and has been brought to a head by Perrault's demonstrations in France; Dryden is careful to guard himself against misconstruction; it will not do to be associated too closely with the French advocates of the Moderns, and he points out that 'there is a vast difference betwixt arguing like Perrault on behalf of the French poets against Homer and Virgil, and betwixt giving the English poets their undoubted due of excelling Æschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles.' From these controversies Dryden passes to the contents of the present Miscellany, and says something about the poets there translated, and about his own principles of versification, a subject on which one would gladly have heard him longer.

A DISCOURSE CONCERNING THE ORIGINAL AND PROGRESS OF SATIRE (1693).

The Preface to Juvenal addressed to the Earl of Dorset (Eugenius of the Essay on Dramatic Poesy) is not one of the best of Dryden's critical papers, as a great part of it is little more than an adaptation from Dacier's account of Satiric Poetry, in his translation of Horace. But the style, for all Dryden's references to the failings of an old man's memory,' and to 'the tattling quality of age,' is not much depressed by the amount of learning which has to be packed into the discourse, and made intelligible and palatable to the studious reader. The themes, apart from the main one, are old favourites with Dryden. The nature of Epic is discussed again, and again the problem of 'machines' is brought up, in relation to Dryden's own plans for the poem that never was written, either about King Arthur or about the Black Prince; while the ab

stract of the history of Satire leads to some less formal passages of literary history in which Dryden is left free from the cumbersome authority of Casaubon, Heinsius, and Dacier.

PARALLEL OF POETRY AND PAINTING

(1695).

The Latin poem De Arte Graphica of the French painter Charles Alphonse Du Fresnoy (1611-1665) was first published in 1668, with a French translation in prose; it was dedicated to Colbert.

Dryden's Parallel of Poetry and Painting is in the main a statement of the case for Idealism in Art, with the implication that the true following of Nature in Art is to discover the ideal and to neglect the distractions of the manifold particulars of experience. Thus Dryden's Parallel is the forerunner of Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses, and indeed Reynolds associates himself with Du Fresnoy and Dryden in the notes which he contributed to Mason's version of the Latin poem in 1782. 'There is an absolute necessity for the Painter to generalize his notions; to paint particulars is not to paint Nature, it is only to paint circumstances. When the Artist has conceived in his imagination the image. of perfect beauty, or the abstract idea of forms, he may be said to be admitted into the great Council of Nature, and to

Trace Beauty's beam to its eternal spring,

And pure to Man the fire celestial bring.—v. 19.1' Dryden supports himself in the arduous study of the Ideal with the help of a long quotation from Bellori, the Italian critic, in which the commonplaces of the Platonic theory, as accepted by Italian artists, are

1 Reynolds on Du Fresnoy, Note iii.

expounded with an eloquence rather too florid for Dryden's taste. 'But in short, this is the present genius of Italy.' The subject was not altogether new to Dryden; long before this, in his studies for the Heroic Drama, he had pondered on the ideal character of the Hero, and had found that in poetic diction the style which was most noble was at the same time most truly in accordance with Nature. But it had not previously occurred to him to work out a demonstration of the principles that were involved in his earlier dogmas. Hitherto his furthest point in this direction was in the Apology for Heroic Poetry (1677). Now when he takes up the subject again, it is not altogether of his own initiative; it is part of a task required by the booksellers, and there are signs in his Parallel, e. g. in the quotation from Bellori, that he is compelled to take the same devices for eking out his tale of work as are to be found, more lavishly employed, in the Prefaces to Juvenal and to Virgil. Nevertheless this Essay, though one of the less lively of Dryden's critical works, is kept from flagging, and from showing signs of fatigue, until something like a fair and consistent exposition of the general principles of composition has been attained, and then, judiciously, Dryden breaks off his theme without labouring it out to the conclusion of Du Fresnoy's argument.

DEDICATION OF THE ÆNEIS (1697).

The Dedication of the Eneis, like the Preface to Juvenal four years earlier, is one of the less original of Dryden's Essays, a remarkable contrast to such free and spirited passages as the Dedication of the Spanish Friar. It repeats the commonplaces of the respectable Fathers of Criticism for whom the Epic Poem was all

but a matter of religion. It goes deep into the moral functions of Epic as compared with Tragedy, and into the defence of the character of Æneas. Great part of it is borrowed, to save trouble, from Segrais's Preface to his translation of the Eneid, including the question whether Virgil, when he spoke of Orion, meant the heliacal or the achronical rising of the constellation. But the good sense of Dryden is clearly manifest throughout the essay, and there are not wanting passages of his livelier manner, e.g. in the account of the modern epic poets, concluding with the note on Paradise Lost: if the giant had not foiled the knight and driven him out of his stronghold, to wander through the world with his lady errant.' And the last pages, a series of remarks on prosody and on poetical rhetoric, 'the turn on thoughts and words,' &c., are completely free from the depressing influence of the French authors.

Dryden's Virgil was published by Tonson in a magnificent folio, with many engravings, by Hollar and Lambert, after Cleyn, which had already appeared in Ogilby's folio Virgil of 1654. Æneas in these 'sculptures' was, however, not quite the same personage as in their previous state in Ogilby. His nose in Tonson's impressions is more Roman, and sometimes he bears also something like the wig of King William; a circumstance which must have given additional point to certain malign allusions in Dryden's preface. 'Æneas, though he married the heiress of the crown, yet claimed no title to it during the life of his father-in-law.'

In spite of the publisher's magnificence, the book was carelessly printed: 'the printer is a beast, and understands nothing I can say to him of correcting the press.' One considerable error was allowed to remain in all the editions till Malone's: Aristotle as an author of 'novels.'

Probably the printer's obstinacy showed itself most in the punctuation, which looks capricious, and which seems generally to have been a difficulty. The printer has enough to answer for in the false pointings,' as Dryden puts it in the Preface to the Second Miscellany.

PREFACE TO THE FABLES (1700).

The Preface to the Fables, addressed to the Duke of Ormond, is a piece of work of which it is hard to speak except in some such terms as those which Dryden himself employs in it when he has to write about Chaucer. There is no need here for any such apologies for the failings of old age as are made by the author in the Preface to Juvenal. The Preface to the Fables is more full of life than anything else in Dryden's prose; not inferior even to the Essay of Dramatic Poesy; while nothing, either in prose or verse, brings out more admirably or to better advantage the qualities of Dryden as the great English man of letters. For this is what he was, rather than essentially a poet; his genius is one that commands both vehicles of expression, it is not one that is specially inclined to verse; and the free movement of his mind and speech is scarcely less wonderful in a prose tract like this Preface than in the verse of Absalom and Achitophel. His chariot wheels grow hot with driving,' and this vehemence and speed are of the same kind whatever chariot he may happen to have selected. In this present case, he is absolutely at home in the work he has undertaken, and it brings out all his best qualities both of mind and character, from the generous, unenvying spirit in which he converses with the great masters, to the humorous correction of Milbourne and Blackmore, and the straightforward answer to Collier.