CHARACTER OF DRYDEN'S POETRY. 271 so is its minor poetry; and even from the poetry of writers whose names are unknown to fame, as fragrant an anthology could be culled as in the literature of any language. But when I hear people talk of the poets carelessly or ignorantly, or, it may be, intentionally, coupling in an indiscriminate series Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Pope, every principle of judgment and feeling and taste revolts. When taking Milton's standard, and acknowledging for the greatest poetry only that which is full of religious, of glorious and magnificent uses, and then looking at the uses to which Dryden debased his imagination, the question as to his poetic rank becomes simply a question how can this corruption put on the incorruption of a great poet's glory. In the course of these lectures I have had occasion to remark the influence exercised on the genius of the poets by the spirit of the times they lived in, but never finding that influence acquiring an ascendency over their innate powers. Passing events seemed to float over their lives, as on a sunny day the shadow of a floating cloud is seen to speed over the surface of the fields, giving, indeed, different hues and tints, but not changing native and unalterable colours. Whatever adaptation the great poets made to their respective times, they ever kept that independence which gives to genius its home amid many generations. With Dryden a different relation began; for he sought a habitation steaming with a thousand vices, and there he dwelt till his garland and singingrobes were polluted by the contagion. Throughout Dryden's poems may be traced, in a distinct reflection, the character of the times of Charles II.; and each should, therefore, be examined by the literary or historical stu dent, for they are reciprocally illustrative. The temper of that time is stamped upon its literature. The poets, instead of their high office of "allaying the perturbations of the mind and setting the affections in right tune," had no worthier charge than to pamper the low passions of a worthless and adulterate generation. There probably never was a period of literature when it was more affected by extrinsic agencies than that now under review, the age of the second Charles. Let us look, therefore, for a moment or two, at its characteristics. Memory may run over the whole period of more than two thousand years,—the life of our British ancestry,― and not find any portion of it so loathsome as those twenty years during which Charles Stuart the younger was restored to the throne of his fathers. Happier would it have been for any one having a man's heart within his breast to live in the barbaric age of British paganism, with all its ferocity, and the terrors of a hideous superstition,-when, in Cowper's fine lines,"The Druids struck the well-strung harps they bore, With fingers deeply dyed in human gore; And, while the victim slowly bled to death, Upon the tolling chords rung out his dying breath;"- Better to have lived amid the wild consternation of the fiercest of England's invasions or the bloodiest of its civil wars, better in the dismay of Mary's martyrdoms, or beneath the iron rod of Cromwell's military usurpation,than to have pined heartsick at the sight of all the debasing profligacy which burst upon England at the time of the Restoration. When Cowley, with the fervour of royalty upon him, gave vent to his indignation at the Protector's dynasty, it was in a strain which would have CHARACTER OF CHARLES STUART. 273 better fitted the lips of a generous Briton chafing under the abominations of his country,-its hereditary monarch restored : "Come the eleventh plague rather this should be; Come sink us rather in the sea; Come rather pestilence and reap us down; Come God's sword, rather than our own. Or Saxon, Norman, or the Dane. In all the bonds we ever bore, We grieved, we sighed, we wept; we never blushed before." Upon Charles Stuart the lesson of adversity was wasted. After a childhood and youth pampered with the perilous luxury that attends the footsteps of an heir to royalty, the full cup of his confident hopes was dashed from his lips, when calamities undreamed of were poured down upon the royal household. The only occasion when he showed a manly spirit-when, backed by Scottish courage, he staked his fortunes on the field of battle to gain the throne of his fathers--had been preceded by an act of perjured hypocrisy; for, kneeling on the spot where his royal Scottish ancestors had sworn their coronation-oath, he called God to witness his plighted faith to a covenant he both detested and despised. The mailed hand of Cromwell was still the hand of victory; and the defeat at Worcester left the young king an outcast and a fugitive, sheltered only by the indomitable loyalty of his adherents, whose devotion he had no heart to be grateful for, for he prized it at no dearer rate than the trunk of the oak which once hid him from his pursuers. He fled to France, abandoning himself to effeminate, vulgar and vicious pleasures. Unhappily, the British blood that flowed in his veins was mingled with the blood of one of those licentiour monarchs who had soiled the purity of the French monarchy: it will be remembered he was the grandson of Henry IV. Let it not be thought that I am wandering from my subject. I seek to show that if the spirit of a nation goes down, its poetry, if suffered to sympathize with the causes of its degradation, will go down with it. In the spirit of those times, and of Charles II. as representing it, I can find ample explanation of the sinking of English poetry. Every pure and noble sentiment, every generous emotion, every lofty thought, became a jest. Now, these are the life of poetry, which in its best forms can breathe only in an atmosphere of purity; and whenever such cannot be found it is the chief duty of poetry to create it,— to ventilate, as it were, a stagnant and corrupted air. The spirit of poetry-and, let me add, too, the love of it-is a spirit of enthusiasm. Amid the wide-spread corruption, the writings of a few poets and not a few of the clergy show that all hearts were not defiled; and that brazen age was well described by one of its divines, when he said, "To fight against religion by scoffing is the game the devil seems to be playing in the present age. He hath tryed the power and rage of the mighty and the wit and knowledge of the learned, but these have not succeeded for the destruction of religion; and therefore now he is making an experiment by another sort of enemies, and sets the apes and drollers upon it. And certainly there was never any other age in which sacred things have been so rudely and impudently assaulted by the profane abuses of jesters and buffoons, who have been the contempt of all wise times, but are the darlings and wits of these." DEBASING EFFECTS OF THE CIVIL WARS. 275 The severe discipline of Puritan morality once removed, there came quickly in its stead a lawlessness whose pride was its freedom from all restraint. Immorality was a thing men boasted of; they took a party-pride in vice. The civil wars had also demoralized the people, by breaking up the habits and regularity of domestic life. Households were destroyed, and their proprietors found a residence in taverns; and, when the causes of such disordered life had passed away, the low habits it had engendered were left behind. Often, beggared by the wars, the sufferers were driven, in the words of as gallant a cavalier as Lovelace, "to steep their thirsty grief in wine." During the Middle Ages, the miseries that followed in the train of war had been famine and pestilence; but after the civil wars in England came debauchery, licentiousness, riot, and blasphemy. To such a condition of public feeling the only poetry that could be welcome was that prostituted form of it which delights in loose lays or bacchanalian orgies. The intellectual tastes of Charles II. have been historically recorded, and are typical of his times. Mentally, he was by no means deficient, but, on the contrary, possessed of much quickness of mind. Quotations from Hudibras, with all the indecencies of its wit, were often on his lips; the bombastic tragedies and the obscene comedies of the Restoration were congenial to him, and doubtless, too, the songs of Sedley and Rochester. There was another taste of the monarch, illustrative also of the downward course of the spirit of the age,—a sort of zeal for material science, prosecuted to the exclusion of all spirituality. The king had his private laboratory, where he carried on experiments as far removed from a true love of science as the filthy chemistry |