoration stage. Addison is "very much offended when I see a play

in rhyme; which is as absurd in English, as a tragedy of hexameters

would have been in Greek or Latin". But blank verse is "in such due

medium between rhyme and prose that it seems wonderfully adapted to

tragedy," as the Elizabethan tragedians had not failed to discover.

The thoughts of English tragic writers, especially of Shakespeare,

"are often obscured by the sounding phrases, hard metaphors, and

forced expressions in which they are clothed". These expressions,

however, have been admired by many. The English tragedian is apt to

make his hero successful in the fifth act: Addison does not approve of

a modernization of "Lear," in which, as in the chronicles which told

the story, King Lear and Cordelia triumph in the end. Aristotle says,

Addison reports, that the populace preferred tragedies which ended ill

(but Addison himself has made the tale of Fair Rosamond end happily).

He makes no universal rule, only protests that a tragedy should not be

_compelled_ to conclude with comfort. There is "nothing which delights

and terrifies our English theatre so much as a ghost, especially when

he appears in a bloody shirt. A spectre has very often saved a play."

Addison applauds the handling of the ghost in "Hamlet": ghosts, in

fact, need delicate handling. For the moving of pity, our principal

machine is the handkerchief; and the introduction of an orphan or two,

but not of half a dozen fatherless children. "That dreadful butchering

of one another," with the use of racks, thumbscrews, and other

instruments of torture, gives occasion to French critics to think us a

people who delight in blood.

In practice, Addison produced a tragedy which political accidents made

highly successful at the moment, and which has enriched the stock of

quotations. But Dr. Johnson described it as rather a poem in dialogue

than a drama, rather a succession of just sentiments in elegant

language than a representation of natural affections.... The events

are expected without solicitude, and are remembered without joy or

sorrow. The "love interest," Pope says, was a popular after-thought,

and Pope told Addison that the play was better fitted to be read

than to be acted. Thanks to the habit of mingling literature with

politics, the play (13 April, 1713) was "expected" with "solicitude"

by Whigs and Tories. "All the foolish industry possible has been used

to make it thought a party play," says Pope. The leaders of each party

clapped loudly at each remark that might be twisted into a political

allusion, while Addison, with Dr. Berkeley and two or three friends,

in a side-box "had a table and two or three flasks of Burgundy and

champagne, with which the author (though a very sober man) thought

necessary to support his spirits". A run of thirty-five nights, a great

marvel then, also sustained the spirits of Addison.

Addison does not hold his high and enviable place in our literature by

virtue of his plays, poems, and work on Medals, but of his brief Essays

in "The Tatler" and "The Spectator". We have already seen how Steele

and he worked, in the most pleasant, kindly, and humorous tone, for the

improvement of morals and manners in the Court and Town.