in his contemplations, and from which he might bring down his knowledge for the instruction of modern poetical artificers. The patterns of Epic (commonly called the 'Heroic Poem') and of Tragedy, or the Heroic Play, are those that chiefly concern Dryden. What influence those ideal patterns had, what reverence they evoked, is scarcely conceivable now, and is seldom thought of by historians. The Heroic Poem' is not commonly mentioned in histories of Europe as a matter of serious interest: yet from the days of Petrarch and Boccaccio to those of Dr. Johnson, and more especially from the sixteenth century onward, it was a subject that engaged some of the strongest intellects in the world. (among them, Hobbes, Gibbon, and Hume);1 it was studied and discussed as fully and with as much thought as any of the problems by which the face of the world was changed in those centuries. There might be difference of opinion about the essence of the Heroic Poem or the Tragedy, but there was no doubt about their value. Truth about them was ascertainable, and truth about them was necessary to the intellect of man, for they were the noblest things belonging to him".

About the middle of the seventeenth century there was an increased activity in the business of epic poetry, especially in France and England; owing, no doubt, to

1 See 'The Answer of Mr. Hobbes to Sir William Davenant's Preface before Gondibert,' 1650, and 'The Iliads and Odysses of Homer, translated out of Greek into English by Thomas Hobbes, of Malmesbury. With a large Preface concerning the virtues of an Heroic Poem, written by the translator,' 1676; Hume, 'Letter to the authors of the Critical Review concerning the Epigoniad of Wilkie,' April 1759; Gibbon, ‘ An Inquiry whether a Catalogue of the Armies sent into the Field is an essential part of an Epic Poem,' Dec. 23, 1763.

2 A Heroic Poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform' (Dedication of the Eneis).

the accumulation of testimony on the subject by the older generations. It was discussed between Hobbes and Davenant; it was meditated by the French poets; and Davenant in England, Chapelain and others in France, undertook to show by their example how the rules and principles of the Heroic Poem might be carried out in practice. Paradise Lost is one of those experiments. It is easy to pass by Gondibert, and to accept the unanimous judgment which disposes of Chapelain's Pucelle; but Milton's work was begun and carried out under the same critical principles, and no small part of his motive was the same learned ambition to embody the abstract form of Epic in a modern vernacular work. Like Ronsard and Tasso before him, like Davenant, like Chapelain, Desmarests, Scudéry, and Father Le Moyne, he was under the spell of the phantom Epic, the pure idea of a Virgilian poem. The heroic poem was an unbodied ghost that might choose for the habit of its earthly life either the story of Paradise or that of the Round Table; just as the tragedy which is Samson Agonistes might have been Samson Hybristes or Pursophorus, or even Solomon Gynæcocratumenus, or any other of the inventions noted by Milton in his list of subjects in the Trinity MS. The abstract inspiration of the Virgilian form of Epic, or of the Euripidean form of Tragedy, before the subject was determined at all, must count for more than a little in the history of Milton's poetry; to realize the importance of these abstract ideas is one of the first requisites in coming to the study of Dryden's critical essays. His freedom cannot be rightly esti mated except in relation to the potent authorities with which he had to deal.

Dryden's attitude towards the pure abstract Forms of Poetry is not very difficult to understand when once

their character has been appreciated. He had read and admired the Latin poets. He appreciated clear reasoning and exposition, such as he found in Rapin and Bossu, and he was not by nature inclined to dissent from established opinion without sufficient cause. He shows respect to the orthodox views wherever he can. The worship of the pure form and the ambition to realize it affected him strongly; for example, in his theory of Heroic Plays, and in his contemplated Epic on King Arthur. But he will not make it a point of honour or of faith to enforce the principles of Heroic Poetry. His original work is determined by present conditions of taste (among which of course a respect for orthodox literary canons must count for something), and his general criticism, having always a reference to his own present undertakings, follows his judgment of what is desirable and feasible for him (or for contemporary English authors) at the moment. The patterns of literature have to demean themselves accordingly. Dryden is willing to pay reverence to the Heroic Poem and to the ideal of Tragedy: it never occurs to him to hesitate. But he does not 'believe what he knows to be untrue,' and nothing is further from his thoughts than to impose on his fellows a bondage like that of Trissino in Italy or Gabriel Harvey in England -two similar spirits in their flat, uncompromising zeal for the purity of classical example, and in their abhorrence of anything like modern novelty. The rules of the pedants are a different thing from the genial influence of the great ancient poets, and they are treated by Dryden in a different way. He felt strongly the conventional obligation to admire the classical poets; but this element of convention or duty was corrected by his natural liking for good literature wherever he found it, and he was able to think of Virgil and Ovid without

prejudice when he came to close quarters with their works.

III. DRYDEN AND CORNeille.

Dryden's position in criticism is very like that of two of his forerunners, Tasso and Corneille, both of whom felt themselves obliged on the one hand to pay reverence to the Ancients, and on the other hand to consider their own genius and the claims of contemporary fashion. With Tasso's critical opinions, as stated in the book of 1587, Discorsi e Lettere Poetiche, Dryden was well acquainted, though they do not seem to have taught him anything that he did not know before; from Corneille's essays in the 1660 edition of his plays, Dryden seems to have got, if not the original impulse to write freely about his literary opinions, at any rate a quickening of interest in critical discussion which left its effects on all his later writings.

The history of Corneille's original work, and of his relation to literary ideals and criticism, is very like that of Dryden. He began writing before the Unities were much thought of, as Dryden began in the older metaphysical' manner, before the complete establishment of the reforms of Waller. He saw the progress of 'correct' ideas, and felt himself obliged to conform to them, as Dryden was obliged to withdraw from the variegated pattern of Annus Mirabilis, which is full of 'metaphysical' conceits, in favour of a more coherent and less capricious mode of poetical elocution, that of Absalom and Achitophel. Like Dryden, Corneille had to come to an understanding with himself about the meaning and the authority of the rules of Poetry; like Dryden, he had an original love of freedom; it was his business as a critic to find some compromise between freedom and authority, to explain the laws of Poetry

in such a way as to reserve for himself the faculty of doing his own work without undue sacrifices. The great difference between Corneille and Dryden is that Corneille in his criticism was limited to the Drama, to the kind of composition in which he was at home, for which he had a natural gift. It detracts somewhat from the value of Dryden's essays that so many of them are concerned with kinds of work for which he was not suited. Corneille is at the centre; he has made the province of Tragedy his own before he begins to write about it as an expositor. Dryden began to write as a critic of the Drama while he was still finding his way, and, unhappily, where there was no satisfactory way to be found. The difference in situation between Corneille and Dryden is that Corneille is a master reviewing the work he has already done and explaining it; Dryden is a master of forms of poetry not dramatic, trying in his dramatic essays to find his way into provinces not his own, to plant a new dramatic colony, by artifice if not by violence, in place of the older kinds of drama which he sees to be exhausted. The fault of his prefaces is that they make one disappointed with his plays, when one comes to them after his criticisms. This is not the case with his non-dramatic work; there the drawback is of another kind, namely, that so much of his Discourses on Satire (the Preface to Juvenal) and on Epic (the Dedication of the Eneis) is mere unoriginal learning, without the freshness of the earlier essays. For this, however, there is compensation, and something more, in the glorious Preface to the Fables, written more than thirty years after the Essay of Dramatic Poetry, and fully its equal in liveliness and vigour. The earlier essays are generally concerned with Drama, the later with other forms of composition. It may be remarked, however, that the distinction is rather a superficial one, for various