not so fitted by nature to write comedy; I want that gaiety of humor which is required to it. My conversation is slow and dull, my humor saturnine and reserved. So that those who decry my comedies do me no injury, except it be in point of profit; reputation in them is the last thing to which I shall pretend." He joined Sir Robert Howard in producing a tragedy in heroic verse, "The Indian Queen," which took the town by storm, and may be regarded as the first of the spectacular melodramas with battles, flying spirits, real Oriental costumes and scenic effects, which are still popular. His other plays were cast in the supposed heroic vein in rhyme, the propriety of which form he had to defend against the advocates of blank verse. To touch the sublime was not only beyond his reach as an artist in expression, but he had not the conception. Hence the inflated verbiage, the ranting, roaring, imitation of passion, and the falsetto of his pathos in these dramas. His "Conquest of Granada," though not without good points, provoked the Duke of Buckingham to voice the literary judgment of the day in his racy burlesque “The Rehearsal," which ridiculed Dryden in the character of Bayes, the poet. His next play, "Aurungzebe," was his last in rhyme. When he was fifty-seven he set himself to write "All for Love, or the World Well Lost," to prove the superiority of his interpretation of the story of Antony and Cleopatra over Shakespeare's. Apart from its purpose to improve upon the master by restricting the interest to the dominion of passion alone, Dryden's play is a noble work. Meanwhile several of his comedies were suppressed or failed because of their obscenity, yet in his own conduct the author was strictly moral.

In 1681 Dryden showed his great gifts as a satirist in his poem, "Absalom and Achitophel," directed against Lord Shaftesbury, then under arrest for treason for conspiring to exclude the Duke of York from the throne as a papist. This was the first great English satire. In it the Duke of Monmouth, the rebel, who was really a natural son of the king, appears as Absalom, Charles as the Hebrew King, Shaftesbury as the tricky Achitophel, who inspired the revolt. Dryden lashed the hated Shaftesbury, and his personal enemy, Buckingham of "The Rehearsal," called Zimri in the satire,

with all the force of genius, and nine editions were sold in a year. While he admitted and condemned the "Popish Plot," Dryden was out of sympathy with those who would again have plunged the country into civil war. The "Religio Laici," written soon after this, indicated his revulsion from the Puritanism which seemed to encourage unrest. But his final religious change is shown in "The Hind and Panther," which is a strong poetical argument, in the form of fable, for Catholicism. It was written after he joined the Roman communion. A quatrain from this poem has twofold interest, first as being an expression of his feelings on making the change, and also, as a literary singularity, in its close resemblance of spirit and structure to a stanza in Cardinal Newman's exquisite hymn "Lead, Kindly Light:"

"My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires;
My manhood, long misled by wandering fires,

Followed false lights; and when their glimpse was gone,
My pride struck out new sparkles of her own."

When the Revolution of 1688 came, Dryden lost his laureateship and other sources of emolument. Again he turned to the stage and miscellaneous literary work. He published translations of the classical poets, from Homer to Virgil. In his sixty-seventh year he wrote the noble ode on St. Cecilia's day, known as "Alexander's Feast;" still later came his versions of tales from Boccaccio and Chaucer, published as "Fables." Despite his versatility, industry, and popularity, Dryden had to struggle for bread to the end. The devotion of his disciple, Alexander Pope, greatly contributed to the growth of his posthumous fame. He died in 1700, the acknowledged head of literary England, if not among the elect poets, still a mighty wielder of verse in serious satire, and capable of poetical flight as lofty as in the ode. Yet his enviable epitaph is found in the tribute of a great modern writer, who says: "It was by no mere figure that the group (of his fellow-authors) called itself a republic of letters, and honored in Dryden the chosen chief of their republic. He had done more than any man to create a literary class. It was his resolve to live by his pen, that first raised literature into a profession."

ABSALOM.

In this portrait is delineated the Duke of Monmouth, natural son of Charles II., who was the chosen leader of the Protestant party that wished to exclude James, the Duke of York, from the throne. He actually headed a rebellion in 1685.

