But nothing is more characteristic of Dryden than the extremely tentative character of his work, and he had doubtless not yet satisfied himself that the couplet was suitable for narrative poems of any length, notwithstanding the mastery over it which he must have known himself to have attained in his short pieces. The very first lines of Astræa Redux show this mastery clearly enough.

Now with a general peace the world was blest,

While ours, a world divided from the rest,

A dreadful quiet felt, and worser far
Than arms, a sullen interval of war.

Here is already the energy divine for which the author was to be famed, and, in the last line at least, an instance of the varied cadence and subtly-disposed music which were, in his hands, to free the couplet from all charges of monotony and tameness. But almost immediately there is a falling off. The poet goes off into an unnecessary simile preceded by the hackneyed and clumsy "thus," a simile quite out of place at the opening of a poem, and disfigured by the too famous, "an horrid stillness first invades the ear," which if it has been extravagantly blamed -and it seems to me that it has certainly will go near to be thought a conceit. But we have not long to wait for another chord that announces Dryden :

For his long absence Church and State did groan,
Madness the pulpit, faction seized the throne.
Experienced age in deep despair was lost

To see the rebel thrive, the loyal crost.

Youth, that with joys had unacquainted been,
Envied grey hairs that once good days had seen.
We thought our sires, not with their own content,
Had, ere we came to age, our portion spent.

Whether the matter of this is suitable for poetry or not is

one of those questions on which doctors will doubtless disagree to the end of the chapter. But even when we look back through the long rows of practitioners of the couplet who have succeeded Dryden, we shall, I think, hardly find one who is capable of such masterly treatment of the form, of giving to the phrase a turn at once so clear and so individual, of weighting the verse with such dignity, and at the same time winging it with such lightly flying speed. The poem is injured by numerous passages introduced by the usual " as" and "thus" and " like," which were intended for ornaments, and which in fact simply disfigure. It is here and there charged, after the manner of the day, with inappropriate and clumsy learning, and with doubtful Latinisms of expression. But it is redeemed by such lines as

When to be God's anointed was his crime ;

as the characteristic gibe at the Covenant insinuated by the description of the Guisean League

As holy and as Catholic as ours;

as the hit at the

Polluted nest

Whence legion twice before was dispossest;

as the splendid couplet on the British Amphitrite—

Proud her returning prince to entertain
With the submitted fasces of the main.

Such lines as these must have had for the readers of 1660 the attraction of a novelty which only very careful students of the literature of the time can understand now. The merits of Astræa Redux must of course not be judged by the reader's acquiescence in its sentiments. But let

any one read the following passage without thinking of the treaty of Dover and the closed exchequer, of Madam Carwell's twelve thousand a year, and Lord Russell's scaffold, and he assuredly will not fail to recognise their beauty :

Methinks I see those crowds on Dover's strand,
Who in their haste to welcome you to land

Choked up the beach with their still-growing store,
And made a wilder torrent on the shore :

While, spurred with eager thoughts of past delight,
Those who had seen you court a second sight,
Preventing still your steps, and making haste
To meet you often wheresoe'er you past.
How shall I speak of that triumphant day
When you renewed the expiring pomp of May ?
A month that owns an interest in your name;
You and the flowers are its peculiar claim.
That star, that at your birth shone out so bright
It stained the duller sun's meridian light,
Did once again its potent fires renew,
Guiding our eyes to find and worship you.

The extraordinary art with which the recurrences of the you and your-in the circumstances naturally recited with a little stress of the voice-are varied in position so as to give a corresponding variety to the cadence of the verse, is perhaps the chief thing to be noted here. But a comparison with even the best couplet verse of the time will show many other excellences in it. I am aware that this style of minute criticism has gone out of fashion, and that the variations of the position of a pronoun have terribly little to do with "criticism of life;" but as I am dealing with a great English author whose main distinction is to have reformed the whole formal part of English prose and English poetry, I must, once for all, take leave to follow the only road open to me to show what he actually did.

The other smaller couplet-poems which have been

mentioned are less important than Astræa Redux, not merely in point of size, but because they are later in date The piece on the coronation, however, contains lines and passages equal to any in the longer poem, and it shows very happily the modified form of conceit which Dryden, throughout his life, was fond of employing, and which, employed with his judgment and taste, fairly escapes the charges usually brought against "Clevelandisms," while it helps to give to the heroic the colour and picturesqueness which after the days of Pope it too often lacked. Such is the fancy about the postponement of the ceremony—

Had greater haste these sacred rites prepared
Some guilty months had in our triumph shared.
But this untainted year is all your own,

Your glories may without our crimes be shown.

And such an exceedingly fine passage in the poem to
Clarendon which is one of the most finished pieces of
Dryden's early versification-

Our setting sun from his de lining seat
Shot beams of kindness on you, not of heat :
And, when his love was bounded in a few
That were unhappy that they might be true,
Made you the favourite of his last sad times,
That is, a sufferer in his subjects' crimes:
Thus those first favours you received were sent,
Like Heaven's rewards, in earthly punishment.
Yet Fortune, conscious of your destiny,
Even then took care to lay you softly by,

And wrapt your fate among her precious things,
Kept fresh to be unfolded with your King's.

Shown all at once, you dazzled so our eyes

As new-born Pallas did the god's surprise;

When springing forth from Jove's new-closing wound,
She struck the warlike spear into the ground;
Which sprouting leaves did suddenly enclose
And peaceful olives shaded as they rose.

For once the mania for simile and classical allusion has not led the author astray here, but has furnished him with a very happy and legitimate ornament. The only fault in the piece is the use of "did," which Dryden never wholly discarded, and which is perhaps occasionally allowable enough.

The remaining poems require no very special remark, though all contain evidence of the same novel and unmatched mastery over the couplet and its cadence. The author, however, was giving himself more and more to the dramatic studies which will form the subject of the next chapter, and to the prose criticisms which almost from the first he associated with those studies. But the events of the year 1666 tempted him once more to indulge in non-dramatic work, and the poem of Annus Mirabilis was the result. It seems to have been written, in part at least, at Lord Berkshire's seat of Charlton, close to Malmesbury, and was prefaced by a letter to Sir Robert Howard. Dryden appears to have lived at Charlton during the greater part of 1665 and 1666, the plague and fire years. He had been driven from London, not merely by dread of the pestilence, but by the fact that his ordinary occupation was gone owing to the closing of the play-houses, and he evidently occupied himself at Charlton with a good deal of literary work, including his essay on dramatic poetry, his play of the Maiden Queen, and Annus Mirabilis itself. This last was published very early in 1667, and seems to have been successful. Pepys bought it on the 2nd of February, and was fortunately able to like it better than he did Hudibras. "A very good poem," the Clerk of the Acts of the Navy writes it down. It may be mentioned in passing that during this same stay at Charlton Dryden's eldest son Charles was born.

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