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DRYDEN, AND THE LITERATURE OF THE
RESTORATION.

IT is a common remark that literature flourishes best in times of social order and leisure, and suffers immediate depression whenever the public mind is agitated by violent civil controversies. The remark is more true than such popular inductions usually are. It is confirmed, on the small scale, by what every one finds in his own experience. When a family is agitated by any matter affecting its interests, there is an immediate cessation from all the lighter luxuries of books and music wherewith it used to beguile its leisure. All the members of the family are intent for the time being on the matter in hand; if books are consulted it is for some purpose of practical reference; and if pens are active, it is in writing letters of business. Not till the matter is fairly concluded are the recreations of music and literature resumed; though then, possibly, with a keener zest and a mind more full and fresh than before. Precisely so it is on the larger scale. If everything that is spoken or written be called literature, there is probably always about the same amount of literature going on in a community; or, if there is any increase or decrease, it is but in proportion to the increase of the population. But, if by literature we mean a certain peculiar kind and quality of spoken or written matter, recognisable by its likeness to certain known precedents, then, undoubtedly literature flourishes in times of quiet and security, and wanes in times of convulsion and disorder. When the storm of some great civil contest is blowing, it is impossible for even the serenest man to shut

BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW, July 1854. The Annotated Edition of the English Poets: Edited by ROBERT BELL. "Poetical Works of John Dryden." 3 vols. London. 1854.

Warton's History of English Pretry.

int

himself quite in from the noise, and turn over the leaves of his Horace, or practise his violin, as undistractedly as before. Great is the power of pococurantism; and it is a noble sight to see, in the midst of some Whig and Tory excitement which is throwing the general community into sixes and sevens, and sending mobs along the streets, the calm devotee of hard science, or the impassioned lover of the ideal, going on his way, aloof from it all, and smiling at it all. But there are times when even these obdurate gentlemen will be touched, in spite of themselves, to the tune of what is going on; when the shouts of the mob will penetrate to the closets of the most studious; and when, as Archimedes of old had to leave his darling diagrams and trudge along the Syracusan streets to superintend the construction of rough cranes and catapults, so philosophers and poets alike will have to quit their favourite occupations, and be whirled along in the common agitation. These are times when whatever literature there is assumes a character of immediate and practical interest. Just as, in the supposed case, the literary activity of the family is consumed in mere letters of business, so, in this, the literary activity of the community exhausts itself in newspaper-articles, public speeches, and pamphlets, more or less elaborate, on the present crisis. There may be a vast amount of mind at work, and as much, on the whole, may be written as before; but the very excess of what may be called the pamphlet-literature, which is perishable in its nature, will leave a deficiency in the various departments of literature more strictly so called-philosophical or expository literature, historical literature, and the literature of pure imagination. Not till the turmoil is over, not till the battle has been fairly fought out, and the mental activity involved in it has been let loose for more scattered work, will the calmer muses resume their sway, and the press send forth treatises and histories and poems and romances as well as pamphlets. Then, however, men may return to literature with a new zest, and the very storm which has interrupted the course of pure literature for a time may infuse into such literature when it begins again, a fresher and stronger spirit. If the battle has ended in a victory, there will be a tone of

Spenser could oft Ease of mind is Faery Acceory; per was compi ir la

joy, of exultation, and of scorn, in what men think and write after it; if it has ended in a defeat, all that is thought and written will be tinged by a deeper and finer sorrow.

