the younger generation, were among the principal of the band of sons (in Ben Jonson's phrase) whom Dryden had now gathered round him. In one of his letters there is a very pleasant picture of the two young men coming out four miles to meet the coach as he returned from one of his Northamptonshire visits, and escorting him to his house. This was in 1695, and in the same year Dryden brought out a prose translation of Du Fresnoy's Art of Painting, with a prefatory essay called a "Parallel of Poetry and Painting." There is not very much intrinsic value in this parallel, but it has an accidental interest of a curious kind. Dryden tells us that it occupied him for twelve mornings, and we are therefore able to calculate his average rate of working, since neither the matter nor the manner of the work betokens any extraordinary care, nor could it have required extraordinary research. The essay would fill between thirty and forty pages of the size of this present. Either in 1695 or in 1696 the poet also wrote a life of Lucian, intended to accompany a translation of the Dialogues made by various hands. This too, which did not appear till after the author's death, was something of a "pot-boiler," but the character of Dryden's prose work was amply redeemed by the "Discourse on Epic Poetry," which was the form that the dedication of the Eneid to Mulgrave took. This is not unworthy to rank with the "Essay on Dramatic Poesy" and the "Discourse on Satire."

CHAPTER VIII.

THE FABLES.

It was beyond a doubt his practice in translation, and the remarkable success that attended it, which suggested to Dryden the last, and one of the most singular, but at the same time the most brilliantly successful of all his poetical experiments. His translations themselves were in many cases rather paraphrases than translations. He now conceived the idea of a kind of composition which was to be avowedly paraphrase. With the unfailing catholicity of taste which is one of his finest literary characteristics, he had always avoided the ignorant contempt with which the age was wont to look on mediæval literature. Even Cowley, we are told, when requested by one of his patrons to give an opinion on Chaucer, confessed that he could not relish him. If, when he planned an Arthurian epic, Dryden had happened to hit on the idea of "transversing" Mallory, we might have had an additional star of the first magnitude in English literature, though his ability to produce a wholly original epic may be doubted. At sixty-seven, writing hard for subsistence, he could not think of any such mighty attempt as this. But he took certain tales of Chaucer, and certain novels of Chaucer's master, Boccaccio, and applied his system to them. The result was the book of poems to

which, including as it did many Ovidian translations, and much other verse, he gave the name of Fables, using that word in its simple sense of stories. It is not surprising that this book took the town by storm. Enthusiastic critics, even at the beginning of the present century, assigned to Theodore and Honoria "a place on the very topmost shelf of English poetry." Such arrangements depend, of course, upon the definition of poetry itself. But I venture to think that it would be almost sufficient case against any such definition, that it should exclude the finest passages of the Fables from a position a little lower than that which Ellis assigned to them. It so happens that we are, at the present day, in a position to put Dryden to a specially crucial test which his contemporaries were unable to apply. To us Chaucer is no longer an ingenious and intelligent but illegible barbarian. We read the Canterbury Tales with as much relish, and with nearly as little difficulty, as we read Spenser, or Milton, or Pope, or Byron, or our own living poets. Palamon and Arcite has, therefore, to us the drawback-if drawback it be-of being confronted on equal terms with its original. Yet I venture to say that, except in the case of those unfortunate persons whose only way of showing appreciation of one thing is by depreciation of something else, an acquaintance with the Knight's Tale injures Dryden's work hardly at ✓ all. There could not possibly be a severer test of at least formal excellence than this.

The Fables were published in a folio volume which, according to the contract with Tonson, was to contain 10,000 verses. The payment was 3007., of which 250 guineas were paid down at the time of agreement, when three-fourths of the stipulated number of lines were actually handed over to the publisher. On this occasion,

at least, Jacob had not to complain of an unduly small consideration. For Dryden gave him not 2500, but nearly 5000 verses more, without, as far as is known, receiving any increase of his fee. The remainder of the 3001. was not to be paid till the appearance of a second edition, and this did not actually take place until some years after the poet's death. Pope's statement, therefore, that Dryden received "sixpence a line" for his verses, though not formally accurate, was sufficiently near the truth. It is odd that one of the happiest humours of Tom the First (Shadwell) occurring in a play written long before he quarrelled with Dryden, concerns this very practice of payment by line. In the Sullen Lovers one of the characters complains that his bookseller has refused him twelvepence a line, when the intrinsic worth of some verses is at least ten shillings, and all can be proved to be worth three shillings "to the veriest Jew in Christendom." So that Tonson was not alone in the adoption of the method. As the book finally appeared, the Fables contained, besides prefatory matter and dedications, five pieces from Chaucer (Palamon and Arcite, the Cock and the Fox, the Flower and the Leaf, the Wife of Bath's Tale, the Character of a Good Parson), three from Boccaccio (Sigismonda and Guiscardo, Theodore and Honoria, Cymon and Iphigenia), the first book of the Iliad, some versions of Ovid's Metamorphoses in continuation of others previously published, an Epistle to John Driden, the second St. Cecilia Ode, commonly called Alexander's Feast, and an Epitaph.

The book was dedicated to the Duke of Ormond in a prose epistle, than which even Dryden never did anything better. It abounds with the fanciful expressions, just stopping short of conceit, which were such favourites with him, and which

he managed perhaps better than any other writer. He holds of the Ormond family, he tells the Duke, by a tenure of dedications, having paid that compliment to his Grace's grandfather, the great Duke of Ormond, and having celebrated Ossory in memorial verses. Livy, Publicola, and the history of Peru are brought in perhaps somewhat by the head and shoulders; but this was simply the fashion of the time, and the manner of the doing fully excused it. Even this piece, however, falls short, in point of graceful flattery, of the verse dedication of Palamon and Arcite to the Duchess. Between the two is the preface, which contains a rather interesting history of the genesis of the Fables. After doing the first book of Homer “as an essay to the whole work," it struck Dryden that he would try some of the passages on Homeric subjects in the Metamorphoses, and these in their turn led to others. When he had sufficiently extracted the sweets of Ovid, "it came into my mind that our old English poet Chaucer in many things resembled him ;" and then, "as thoughts, according to Mr. Hobbs, have always some connexion," he was led to think of Boccaccio. The preface continues with critical remarks upon all three authors and their position in the history of their respective literatures, remarks which, despite some almost unavoidable ignorance on the writer's part as to the early condition and mutual relationship of modern languages, are still full of interest and value. It ends a little harshly, but naturally enough, in a polemic with Blackmore, Milbourn, and Collier. Not much need be said about the causes of either of these debates. Macaulay has told the Collier story well, and, on the whole, fairly enough, though he is rather too complimentary to the literary value of Collier's work. That redoubtable divine had all the right on his side, beyond a