I have pleaded guilty to all thoughts and expressions of mine which can be truly argued obscenity, profaneness, or immorality, and retract them. If he be my enemy, let him triumph; if he be my friend, as I have given him no personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance." 22 There is some wit in what follows: "He (Collier) is too much given to horseplay in his raillery, and comes to battle like a dictator from the plough. I will not say the zeal of God's house has eaten him up,' but I am sure it has devoured some part of his good manners and civility." 23 Such a repentance raises a man; when he humbles himself thus, he must be a great man. He was so in mind and in heart, full of solid arguments and individual opinions, above the petty mannerism of rhetoric and affectations of style, a master of verse, a slave to his idea, with that abundance of thought which is the sign of true genius: "Thoughts such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only difficulty is to chuse or to reject, to run them into verses, or to give them the other harmony of prose: I have so long studied and practised both, that they are grown into a habit, and become familiar to me. With these powers he entered upon his second career; the English constitution and genius opened it to him.

" 24

Section VII.-How Literature in England is Occupied with Politics and Religion

"A man," says La Bruyère, "born a Frenchman and a Christian finds himself constrained in satire; great subjects are forbidden to him; he essays them sometimes, and then turns aside to small things, which he elevates by the beauty of his genius and his style." It was not so in England. Great subjects were given up to vehement discussion; politics and religion, like two arenas, invited every talent and every passion to boldness and to battle. The king, at first popular, had roused opposition by his vices and errors, and bent before public discontent as before the intrigue of parties. It was known that he had sold the interests of England to France; it was believed that he would deliver up the consciences of Protestants to the Papists. The lies of Oates, the murder of the magistrate Godfrey, his corpse solemnly paraded in the streets of London, had inflamed the imagination and

22 Preface to the Fables, xi. 238.

VOL. II.-17

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid. xi. 209.

prejudices of the people; the judges, blind or intimidated, sent innocent Roman Catholics to the scaffold, and the mob received with insults and curses their protestations of innocence. The king's brother had been dismissed from his offices, and it was proposed to exclude him from the throne. The pulpit, the theatre, the press, the hustings, resounded with discussions and recriminations. The names of Whigs and Tories arose, and the loftiest debates of political philosophy were carried on, enlivened by the feeling of present and practical interests, embittered by the rancor of old and wounded passions. Dryden plunged in; and his poem of "Absalom and Achitophel" was a political pamphlet." They who can criticise so weakly," he says in the preface," as to imagine that I have done my worst, may be convinced at their own cost that I can write severely with more ease than I can gently." A Biblical allegory, suited to the taste of the time, hardly concealed the names, and did not hide the men. He describes the tranquil old age and incontestable right of King David; the charm, pliant humor, popularity of his natural son Absalom; the genius and treachery of Achitophel, who stirs up the son against the father, unites the clashing ambitions, and reanimates the conquered factions. There is hardly any wit here; there is no time to be witty in such contests; think of the roused people who listened, men in prison or exile who are waiting: fortune, liberty, life was at stake. The thing is to strike the nail on the head, hard, not gracefully. The public must recog

1 Charles II.

The Earl of Shaftesbury:

The Duke of Monmouth.

"Of these the false Achitophel was first,
A name to all succeeding ages curst:
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 storm; 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 honour 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.'

nize the characters, shout their names as they recognize the portraits, applaud the attacks which are made upon them, rail at them, hurl them from the high rank which they covet. Dryden passes them all in review:

"In the first rank of these did Zimri 4 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;
Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.
Blest madman, who could every hour employ
With something new to wish or to enjoy!
Railing and praising were his usual themes;
And both, to show his judgment, in extremes:
So over-violent, or over-civil,

That every man with him was God or devil.
In squandering wealth was his peculiar art;

Nothing went unrewarded but desert.

Beggared by fools whom still he found too late,
He had his jest, and they had his estate.

He laugh'd himself from Court; then sought relief
By forming parties, but could ne'er be chief:
For spite of him, the weight of business fell
On Absalom and wise Achitophel;
Thus wicked but in will, of means bereft,
He left not faction, but of that was left.

"Shimei," whose youth did early promise bring
Of zeal to God and hatred to his King;
Did wisely from expensive sins refrain
And never broke the Sabbath but for gain:
Nor ever was he known an oath to vent,
Or curse, unless against the government."

