school, under the famous Dr. Busby. A school-boy poem on the death of Lord Hastings had the distinction, and we may add the misfortune, of being published in connection with sev

eral other elegies called forth by the same event. Some of its conceits are exceedingly ridiculous. The young nobleman had died of the small-pox, and Dryden exclaims:

"Was there no milder way than the small-pox,

The very filthiness of Pandora's box?"

Of the pustules he says:

"Each little pimple had a tear in it,

To wail the fault its rising did commit."

And as the climax of this absurdity:

"No comet need foretell his change drew on,
Whose corpse might seem a constellation."

Dryden's genius was slow in maturing, and much of his early work failed to give promise of his future eminence.

He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1650, and took his degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1654. No details of his college life have come down to us, except his punishment on one occasion for "disobedience to the vice-master, and contumacy in taking his punishment, inflicted by him." In 1654,

by the death of his father, he came into the possession of a small estate worth about sixty pounds a year. After leaving Cambridge, for which he entertained no great affection, he went to London, and served for a time as secretary to his cousin, Sir Gilbert Pickering, a favorite of Cromwell.

In 1658 he composed "Heroic Stanzas" on the death of Oliver Cromwell, which caused him to be spoken of as a rising poet. Though disfigured here and there by conceits, it is, upon the whole, a strong, manly poem, showing a just appreciation of the great Protector's life. His next effort does not reflect credit

on his character. It was the "Astræa Redux," written "on the happy restoration and return of his sacred Majesty, Charles II." After his eulogy of Cromwell two years before, we are hardly prepared for such lines as these:

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"For his long absence Church and State did groan;
Madness the pulpit, faction seized the throne:
Experienced age in deep despair was lost,
To see the rebel thrive, the loyal cross'd."

In 1663 he began to write for the stage. Instead of seeking to elevate public morals, or to attain perfection in art, it is to the lasting discredit of Dryden that he pandered to the vicious taste of the time. His first play, "The Wild Gallant," was not successful; and Pepys, in his "Diary," pronounced it so poor a thing as ever I saw in my life." Without following him through the vicissitudes of his dramatic career, it is enough to say that he wrote in all twenty-eight comedies and tragedies, and at length established his position as the first dramatist of his time. For a long time he followed French models, but at last came to recognize and professedly to imitate the "divine Shakespeare." In his comedies, as he tells us, he copied "the gallantries of the court." When in later years Jeremy Collier severely attacked the immoralities of the stage, Dryden, unlike several of his fellow dramatists who attempted a reply, pleaded guilty, and retracted all thoughts and expressions that could be fairly charged with "obscenity, profaneness, or immorality."

In his tragedies he imitated the heroic style of Corneille. They contain much splendid declamation, which too often degenerates into bombast. But frequently he reaches the height of genuine poetry. Only a poet could have written

these lines:

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Something like

That voice, methinks, I should have somewhere heard;
But floods of woe have hurried it far off

Beyond my ken of soul."

Or these:

"I feel death rising higher still and higher
Within my bosom; every breath I fetch
Shuts up my life within a shorter compass,
And, like the vanishing sound of bells, grows less
And less each pulse, till it be lost in air.”

When he moralizes he is often admirable:

"The gods are just,

But how can finite measure infinite?

Reason! alas, it does not know itself!

Yet man, vain man, would with his short-lined plummet
Fathom the vast abyss of heavenly justice.

Whatever is, is in its causes just,

Since all things are by fate. But purblind man

Sees but a part o' th' chain, the nearest links,
His eyes not carrying to that equal beam

That poises all above."

But the drama was not Dryden's sphere. In his mind the judgment had the ascendency over the imagination. He was strongest in analyzing, arguing, criticising. He was a master of satire — not indeed of that species which slovenly butchers a man, to use his own comparison, but rather of that species which has "the fineness of stroke to separate the head from the body, and leave it standing in its place." We shall say nothing of his "Annus Mirabilis," a long poem on the Dutch war and the London fire, except that it contains some of his manliest lines. It is not easy to surpass,

"Silent in smoke of cannon they come on;

"And his loud guns speak thick, like angry men;"

"The vigorous seaman every port-hole plies,

And adds his heart to every gun he fires."

In 1681 appeared the famous satire, "Absalom and Achitophel," the object of which was to bring discredit on the Earl