wrote them in blank verse, which he formerly had scouted as beneath the dignity of the drama. But in all his plays, rhyming or unrhyming, heroic or comic, he is fully open to the change of immorality.

"The female character and softer passions seem to have been entirely beyond his reach. His love is always licentiousness, his tenderness a mere trick of the stage. His merit consists in a sort of Eastern magnificence of style, and in the richness of his versification. The bowl and dagger - glory, ambition, lust, and crime are the staple materials of his tragedy, and lead occasionally to poetical grandeur and brilliancy of fancy. His comedy is, with scarce an exception, false to nature, improbable and ill-arranged, and subversive equally of taste and morality."-Chambers.

Success as a Satirist. - Dryden may have deserved the ridicule thrown upon him in The Rehearsal, and in other satires by Shadwell and Little. But he retaliated upon his opponents in the poem of Absalom and Achitophel, with wonderful vigor. The success of this bold political satire was almost unprecedented, and placed Dryden above all his political contemporaries. "His antagonists came on with infinite zeal and fury, discharged their ill-aimed blows on every side, and exhausted their strength in violent and ineffective rage; but the keen and trenchant blade of Dryden never makes a thrust in vain, — never strikes but at a vulnerable point."-Sir Walter Scott.

Religious Poems. - Not long after this, Dryden published a poem in quite a different vein, Religio Laici, to defend the Church of England against dissenters. Towards the close of his life he embraced the Catholic religion, and wrote the Hind and Panther in defence of his new opinions. In this poem, the Hind is the Church of Rome; the spotted Panther is the Church of England; while the Independents, Quakers, Anabaptists, etc., are bears, hares, boars, etc. The Calvinists are wolves:

"More haughty than the rest, the wolfish race
Appears, with belly gaunt and famished face —
Never was so deformed a beast of grace.

His ragged tail betwixt his legs he wears,

Close clapped for shame, but his rough crest he rears,
And pricks up his predestinating ears."

Other Works. - One of Dryden's remarkable poems was his Annus Mirabilis, being a poetical account of the events of the year 1666. His latest productions were his poetical versions of portions of Juvenal and Persius, and of the Æneid of Virgil. He wrote also, about the same time, his Fables, being imitations from Boccaccio and Chaucer. They are admirably done, and have been read more than almost any part of his works. Very late in life, also, he wrote his Ode to St. Cecilia, the loftiest and most imaginative of all his compositions.

Prose Works. Dryden excelled in prose almost as much as in poetry. His Essay on Dramatic Poets was the first attempt in English at regular criticism, and has received universal commendation. His other prose works are the pieces written as accompaniments to his plays, and consist of prefaces, dedications, and critical essays. "The prose of Dryden may rank with the best in the English language.”Sir Walter Scott.

"Without either creative imagination or any power of pathos, he is in argument, in satire, and in declamatory magnificence, the greatest of our poets. His poetry, indeed, is not the highest kind of poetry, but in that kind he stands unrivalled and unapproached. Pope, his great disciple, who, in correctness, in neatness, and in the brilliancy of epigrammatic point, has outshone his master, has not come near him in easy flexible vigor, in indignant vehemence, in narrative rapidity, any more than he has in sweep and variety of versification. Dryden never writes coldly, or timidly, or drowsily. The movement of verse always sets him on fire, and whatever he produces is a coinage hot from the brain, not slowly scraped or pinched into shape, but struck out as from a die with a few stout blows or a single wrench of the screw. It is this fervor especially which gives to his personal sketches their wonderful life and force: his Absalom and Achitophel is the noblest portrait gallery in poetry."- Craik,

His complete works were edited by Sir Walter Scott, in 18 vols., 8vo.

Roscommon.

Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, 1633-1684, a native of Ireland, was a nobleman of cultivated tastes and great purity of character; and he holds a respectable place among English poets.

Roscommon wrote Odes, Prologues, etc.; translated Dies Ira, and Horace's Art of Poetry; and wrote an Essay on Translated Verse.

"It was my Lord Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse which made me uneasy till I tried whether or no I was capable of following his rules and of reducing the speculative into practice."- Dryden.

"He is elegant, but not great; he never labors after exquisite beauties, but he seldom falls into grave faults. He improved taste, if he did not enlarge knowledge."Johnson.