Against these attacks their chief, Shaftesbury, made a stand; when accused of high treason he was declared not guilty by the grand jury, in spite of all the efforts of the court, amidst the applause of a great crowd; and his partisans caused a medal to be struck, bearing his face, and boldly showing on the reverse London Bridge and the Tower, with the sun rising and shining

The Duke of Buckingham.

Slingsby Bethel.

through a cloud. Dryden replied by his poem of the "Medal," and the violent diatribe overwhelmed the open provocation:

"Oh, could the style that copied every grace
And plow'd such furrows for an eunuch face,
Could it have formed his ever-changing will,
The various piece had tired the graver's skill!
A martial hero first, with early care,
Blown like a pigmy by the winds, to war;
A beardless chief, a rebel ere a man,
So young his hatred to his Prince began.
Next this (how wildly will ambition steer!)
A vermin wriggling in the usurper's ear;
Bartering his venal wit for sums of gold,
He cast himself into the saint-like mould,

Groaned, sighed, and prayed, while godliness was gain,
The loudest bag-pipe of the squeaking train."

The same bitterness envenomed religious controversy. Disputes on dogma, for a moment cast into the shade by debauched and sceptical manners, had broken out again, inflamed by the bigoted Roman Catholicism of the prince, and by the just fears of the nation. The poet who in " Religio Laici " was still an Anglican, though lukewarm and hesitating, drawn on gradually by his absolutist inclinations, had become a convert to Romanism, and in his poem of “ The Hind and the Panther" fought for his new creed. "The nation," he says in the preface," is in too high a ferment for me to expect either fair war or even so much as fair quarter from a reader of the opposite party." And then, making use of medieval allegories, he represents all the heretical sects as beasts of prey, worrying a white hind of heavenly origin; he spares neither coarse comparisons, gross sarcasms, nor open objurgations. The argument is close and theological throughout. His hearers were not wits, who cared to see how a dry subject could be adorned; they were not theologians, only by accident and for a moment, animated by mistrustful and cautious feelings, like Boileau in his "Amour de Dieu." They were oppressed men, barely recovered from a secular persecution, attached to their faith by their sufferings, ill at ease under the visible menaces and ominous hatred of their restrained foes. Their poet must be a dialectician and a schoolman; he needs all the sternness of logic; he is immeshed in it, like a recent convert, saturated with the proofs which have separated him from the

national faith, and which support him against public reprobation, fertile in distinctions, pointing with his finger at the weaknesses of an argument, subdividing replies, bringing back his adversary to the question, thorny and unpleasing to a modern reader, but the more praised and loved in his own time. In all English minds there is a basis of gravity and vehemence; hate rises tragic, with a gloomy outbreak, like the breakers of the North Sea. In the midst of his public strife Dryden attacks a private enemy, Shadwell, and overwhelms him with immortal scorn." A great epic style and solemn rhyme gave weight to his sarcasm, and the unlucky rhymester was drawn in a ridiculous triumph on the poetic car, whereon the muse sets the heroes and the gods. Dryden represented the Irishman Mac Flecknoe, an old king of folly, deliberating on the choice of a worthy successor, and choosing Shadwell as an heir to his gabble, a propagator of nonsense, a boastful conqueror of common sense. From all sides, through the streets littered with paper, the nations assembled to look upon the young hero, standing near the throne of his father, his brow surrounded with thick fogs, the vacant smile of satisfied imbecility floating over his countenance:

"The hoary prince in majesty appear'd,

High on a throne of his own labours rear'd.
At his right hand our young Ascanius sate,
Rome's other hope, and pillar of the state;
His brows thick fogs instead of glories grace,
And lambent dulness play'd around his face.
As Hannibal did to the altars come,
Sworn by his sire, a mortal foe to Rome;
So Shadwell swore, nor should his vow be vain,
That he, till death, true dulness would maintain;
And, in his father's right and realm's defence,
Ne'er to have peace with wit nor truce with sense.

The king himself the sacred unction made,

As king by office and as priest by trade.

In his sinister hand, instead of ball,

He placed a mighty mug of potent ale."

His father blesses him:

"Heavens bless my son! from Ireland let him reign
To far Barbadoes on the western main;

Of his dominion may no end be known,

And greater than his father's be his throne;

Mac Flecknoe.