ANNUS MIRABILIS.

THIS is the first poem of any length which Dryden gave to the public. Formerly he had only launched out in occasional verses, and, in some instances, on subjects of no prominent importance. He now spread a broader canvas, and prepared to depict a more extensive and magnificent scene. The various incidents of an eventful war between two powerful nations, who disputed the trident of the ocean, and the tremendous fire, which had laid London in ashes, were subjects which still continued to agitate the bosoms of his countrymen. These, therefore, he ventured to assume as the theme of his poem; and his choice is justified by the effects which it yet produces upon the reader.

There would have been no doubt, even had the author himself been silent, that he followed D'Avenant in the choice of the elegiac stanza, in which the Annus Mirabilis is composed. It is sounding and harmonious to the ear; and perhaps Dryden still annexed to the couplet the idea of that harshness, which was so long its characteristic in the hands of our early English writers. But the four-lined stanza has also its peculiar disadvantages; and they are admirably stated by the judicious critic, who first turned the Editor's eyes, and probably those of many others, on the neglected poem of "Gondibert."-"The necessity of comprising a sentence within the limits of the measure, is the tyranny of Procrustes to thought. For the sake of a disagreeable uniformity, expression must constantly be cramped or extenuated. In general, the latter expedient will be practised as the easiest; and thus both sentiment and language will be enfeebled by unmeaning expletives."* It is nevertheless true, that Dryden has very seldom suffered his poem to languish. Every stanza presents us either with vivid description, or with some strong thought, which is seldom suffered to glide into tenuity. But this structure of verse has often laid him under an odd and rather unpleasing necessity, of filling up his stanza, by coupling a simile, or a

* Essay by Dr. Aikin on the Heroic Poem of "Gondibert." VOL. IX.

F

moral, expressed in the two last lines, along with the fact, which had been announced in the two first. When these comments, or illustrations, however good in themselves, appear to be intruded upon the narrative or description, and not naturally to flow out of either, they must be considered as defects in composition; and a kind of versification, which compels frequent recurrence to such expedients for filling up the measure, has a disadvantage, for which mere harmony can hardly compensate. In the passages which follow, there is produced a stiff and awkward kind of balance between the story and the poet's reflections and illustrations :

Lawson among the foremost met his fate,
Whom sea-green Sirens from the rocks lament:

Thus as an offering for the Grecian state,

He first was killed, who first to battle went.

To nearest ports their shattered ships repair,
Where by our dreadful cannon they lay awed:
So reverently men quit the open air,

Where thunder speaks the angry gods abroad.

Like hunted castors, conscious of their store,

:

Their way-laid wealth to Norway's coasts they bring;
There first the North's cold bosom spices bore,

And winter brooded on the eastern spring.

When, after such verses, we find one in which the author expresses a single idea so happily as just to fill up the quatrain, the difference is immediately visible betwixt a simile easily and naturally introduced, and stanzas made up and levelled with what a poet of those times would perhaps have ventured to call the travelled earth of versification:

And now four days the sun had seen our woes;
Four nights the moon beheld the incessant fire;
It seemed as if the stars more sickly rose,
And farther from the feverish north retire.

Of all these difficulties our author seems to have been aware, from his preliminary epistle to Sir Robert Howard; and it was probably the experimental conviction, that they were occasionally invincible, which induced him thenceforward to desert the quatrain; although he has decided that stanza to be more noble, and of greater dignity, both for the sound and number, than any other verse in use among us.

The turn of composition, as well as the structure of the verse, is adopted from "Gondibert." But Dryden, more

completely master of the English language, and a writer of much more lively imagination and expression, has, in general, greatly exceeded his master in conceiving and bringing out the far-fetched ideas and images with which each has graced his poem. D'Avenant is often harsh and turgid, and the construction of his sentences extremely involved. Dryden has his obscure, and even unintelligible, passages; but they arise from the extravagance of the idea, not from the want of power to express it. For example,

D'Avenant says—

Near her seems crucified that lucky thief,

In heaven's dark lottery prosperous more than wise,
Who groped at last by chance for heaven's relief,

And throngs undoes with hopes by one drawn prize.