"Roscommon, not more learned than good,

With manners gracious as his noble blood;
To him the wit of Greece and Rome was known,

And every author's merits but his own."- Pope.

Roscommon seems to have been about the only writer of his time who was thoroughly pure and moral.

Orrery.

Roger Boyle, 1621-1679, Earl of Orrery, and son of the "Great Earl of Cork," like most of the noble family to which he belonged, cultivated authorship.

The Earl's works are rather numerous, but are not accounted as of a very high order. They are mostly poetical. The following is a partial list: Tragedies, Henry V., The Black Prince, Herod the Great, Triphon, Mustapha, Altemira; Two Comedies, Mr. Anthony, and Guzman; Poems on the Fasts and Festivals of the Church; Poem on the Death of Cowley; Parthenissa, a Romance; A Treatise on the Art of War.

Dorset.

Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, 1637-1706, a nobleman of gay life and easy manners, wrote a few songs which were very popular, and some satires which "sparkled with wit as splendid as that of Butler."- Macaulay.

Dorset's most celebrated song, "To all yon ladies now on land," was written at sea, the night before a naval engagement. He was liberal and judicions in the use of his money among men of letters, and was a general favorite. He was "an intellectual voluptuary, and a master of all those pleasing branches of knowledge which can be acquired without severe application."— Macaulay.

Rochester.

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, 1647-1680, was a gay and profligate courtier of this period, who was celebrated in his day for his wit, and whose life and writings were equally at variance with religion and morality.

His Career. - Rochester was educated at Oxford; travelled on the continent; and fought against the Dutch. His recklessness and dissipation at Court brought him prematurely to the grave. During his life he was admired as a wit and poet, but on his death-bed, being converted by the efforts of Bishop Burnet, he gave strict orders that his profane writings should be destroyed. Notwithstanding this prohibition, there appeared, in 1780, a volume purporting to be a collection of his poems. Several other editions have appeared subsequently. Under the circumstances, it is not possible to speak confidently on the genuineness of the collections as a whole. Some of the pieces are undoubtedly Rochester's, such as the Imitation of Horace's Satire, Satire against Man, Verses upon Nothing. The last is generally considered the best. The poems do not sustain their author's reputation, and have little to recommend them to readers of the present day. Their obscenity is repulsive, and their so-called wit, although it flashes at times, is in the main tedious.

WILLIAM CAVENDISH, Duke of Devonshire, 1640-1707, a statesman of high rank, is also known as an author. Works: Ode on the Death of Queen Mary; An Allusion to the Bishop of Cambray's Supplement to Homer, a Poem; Fragments on the Peerage;

Speeches. "He was the friend and companion, and at the same time the equal, of Ormond, Dorset, Roscommon, and all the noble ornaments of that reign of wit in which he passed his youth."- Campbell.

SIR GEORGE ETHERIDGE, 1636-1690, was one of those gay and dissolute writers and wits who made the reign of Charles II. both famous and infamous.

Etheridge began studying for the bar, but abandoned the law, and betook himself to the drama. He wrote The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub; She Would if She Could, a Comedy; The Man of the Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter, a Comedy, etc. The last was his most successful piece. "It is, perhaps, the most elegant comedy, and contains more of the real manuers of high life than any one the English stage was ever adorned with."- Biog. Dram. "Sir George Etheridge was as thorough a fop as ever I saw; he was exactly his own Sir Fopling Flutter."- Spence's Anecdotes.

Yet this man was knighted, and was sent as British Minister to Ratisbon. After a gay evening party given by him at Ratisbon, he is said to have fallen down stairs and broken his neck while taking leave of his guests.

SIR WILLIAM KILLIGREW, LL.D., 1605-1693, was an active royalist in the times of the Stuarts, and at the Restoration was First Vice-Chamberlain to Charles II. Killigrew gave much time to literary pursuits. Among his works are the following: Pandora, a Comedy; Selindra, a Tragi-Comedy; Ormasdes, a Tragi-Comedy; The Siege of Urbin, a Tragi-Comedy; The Imperial Tragedy; Midnight and Daily Thoughts, a religious work, etc.

