DRYDEN.

[Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1845.]

SIR Walter Scott's admirable Life of Dryden concludes with this passage:"I have thus detailed the life, and offered some remarks on the literary character of John Dryden; who, educated in a pedantic taste and a fanatical religion, was destined, if not to give laws to the stage of England, at least to defend its liberties; to improve burlesque into satire; to free translation from the fetters of verbal metaphrase, and exclude from it the license of paraphrase; to teach posterity the powerful and varied poetical harmony of which their language was capable; to give an example of the lyric ode of unapproached excellence; and to leave a name SECOND ONLY TO THOSE OF MILTON AND OF SHAKSPEARE." Two names we miss, and muse where the immortal author of Waverley would have placed them; not surely below Dryden's those of CHAUCER and SPENSER.

Let those four names form a constellation-and the star Dryden, large and bright though it be, must not be looked for in the same region of the heavens. First in the second order of English poets-let glorious John keep the place assigned him by the greatest of Scotsmen. We desire not that he shall vacate the throne. But between the first order and the second, let that be remembered which seems here to have been forgotten, that immeasurable spaces intervene. "Second only to Shakspeare and Milton," implies near approach to them of another greatness inferior but in degree, and Dryden is thus lifted up in our imagination into the sphere of the Creators. On such mention of Milton, let us converse about him for a short half hour, and then venture to descend on Dryden, not with precipitation, but as in a balloon.

To an Englishman recollecting the poetical glories of his country, the Seventeenth Century often appears as the mother

of one great name- -MILTON. Original and mighty poets express, at its highest, the mind of their time as it is localized on their own soil. With Elizabeth the splendour of the feudal and chivalrous ages for England finally sets. A world expires, and ere long a new world rises. The Wars which signalize the new period, contrast deeply with those which heretofore tore the land. Those were the factions of high lineages. Now, thought seizes the weapons of earthly warfare. The rights vesting in an English subject by the statutes of the country-the rights vesting in man, as the subject of civil government, by the laws of God and nature, are scanned by awakened reason, and put arms into men's hands. The highest of all the interests of the human being -higher than all others, as eternity excels time-Religionis equally debated. The Protestant church is beleaguered by hostile sects-the Reformation subjected to the demand for a more searching and effective reform. Creed, worship, ecclesiastical discipline and government, all come into debate. A thraldom of opinion-a bondage of authority, that held for many centuries the nation bound together in no powerless union, is, upon the sudden, broken up. Men will know why they obey and why they believe; and human laws and divine truths are searched, as far as the wit of man is capable, to the roots. It is the spirit of the new time that has broken forth, and begins ambitiously, and riotously, to try its powers, but nobly, magnanimously and heroically too. MILTON Owned and showed himself a son of the time. Gifted with powers eminently fitted for severe investigation-apt for learning, and learned beyond most men-of a temper adverse and rebellious to an assumed and ungrounded control-large-hearted and large-minded to comprehend the diverse interests of men-personally fearless-devout in the highest and boldest sense of the word; namely, as acknowledging no supreme law but from heaven, and as confiding in the immediate communication of divine assistance to the faithful servants of heaven-possessing, moreover, in amplest measure, that peculiar endowment of sovereign poets which enables them to stand up as the teachers of a lofty and tender wisdom, as moral prophets to the species, the clear faculty of profound self-inspection-he was prepared to share in the intellectual strife and change of that day even had some interposing, pacific angel charmed away from the bosom of the land all other warfare and revolution—and to shine in

that age's work, even had the muse never smiled upon his cradled forehead, never laid the magical murmurs of song on his chosen lips. He was a politician, a theologian of his age -amidst the demolition of established things, the clang of arms, and the streaming of blood, whether in the field or upon the scaffold, a thinker and a writer.

There are times that naturally produce real, others that naturally produce imitative poetry. Tranquil, stagnating times produce the imitative; times that rouse in man selfconsciousness, produce the real. All great poetry has a moral foundation. It is imagination building upon the great, deep, universal, eternal human will. Therefore profound sympathy with man, and profound intelligence of man, aided by, or growing out of that profound sympathy, are vital to the true poet. But in stagnating times both sympathy with man sleeps, and the disclosure of man sleeps. Troubled times bring out humanity-show its terrible depths-also its might and grandeur-both ways its truth. A great poet seems to require his birth in an age when there are about him great self-revelations of man, for his vaticination. Moreover, his own particular being is more deeply and strongly stirred and shown to him in such a time. But the moral tempest may be too violent for poetry-as the Civil War of the Roses appeared to blast it and all letters-that of the Parliament contrariwise. The intellect of Milton, in the Paradise Lost, shows that it had seen "the giant-world enraged."