Of all this numerous progeny was none
So beautiful, so brave, as Absalon :
Whether, inspired by some diviner lust,
His father got him with a greater gust,
Or that his conscious destiny made way
By manly beauty to imperial sway.
Early in foreign fields he won renown
With kings and states allied to Israel's crown;
In peace the thoughts of war he could remove,
And seemed as he were only born for love.
Whate'er he did was done with so much ease,
In him alone 'twas natural to please;
His motions all accompanied with grace,
And Paradise was opened in his face.
With secret joy indulgent David viewed
His youthful image in his son renewed;
To all his wishes nothing he denied

And made the charming Annabel his bride.
What faults he had (for who from faults is free?)
His father could not or he would not see.

Some warm excesses, which the law forebore,
Were construed youth that purged by boiling o'er;

And Amnon's murder by a specious name

Was called a just revenge for injured fame.

Thus praised and loved, the noble youth remained,
While David undisturbed in Sion reigned.

ACHITOPHEL.

THIS character is intended for the Earl of Shaftesbury, who was charged with instigating the Duke of Monmouth to rebellion.

Some, by their Monarch's fatal mercy grown
From pardoned rebels kinsmen to the throne,
Were raised in power and public office high;
Strong bands, if bands ungrateful men could tie.

Of these the false Achitophel was first,
A name to all succeeding ages cursed;
For close designs and crooked counsels fit,
Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit,
Restless, unfixed in principles and place,
In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace;
A fiery soul, which working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy body to decay,

And o'er-informed the tenement of clay.
A daring pilot in extremity,

Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high,
He sought the storms; but for a calm unfit,
Would steer too nigh the sands to boast his wit.
Great wits are sure to madness near allied

And thin partitions do their bounds divide;
Else, why should he, with wealth and honor blest,
Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?
Punish a body which he could not please,
Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease?
And all to leave what with his toil he won
To that unfeathered two-legged thing, a son,
Got, while his soul did huddled notions try,
And born a shapeless lump, like anarchy.
In friendship false, implacable in hate,
Resolved to ruin or to rule the state;
To compass this the triple bond he broke,

The pillars of the public safety shook,

And fitted Israel for a foreign yoke;

Then, seized with fear, yet still affecting fame,
Usurped a patriot's all-atoning name.
So easy still it proves in factious times
With public zeal to cancel private crimes.
How safe is treason and how sacred ill,
Where none can sin against the people's will,
Where crowds can wink and no offence be known,
Since in another's guilt they find their own!
Yet fame deserved no enemy can grudge;
The statesman we abhor, but praise the judge.
In Israel's courts ne'er sat an Abbethdin [judge]
With more discerning eyes or hands more clean,
Unbribed, unsought, the wretched to redress,
Swift of despatch and easy of access.

Oh! had he been content to serve the crown
With virtues only proper to the gown,

Or had the rankness of the soil been freed
From cockle that oppressed the noble seed,
David for him his tuneful harp had strung
And Heaven had wanted one immortal song.
But wild ambition loves to slide, not stand,
And Fortune's ice prefers to Virtue's land.
Achitophel, grown weary to possess
A lawful fame and lazy happiness,
Disdained the golden fruit to gather free,
And lent the crowd his arm to shake the tree.
Now, manifest of crimes contrived long since,
He stood at bold defiance with his Prince,
Held up the buckler of the people's cause
Against the crown, and skulked behind the laws.
The wished occasion of the Plot he takes;
Some circumstances finds, but more he makes;
By buzzing emissaries fills the ears

Of listening crowds with jealousies and fears,
Of arbitrary counsels brought to light,
And proves the King himself a Jebusite.
Weak arguments! which yet he knew full well
Were strong with people easy to rebel.
For governed by the moon, the giddy Jews
Tread the same track when she the prime renews:
And once in twenty years, their scribes record,
By natural instinct they change their lord.
Achitophel still wants a chief, and none
Was found so fit as warlike Absalom.

ZIMRI.

GEORGE VILLIERS, the Duke of Buckingham, is here wittily satirized. He criticized Dryden and was the enemy of Clarendon.

Some of their chiefs were princes of the land;

In the first rank of these did Zimri stand,

A man so various that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome:
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
Was everything by starts and nothing long;
But in the course of one revolving moon
Was chymist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon;