HENRY AINSWORTH, D. D., d. 1662, was a leader among the English Independents in the sixteenth century, and was banished on account of his religious opinions. His principal work is his Annotations on the Psalms, the Song of Solomon, and the Pentateuch. The Annotations have been highly commended, and are often quoted.

WILLIAM BRIDGE, 1600-1670, a Puritan Non-conformist divine of the time of Charles I., was a scholarly man, of studious habits, and an industrious writer. A collected edition of his works, in 5 vols, was published in 1845. They are chiefly sermons. "He was a very close student, rising every morning, both in winter and summer, at four o'clock, and continuing in his library until eleven" On the passage of the Act of Conformity, he gave up his living, and went to Rotterdam. Archbishop Laud writes: "In Norwich, one Mr. Bridge, rather than he would conform, hath left his lecture and two cures, and is gone into Holland." On the margin of this, King Charles wrote, "Let him go: we are well rid of him!"

REV. THOMAS BROOKES, 1680, was an English Independent divine, of some celebrity. An affecting and useful writer, though homely in his expressions.”— Darling. Works: The Unsearchable Riches of Christ; Precious Remedies for Satan's Devices; The Mute Christian under the Smarting Rod; A Golden Key to open Hid Treasures; Apples of Gold for Young Men and Women; The Private Key of Heaven; Heaven on Earth. "Precious Remedies' went through 60 editions; "Mute Christian," 50 editions; "Apples of Gold," 25 editions.

SAMUEL CLARKE, 1599–1682, a Non-conformist divine. Works: The Marrow of Ecclesiastical History, 2 vols. fol.; A General Martyrology, fol.; A Mirror or Looking-Glass, both for Saints and Sinners, 2 vols.; Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons; The Marrow of Divinity. SAMUEL CLARKE, 1626–1700, son of the preceding, wrote a Commentary on the Old and New Testament, which is well spoken of; also, some other works.

THOMAS GOODWIN, D. D., 1600–1697, was a high Calvinistic divine, of great learning, who gave up his preferments and became an Independent. He lived to be ninetyseven years old. His writings were exceedingly numerous. A collection, published after his death, and containing only part of his works, fills 5 vols., fol. They are to a large extent expository.

THOMAS MANTON, D. D., 1620-1677, was a learned Non-conformist divine, educated at Oxford. His writings are very numerous and are held in high estimation. They are mainly of an expository character. He wrote Commentaries on several of the Epistles, an Exposition of the Lord's Prayer, and One Hundred and Ninety Sermons on the 119th Psalm.

JOHN BIDDLE, 1615-1662, has been styled "The Father of the English Unitarians."

Biddle wrote several treatises calling in question the received opinion in regard to the Holy Spirit, for which he was imprisoned, and even condemned to death, though the latter sentence was not executed. The names of some of his works are A Confes sion of Faith touching the Holy Trinity; A Brief Scripture Catechism; A History of the Unitarians, &c.

CHAPTER X.

DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

THE period included in this Chapter embraces the reigns. of Charles II. and James II., 1660-1688, the final expulsion of the Stuarts, the Revolution of 1688, and the reign of William and Mary, 1688-1702. It was, especially in its earlier part, a period of great licentiousness of manners, which is but too faithfully reflected in much of its poetical and all of its dramatic literature.

The authors of this period are, for convenience of description, divided into four Sections: 1. Poets, including the dramatic writers, and beginning with Dryden; 2. Philosophical and Miscellaneous writers, beginning with Locke; 3. Theological writers, beginning with Tillotson; 4. The Early Friends, beginning with George Fox.

I. THE POETS.

Dryden.

John Dryden, 1631-1700, fills a larger space in English literature than any other writer between the age of Milton and that of Pope and Addison. Dryden is confessedly one of the greatest of English poets; and although there may be a question among critics as to his precise rank, his name is never omitted in any enumeration of our first-class authors.

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His Early History. - Dryden was born of an ancient family of the name of Driden. The change in the spelling of his name was a fancy of his own. His parents were rigid Puritans. He was educated first at Westminster, under the famous Dr. Busby, and afterwards at Cambridge. He was early in life a great admirer of Cromwell, and his first poem of any note was Heroic Stanzas on the Late Lord Protector, written on the occasion of Cromwell's death. They contain some passages in his happiest vein. The following may be quoted:

"His grandeur he derived from heaven alone,

For he was great ere fortune made him so;
And wars, like mists that rise against the sun,

Made him but greater seem, not greater grow."

Dryden, however, always worshipped the rising sun, and on the overthrow of the Commonwealth and the restoration of the Stuarts, he went over to the winning party and wrote his Astræa Redux, a poem of welcome to the new order of things. He wrote also A Panegyric to his Sacred Majesty King Charles II.

Career as a Dramatist. - The Restoration brought the drama again into vogue, and Dryden applied himself to writing for the stage. His first play, The Wild Gallant, was not successful. His next, The Rival Ladies, fared better. The Indian Emperor was a triumph, and the author was at once a man of mark. It led, among other things, to his marriage to a noble lady, daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. The marriage was ill assorted. It brought him neither wealth nor happiness. When the lady wished herself a book, that she might have more of his company, he replied, "Be an almanac, then, my dear, that I may change you once a year." He revenged himself for her railing by uttering sarcasms on the sex, in his plays. In one of them, for instance, he says, that woman was made from the dross and refuse of man," upon which Jeremy Collier wittily remarks, "I did not know be‐ fore that man's dross lay in his ribs : I believe it sometimes lies higher." Dryden's plays are twenty-nine in number, and run through thirty-two years of his life,—from his thirty-first to his sixty-third year.

Character of his Plays. All of Dryden's earlier plays are modelled after the French drama, which King Charles had made fashionable. They are in rhyming verse, are occupied solely by heroic and exalted personages, and filled with scenes of inflated and incongruous splendor. When this fashion was at its height, it received a rude shock from a lively parody, The Rehearsal, written by the Duke of Buckingham. Dryden's plays after this were more natural, and he

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 charge 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, în 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 Iræ, 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.