Happily for the literary fame of his country-for the solid exaltation in these latter ages of the sublime art which he cultivated-for the lovers of poetry who by inheritance or by acquisition speak the masculine and expressive language which he still ennobled-for the serene fame of the august poet himself the political repose which a new change (the restoration of detruded and exiled royalty to its ancestral throne) spread over the land, by shutting up the public hopes of the civil and ecclesiastical republican in despair, and by crushing his faction in the dust, gave him back, in the visionary blindness of undecaying age, to "the still air of delightful studies," in order that, in seclusion from all "barbarous dissonance," he might achieve the work destined to him from the beginning not less than the greatest ever achieved by man.

Educated by such a strife to power-and not more sublimely gifted than strenuously exercised-Milton had con

stantly carried in his soul the twofold consciousness of the highest destination. He knew himself born a great poet: and the names of great poets sounding through all time, rang in his ears. What Homer was to his people and to his language, he would be to his; and this was the lower vocation-glorious as earthly things may be glorious-and self-respecting while he thought of his own head as of one that shall be laurel-bound; yet magnanimous and publicspirited, while he trusted to shed upon his language and upon his country the beams of his own fame. This, we say, was his lower vocation, taken among thoughts and feelings high but merely human. But a higher one accompanied it. The sense of a sanctity native to the human soul, and indestructible-the assiduous hallowing of himself, and of all his powers, by religious offices that seek nothing lower than communion with the fountain-head of all holiness and of all good. And Milton, labouring "in the eye of his great taskmaster "-trained by all recluse and silent studies -trained by the turmoil raging around him of the times, and by his own share in the general contention-according to the self-dedication of his mind trained within the temple-he, stricken with darkness and amidst the gloom of extinguished earthly hopes, assumed the singing robes of the poet.

The purpose of the Paradise Lost is wholly religious. He strikes the loudest, and at the same time, the sweetest-toned harp of the Muse with the hand of a Christian theologian. He girds up all the highest powers of the human mind to wrestling with the most arduous question with which the human faculties can engage-the all-involving questionHow is the world governed? Do we live under chance, or fate, or Providence? Is there a God? And is he holy, loving, wise, and just? He will

“Assert eternal providence, And justify the ways of God to man.'

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The justifying answer he reads in the Scriptures. Man fell, tempted from without by another, but by the act of his own free-will, and by his own choice. Thus, according to the theology of Milton, is the divine Rule of the universe completely justified in the sin into which man has fallenin the punishment which has fallen upon man. The Justice of God is cleared. And his Love? That shines out, when man has perversely fallen, by the Covenant of Mercy, by

finding out for him a Redeemer. And thus the two events in the history of mankind, which the Scriptures present as infinitely surpassing all others in importance, which are cardinal to the destinies of the human race, upon which all our wo, and, in the highest sense, all our weal are hung, become the subject of the work-the Fall of man consoled by the promise and undertaking of his Redemption.

The narrative of the Fall, delivered with an awful and a pathetic simplicity to us in a few words in the first chapter of Genesis, becomes accordingly the groundwork of the Poem; and these few words, with a few more scattered through the Scriptures, and barely hinting Celestial transactions, the War and Fall of the Angels, are by a genius, as daringly as powerfully creative, expanded into the mighty dimensions of an Epic. That unspeakable hope, foreshown to Adam as to be accomplished in distant generations, pouring an exhilarating beam upon the darkness of man's self-wrought destruction, which saves the catastrophe of the poem from utter despair, and which tranquilizes the sadness, has to be interwoven in the poet's narrative of the Fall. How stupendous the art that has disposed and ordered the immensity!-comprehended the complexity of the subject into a clearly harmonized, musically proportionate whole !

Unless the Paradise Lost had risen from the soul of Milton as a hymn-unless he had begun to sing as a worshiper with his hands uplifted before the altar of incense, the choice of the subject would have been more than bold-it would have been the daring of presumption-an act of impiety. For he will put in dialogue God the Father and God the Sondisclosing their supreme counsels. He has prayed to the Third Person of the Godhead for light and succour. If this were a fetch of human wit, it was in the austere zealot and puritan a mockery. To a devout Roman Catholic poet, we could forgive everything. For nursed among legends and visual representations of the invisible-panoplied in a childlike imposed faith from the access of impiety-his paternoster and his ave-Marie more familiar to his lips than his bread, almost so as their breath-the most audacious representations may come to him vividly and naturally, without a scruple and without a thought. But Milton, the purged, the chastened, a spiritual iconoclast, drinking his faith by his own thirst from the waters of Zion, a champion whose weapons from the armory of God "are given him tempered"--he to holy things cannot lay