in

The history of English literature affords some curious illustrations of this law. It has always puzzled historians, for example, to account for such a great unoccupied gap in our literary progress as occurs between the death of Chaucer and the middle of the reign of Elizabeth. From the year 1250, when the English language first makes its appearance in anything like its present form, to the year 1400, when Chaucer died, forms, as all know, the infant age of our literature. It was an age of great literary activity; and how much was achieved in it remains apparent in the fact that it culminated in a man like Chaucer a man whom, without any drawback for the early epoch at which he lived, we still regard as one of our literary princes. Nor was Chaucer the solitary name of his age. He had some notable contemporaries, both in verse and prose. When we pass from Chaucer's age, however, we have to overleap nearly a hundred and eighty years before we alight upon a period presenting anything like an adequate show of literary continuation. A few smaller names, like those of Lydgate, Surrey, and Skelton, are all that can be cited as poetical thite. Bo.representatives of this sterile interval in the literary history of England; whatever of Chaucer's genius still lingered in the Junrey B-1516. island seeming to have travelled northward, and taken refuge 1518. in a series of Scottish poets, far excelling any of their English contemporaries. How is this to be accounted for? Is it that really, during this period, there was less of available mind than before in England; that the quality of the English nerve, so to speak, had degenerated? By no means necessarily so. Englishmen, during this period, were engaged in enterprises requiring no small amount of intellectual and moral vigour; and there remain to us, from the same period, specimens of grave and serious prose, which, if we do not place them among the gems of our literature, we at least regard as evidence that our ancestors of those days were men of heart and wit and solid sense. In short, we are driven to suppose that there was something in the social circumstances of England during the

long period in question, which prevented such talent as there was from assuming the particular form of literature. Fully to make out what this "something" was, may baffle us; but when we remember that this was the period of the civil wars of the Roses, and also of the great Anglican Reformation, we have reason enough to conclude that the dearth of pure literature may have been owing, in part, to the engrossing nature of those practical questions which then disturbed English society. When Chaucer wrote, England, under the splendid rule of the third Edward, was potent and triumphant abroad, but large and leisurely at home; but scarcely had that monarch vacated the throne when a series of civil jars began, which tore the nation into factions, and was speedily followed by a religious movement as powerful in its effects. Accordingly, though printing was introduced during this period, and thus Englishmen had greater temptations to write, what they did write was almost exclusively plain grave prose, intended for practical or polemical occasions, and making no figure in a historical retrospect. How different when, passing the controversial reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Mary, we come upon the golden days of Queen Bess! Controversy enough remained to give occasion to plenty of polemical prose; but about the middle of her reign, when England, once more great and powerful abroad as in the time of the Edwards, settled down within herself into a new lease of social order and leisure under an ascertained government, there began an outburst of literary genius such as no age or 1 country had ever before witnessed. The literary fecundity of that period of English history which embraces the latter half of the reign of Elizabeth, and the whole of the reign of James I. (1580-1625), is a perpetual astonishment to us all. In the entire preceding three centuries and a half, reckoning from the first use of the English tongue, we can with difficulty name six men that can, by any charity of judgment, be regarded as stars in our literature, and of these only one that is a star of the first magnitude: whereas, in this brief period of forty-five or fifty years, we can reckon up a host of poets and prose-writers all noticeable on high literary grounds,

and of whom at least thirty were men of extraordinary dimensions. Indeed, in the contemplation of the intellectual abundance and variety of this age-the age of Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Bacon, and Raleigh, and Hooker, and Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher, and Donne, and Herbert, and Massinger, and their illustrious contemporaries—we feel ourselves driven from the theory that so rich a literary crop could have resulted from that mere access of social leisure after a long series of national broils to which we do in part attribute it, and are obliged to suppose that there must have been, along with this, an actually finer substance and condition, for the time being, of the national nerve. The very brain of England must have become more "quick, nimble, and forgetive," before the time of leisure came.

We have spoken of this great age of English literature as terminating with the reign of James I., in 1625. In point of fact, however, it extended some way into the reign of his son, Charles I. Spenser had died in 1599, before James had ascended the English throne; Shakespeare and Beaumont had died in 1616, while James still reigned; Fletcher died in 1625; Bacon died in 1626, when the crown had been but a year on Charles's head. But while these great men and many of their contemporaries had vanished from the scene before England had any experience of the first Charles, some of their peers survived to tell what kind of men they had been. Ben Jonson lived till 1637, and was poet-laureate to Charles I.; Donne and Drayton lived till 1631; Herbert, till 1632; Chapman, till 1634; Dekker, till 1638; Ford, till 1639; and Heywood and Massinger, till 1640.

The whole of

There is one point in the reign of Charles, however, where a clear line may be drawn separating the last of the Elizabethan giants from their literary successors. This is the point at which the Civil War commences. the earlier part of Charles's reign was a preparation for this war; but it cannot be said to have fairly begun till the meeting of the Long Parliament in 1640, when Charles had been fifteen years on the throne. If we select this year as the commencement of the great Puritan and Republican Revolu