have terribly little to do with "criticism of life;"* but as I am dealing with a great English author, whose main distinction is to have reformed the whole formal part of English prose and English poetry, I must, once for all, take leave to follow the only road open to me to show what he actually did.

2. Absalom and Achitophel (1681).

Absalom and Achitophel† is perhaps, with the exception of the St. Cecilia Ode, the best known of all Dryden's poems, to modern readers; and there is no need to give any very lengthy account of it, or of the extraordinary skill with which Monmouth is treated. The sketch, even now about the best existing in prose or verse, of the "Popish Plot," the character, and speeches of Achitophel, the unapproached portrait of Zimri, and the final harangue of David, have for generations found their places in every book of elegant extracts, either for general or school use. But perhaps the most characteristic passage of the whole, as indicating the kind of satire which Dryden now introduced for the first time, is the passage descriptive of Shimei -Slingsby Bethel the republican sheriff of the city :

"But he, though bad, is followed by a worse,
The wretch who Heaven's anointed dared to curse;
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.
Thus heaping wealth, by the most ready way
Among the Jews, which was to cheat and pray;
The City, to reward his pious hate

Against his master, chose him magistrate.
His hand a vare§ of justice did uphold,
His neck was loaded with a chain of gold.
During his office treason was no crime,
The sons of Belial had a glorious time;

* According to Matthew Arnold, the function of poetry, and indeed of all literature, is the criticism of life.'

+ Absalom stood for the Duke of Monmouth; Achitophel for the Earl of Shaftesbury; Zimri for George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who had satirized Dryden (as Bayes) in The Rehearsal; David was Charles II.

A "plot" alleged against the Catholics, having for its object the assassination of Charles II., 1678. On the perjured evidence of Titus Oates and his confederates a number of lives were sacrificed.

§ Staff.

For Shimei, though not prodigal of pelf,
Yet loved his wicked neighbor as himself.
When two or three were gathered to declaim
Against the monarch of Jerusalem,

Shimei was always in the midst of them;
And, if they cursed the king when he was by,
Would rather curse than break good company.
If durst his factious friend accuse,
any

He packed a jury of dissenting Jews,

Whose fellow-feeling in the godly cause

Would free the suffering saint from human laws;
For laws are only made to punish those
Who serve the king, and to protect his foes.
If any leisure time he had from power,
Because 'tis sin to misemploy an hour,
His business was by writing to persuade
That kings were useless, and a clog to trade;
And that his noble style he might refine,

No Rechabite* more shunned the fumes of wine.
Chaste were his cellars, and his shrieval board
The grossness of a city feast abhorred :

His cooks with long disuse their trade forgot;
Cool was his kitchen, though his brains were hot.
Such frugal virtue malice may accuse,
But sure 'twas necessary to the Jews:

For towns, once burnt, such magistrates require
As dare not tempt God's providence by fire.
With spiritual food he fed his servants well,
But free from flesh, that made the Jews rebel;
And Moses' laws he held in more account,
For forty days of fasting in the mount.”

There had been nothing in the least like this before. The prodigality of irony, the sting in the tail of every couplet, the ingenuity by which the odious charges are made against the victim in the very words almost of the phrases which his party were accustomed to employ, and, above all, the polish of the language and the verse, and the tone of half-condescending banter, were things of which that time had no experience. The satire was as bitter as Butler's,† but less grotesque and less labored.

* Jeremiah xxxv. 6.

+ Samuel Butler (1600-1680), who satirized the Puritans in his Hudibras.

3. Mac Flecknoe (published Oct. 4, 1682).

Thomas Shadwell was a Norfolk man, and about ten years Dryden's junior. Ever since the year 1668 he had been writing plays (chiefly comedies) and hanging about town, and Dryden and he had been in a manner friends. They had joined Crowne in the task of writing down the Empress of Morocco,* and it does not appear that Dryden had ever given Shadwell any direct cause of offence. Shadwell, however, who was exceedingly arrogant and apparently jealous of Dryden's acknowledged position as leader of the English drama, took more than one occasion of sneering at Dryden, and especially at his critical prefaces. Whether it was owing to haste, as Rochester pretended, or, as Dryden would have it, to certain intellectual incapacities, there can be no doubt that nobody ever made less use of his faculties than Shadwell. His work is always disgraceful as writing; he seems to have been totally destitute of any critical faculty, and he mixes up what is really funny with the dullest and most wearisome folly and ribaldry. He was thus given over entirely into Dryden's hands, and the unmatched satire of Mac Flecknoe was the result.

