to overlook the unprecedented ease and grace with which the heroic measure is handled. Notice this passage, too, in which Buckingham is described:

"Some of their chiefs were princes of the land;

In the first rank of these did Zimri stand;

A man so various that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome:
Stiff in opinion, always in the wrong;
Was everything by starts, and nothing long;
But in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon:
Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.
Blest madman, that could every hour employ,
With something new to wish, or to enjoy :
Railing and praising were his usual themes;
And both, to show his judgment, in extremes:
So over violent, or over civil,

That every man with him was God or Devil.
In squandering wealth was his peculiar art:
Nothing went unrewarded but desert.

Beggared by fools, whom still he found too late,
He had his jest, and they had his estate.

He laughed himself from court; then sought relief
By forming parties, but could ne'er be chief:
For spite of him, the weight of business fell
On Absalom and wise Achitophel;

Thus wicked but in will, of means bereft,

He left not faction, but of that was left."

Here is the same unexaggerated description, this time of a flimsy character, and it is easy to imagine the force with which the poem must have impressed itself upon its readers. As for the mere sound, the above may be compared with these lines of Rochester's:

"Well, sir, 'tis granted: I said Dryden's rhymes
Were stolen, unequal-nay dull, many times.
What foolish patron is there found of his
So blindly partial to deny me this?

But that his plays embroidered up and down
With wit and learning, justly pleased the town,
In the same paper I as freely own.

Yet, having this allowed, the heavy mass

That stuffs up his loose volumes must not pass."

Or these from Oldham (1653-83) (from a satire in which
Spenser is dissuading Oldham from poetry):

"I come, fond Idiot, ere it be too late,
Kindly to warn thee of thy wretched fate:
Take heed betimes, repent and learn of me
To shun the dang'rous rocks of Poetry:
Had I the choice of Flesh and Blood again,
To act once more in Life's tumultuous scene;
I'd be a Porter or a Scavenger,

A Groom, or anything but a Poet here:

Hast thou observed some Hawker of the Town,

Cries Matches, Small coal, Brooms, Old shoes and boots,
Socks, Sermons, Ballads, Lies, Gazettes, and Votes ?
So unrecorded to the grave I'd go.". . .

Surely Dryden's superior management of the heroic verse is evident at once. And it is to be noticed that he does not confine himself to what Mr. Lowell calls the "thought coop" of the couplet. The sense runs through from one line to another. Yet he did this without awkwardness. Another quality that he had was that of reasoning in verse, of making statements or arguments as clear as his own prose-and that is saying a good deal.

This Dryden did without the fierce fury of most of the satirists, a quality which they copied from Juvenal, just as they imitated his obscurity and that of Persius. He wrote, too, with complete self-possession, a sort of lordly superiority to personal pique, as when he speaks of one Samuel Johnson as Ben-Jochanan :

"A Jew of humble parentage was he,

By trade a Levite though of low degree:

His pride no higher than the desk aspired,
But for the drudgery of priests was hired
To read and pray in linen ephod brave,
And pick up single shekels from the grave.
Married at last, but finding charge come faster,
He could not live by God, but changed his master,
Inspired by want, was made a factious tool;
They got a villain, and we lost a fool."

Or his cool reference to Pordage :*

"Lame Mephibosheth, the wizard's son."

In 1681 appeared "The Medal," a satire against sedition; a medal having been struck off to celebrate Shaftesbury's acquittal of the charge of high-treason.

Let us consider for a moment the circumstances in which these poems were read. In the city there were numberless coffee-houses, which were frequented by men of all sorts for the discussion of political, social, and literary news; but in the country there were but few opportunities of knowing what was going on. The gazettes published only what the licensers of the press allowed, and they naturally did not contain much of the talk of the town. The curiosity of the provinces was allayed, however, by men who made a business of writing news-letters to certain persons of the nobility, clergymen, magistrates, or what not. The writers wandered through the town, picking up scraps of news for their correspondents. Their method may be learned from No. 625 of the Spectator, in which a writer says: “In order to make myself useful, I am early in the

* Pordage's father had been expelled his charge for insufficiency. One count in the accusation brought against him was this: "That a great dragon came into his chamber with a tail of eight yards long, four great teeth, and did spit fire at him; and that he contended with him;" vide Scott's "Life of Dryden," chap. v. Apparently it was not thought etiquette to contend with dragons.

antichamber, where I thrust my head into the thick of the press, and catch the news, at the opening of the door, while it is warm. Sometimes I stand by the beefeaters, and take the buzz as it passes by me. At other times I lay my ear close to the wall, and suck in many a valuable whisper, as it runs in a straight line from corner to corner. When I am weary of standing, I repair to one of the neighbouring coffee-houses, . . . and forestall the evening post by two hours. There is a certain gentleman who hath given me the slip. ... But I have played him a trick. I have purchased a pair of the best coach-horses I could buy for money, and now let him outstrip me if he can." Thus we see that the energy of reporters is not an invention of the nineteenth century.

The poorer people of the country received their information of what was going on in the city from the clergyman, with such comments, words of explanation, warning, and advice as they thought proper; and, since the clergy belonged to the king's party, they doubtless took every precaution to disseminate what they deemed sound views.

As to the dissenters, they were the great readers of sermons and tracts, and how numerous these were may be gathered from the list at the beginning of this chapter. Preaching was generally forbidden them, and the songs of the time are full of ribald abuse of their conventicles, as their secret reunions were called. They were exposed to severe persecution. Pepys, August 7, 1664, says: "I saw several poor creatures carried by, by constables, for being at a conventicle. They go like lambs, without any resistance. I would to God," he adds, "they would either conform, or be more wise and not be catched." Of their sufferings it is easy to judge from reading any life of Bunyan. Being debarred from preaching, they took to writing, and there are many proofs of their literary activ

ity. By the side of the Pindaric odes, the translations, the ribald plays, the fierce satires of the reign of Charles II., there were appearing a host of religious publications, of which the best known, because the best in every way, was Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," which went through eight editions in four years.

Dryden was peculiarly happy in choosing his method of attack. Nowadays, practised readers are weary of fables and allegories; but these always have a charm for children, and for inexperienced readers, who need this sugaring of the pill, or, as Addison put it (Spectator, No. 512): “This natural pride and ambition of the soul is very much gratified in the reading of a fable; for in writings of this kind the reader comes in for half of the performance, everything appears to him like a discovery of his own. . . . For this reason the "Absalom and Achitophel" was one of the most popular poems that ever appeared in English." Then a biblical allegory was most fortunate. Dryden stole the very thunder of the Puritans: Zimri, Shimei, Ishbosheth, Jebusites, Barzillai—these names alone would have sanctified any writing.

Not only, however, was it customary to transfer current themes to a biblical setting, as indeed had been done in "Samson Agonistes "-for the translation of the Bible had brought about a change something like that of the Renaissance-but the very names of the poem had been applied

*For the origin of this book, see "The Ancient Poem of Guillaume de Guileville, entitled Le Pelerinage de l'Homme, compared with the Pilgrim's Progress of John Bunyan. Edited from Notes collected by the late Mr. Nathaniel Hill. London: Basil Montague Pickering. 1858." It is much to be regretted that the editor did not publish the notes in full. Cf. prefaces of Southey and James Montgomery to their editions of this book, and the interesting but uncritical remarks of George Offor in his re print, London, 1847.