HENRY VAUGHAN, 1621-1695, holds a respectable rank among the second-class poets of that day.

Vaughan was a Welshman, born in Brecknockshire, and had something of the enthusiasm characteristic of his race. He was bred to the law, but abandoned it for physic. In the earlier part of his career he wrote translations from Juvenal and other classical authors. Later in life he became deeply religious, and wrote sacred lyrics: Silex Scintillans, or Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations; The Mount of Olives, or Solitary Devotions; Flores Solitudinis, or Certain Rare and Eloquent Pieces. "He is one of the hardest even of the inferior order of the school of conceit; but he has some few scattered thoughts that meet our eye amidst his harsh pages, like wild flowers on a barren heath." - Campbell. This verdict of Campbell's does scant justice to Vaughan. He certainly holds a respectable rank in the second class of sacred poets.

JOSEPH BEAUMONT, D. D., 1615-1699, an eminent poet and scholar of his day, long since forgotten, was King's Professor of Divinity, and Master of St. Peter's College, in Cambridge. His Psyche, or Love's Mystery, in twenty-four cantos, displaying the Intercourse betwixt Christ and the Soul, is a curiosity of literature, being the longest poem in our language. It contains 38,922 lines, "being considerably longer than the Fairy Queen, nearly four times the length of Paradise Lost, and five or six times as long as the Excursion." It was written "for the avoiding of mere idleness," as the task he might safeliest presume upon, without the society of books," the Puritans having driven him from his fellowship at Cambridge. The bulk of it was written in less than a year, 1647-8, and then published. A second edition, revised, with four new

cantos, was published in 1702. Pope said: "There are in it a great many flowers well worth gathering, and a man who has the art of stealing wisely, will find his account in reading it."

Some of Beaumont's Minor Poerus, English and Latin, were published in 1749. They have great merit, or rather there are some very fine bits among them. Both volumes

are now scarce.

NICHOLAS BRADY, 1659-1726, an English clergyman, was the author of a translation of Virgil's Eneid into English verse, but is chiefly known by his Version of the Psalms of David, made in conjunction with Nahum Tate. Tate and Brady was for many generations of Englishinen the only hymnal known in their church service. It did a good work in its day, and had some poetical merit, notwithstanding the abundant ridicule which has been thrown upon it, and the general contempt into which it has now fallen. (See article on Hymnody, p. 135.)

JOHN POMFRET, 1667-1703; studied at Cambridge and took orders in the Church of England. Pomfret is the author of a few poems, one of which, The Choice, was very popular in its day, but has since gone almost wholly out of fashion. It is slightly praised by Johnson, whereas Hallam speaks of it as intolerable in its tame and frigid monotony.

REV. THOMAS CREECH, 1659-1700, is known in literature by his translations from the Latin poets. He translated Lucretius and Horace, and portions of Theocritus, Ovid, Juvenal, and Plutarch. His translations are not generally ranked very high. He committed suicide, in a fit of insanity, it is supposed,

JOHN PHILIPS, 1676-1708, "the poet of the English vintage" (Macaulay) wrote a poem in two books, On Cider, in imitation of the Georgics of Virgil; a mock-heroic poem, Splendid Shilling, in imitation of the blank verse of Paradise Lost; and a poem called Blenheim. The poem On Cider is more remarkable for its scientific accuracy than for its poetical beauty, while that on The Splendid Shilling gives pain by its application of the high-sounding phrases of Milton to common and vulgar topics.

THOMAS BROWN, 1663-1704, a facetions poet, commonly called Tom Brown, was noted equally for his skill in languages and his ribaldry. He lives in literary history, not from any inherent merit in his works, but solely because he is often named or referred to in the works of Addison, Dryden, and others of good repute.

Dramatic Writers.

Thomas Otway, 1651–1685, was a dramatic writer of considerable note, contemporary with Dryden.

Otway was educated at Oxford. He began as an actor in London, but, not meeting with much success, betook himself to writing plays, partly original, partly translations or imitations from the French.

Many of Otway's plays were very successful at the time, but only two have maintained their reputation among readers and actors of the present day, viz.: The Orphan, and Venice Preserved. Otway was improvident by nature, and died young in very indigent circumstances. His untimely fate was his own fault, rather than that of his