Flecknoe, whom but for this work no one would ever have inquired about, was, and had been for some time, a stock-subject for allusive satire. He was an Irish priest who had died not long before, after writing a little good verse and a great deal of bad. He had paid compliments to Dryden, and there is no reason to suppose that Dryden had any enmity towards him; his part, indeed, is simply representative, and the satire is reserved for Shadwell. Well as they are known, the first twenty or thirty lines of the poem must be quoted once more, for illustration of Dryden's satirical faculty is hardly possible without them :

"All human things are subject to decay,

And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey.
This Flecknoe found, who, like Augustus, young
Was called to empire, and had governed long;
In prose and verse was owned without dispute,
Through all the realms of Nonsense absolute.

* A tragedy published in 1673 by Elkanah Settle. Settle brought out as a reply to Absalom and Achitophel his Absalom Senior-sorry stuff that would have been forgotten but for Dryden's notice of the author. Says Dryden, "He is an animal of most deplored understanding, without reading and conversation," etc.

This aged prince, now flourishing in peace,
And blessed with issue of a large increase,
Worn out with business, did at length debate
To settle the succession of the state;

And, pondering which of all his sons was fit
To reign, and wage immortal war with wit,
Cried-Tis resolved! for nature pleads, that he
Should only rule who most resembles me.
Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dulness from his tender years;
Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.
Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,
Strike through and make a lucid interval;
But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray,
His rising fogs prevail upon the day.
Besides, his goodly fabric fills the

eye,

And seems designed for thoughtless majesty;
Thoughtless as monarch oaks that shade the plain,
And, spread in solemn state, supinely reign.''

4. Ode on the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killegrew.

Johnson pronounced it the noblest in the language; and in his time it certainly was, unless Lycidas be called an ode. Since its time there has been Wordsworth's great Immortality Ode, and certain beautiful but fragmentary pieces of Shelley which might be so classed; but till our own days nothing else which can match this. The first stanza may be pronounced absolutely faultless and incapable of improvement. As a piece of concerted music in verse it has not a superior, and Warton's depreciation of it is a curious instance of the lack of catholic taste which has so often marred English criticism of poetry :—

"Thou youngest virgin-daughter of the skies,
Made in the last promotion of the blessed;
Whose palms, new plucked from Paradise,
In spreading branches more sublimely rise,
Rich with immortal green above the rest:
Whether, adopted to some neighboring star,
Thou rollest above us, in thy wandering race,
Or, in procession fixed and regular,

Movest with the heaven's majestic pace;
Or, called to more superior bliss,

Thou treadest with seraphim the vast abyss:

Whatever happy region is thy place,
Cease thy celestial song a little space;
Thou wilt have time enough for hymns divine,
Since heaven's eternal year is thine.

Hear, then, a mortal Muse thy praise rehearse,
In no ignoble verse;

But such as thy own voice did practise here,
When thy first-fruits of Poesy were given,
To make thyself a welcome inmate there,
While yet a young probationer,

And candidate of heaven."

DRYDEN, in English Men of Letters.

THE ENGLISH HISTORIANS OF OUR OWN DAY.* JUSTIN M'CARTHY (b. 1830).

The period which we are surveying was especially rich in historical studies. It was prolific, not only in historians and histories, but even in new ways of studying history. The Crimean War was still going on when Mr. Froude's "History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth" began to make its appearance; and the public soon became alive to the fact that a man of great and original power had come into literature. The first volume of Mr. Buckle's "History of Civilization" was published in 1857. Mr. Freeman literally disentombed a great part of the early history of England, cleared it of the accumulated dust of traditional error and ignorance, and for the first time showed it to us as it must have presented itself to the eyes of those who helped to make it. Mr. Kinglake began the story of the Crimean War. Mr. Lecky occupied him. self with "The History of Rationalism in Europe;" "The History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne ;" and more lately with the great days of the eighteenth century. Canon Stubbs made the "Constitutional History of England his province; and Mr. Green undertook to compress the whole sequence of English history into a sort of literary outline map in which events stood clearly out in the just perspective and proportions of their real importance. Of the men we have named, it would not be unreasonable to say that Mr. Froude and Mr. Kinglake belong to the romantic school of historians; Mr.

* Selections from the various historians here characterized will be found in this Reader.