We here perfectly understand the author's meaning, through his lumbering and unpoetical expression; but, in the following stanza, Dryden is unintelligible, because he had conceived an idea approaching to nonsense, while the words themselves are both poetical and expressive :—

Then we upon our globe's last verge shall go,
And view the ocean leaning on the sky;

From thence our rolling neighbours we shall know,
And on the lunar world securely pry.

In short, Dryden never fails in the power of elegant expression, till he ventures upon something which it is impossible to express.

The love of conceit and point, that inveterate though decaying disease of the literature of the time, has not failed to infect the Annus Mirabilis. That monstrous verse, in which the extinction of the fire is described, cannot be too often quoted, both to expose the meanness of the image, and the confusion of the metaphor; for it will be noticed, that the extinguisher, so unhappily conceived, is not even employed in its own mean office. The flames of London are first a tallow candle; and secondly hawks, which, while pouncing on their quarry, are hooded with an extinguisher :An hollow crystal pyramid he takes,

In firmamental waters dipt above;
Of it a broad extinguisher he makes,

And hoods the flames that to their quarry drove.

Passages also occur, in which, from the author's zealous desire to be technically minute, the style becomes low and vulgar. There is no doubt that, as Dryden has observed, the proper terms of art may be not only justly, but with the highest advantage, employed in poetry; but such technical

phrases require to be selected with great judgment: they must bear relation to some striking and important object, or they are mean and trivial; and they must be at once generally intelligible, and more expressive in themselves than ordinary language, or they are unnecessarily obscure and pedantic. Dryden has failed in both these points, in his account of the repairs of the fleet.* Stanza 148, in particular, combines the faults of meanness and unnecessary obscurity, from the affected use of the dialect of the dock-yard :

Some the galled ropes with dauby marline bind,

Or searcloth masts with strong tarpauling coats:
To try new shrouds one mounts into the wind,
And one below their ease or stiffness notes.

Other examples might be produced of the faults of this remarkable poem; but it is time to say, that they are much overbalanced by its beauties. If Dryden is sometimes obscure, from the extravagance of his imagination, or the far-fetched labour of his similes, and if his desire to use appropriate language has occasionally led him into low and affected minuteness, this poem exhibits a far greater number of instances of happy and judicious illustration, beautiful description, and sublime morality. The comparison of the secret rise of the Fire of London to the obscure birth of an usurper, is doubly striking, when we consider how closely the passage may be understood to bear reference to the recent domination of the Protector.† I will not load these preliminary observations by inserting the whole of the striking passage, on the different manner in which the night, after the battle of the first of June, was passed on board the English and Dutch fleets, but certainly the 71st stanza will not lose by being an hundred times quoted:

In dreams they fearful precipices tread;

Or, shipwrecked, labour to some distant shore;
Or in dark churches walk among the dead;

They wake with horror, and dare sleep no more.

The verses in which Prince Rupert and his enemy are compared to a greyhound and hare, after a course so desperate as totally to exhaust both, have been always considered as exquisitely beautiful. The description of

* See stanza 146, and those which follow.

Stanzas 213, 214.

See stanzas 131, 132. I wish, however, our author had spared avouching himself to have been eye-witness to so marvellous a chase. The “so have I seen" should be confined to things which are not only possible, but,

the "Loyal London" partakes of the beauties and faults which are dispersed through the poem. Nothing can be more majestic than her description, "firing the air with her sanguine streamers," and " riding upon her shadow in floating gold." We lament that the weaver should have been so fascinated with his labours as to commence seaman; and still more, that, after describing her " roomy decks," and "depth of draught," she should furnish no grander simile than that of

a sea-wasp floating on the waves.

More unqualified approbation may be justly afforded to the whole description of the Dutch homeward-bound fleet, captured in sight of their desired haven; and the fine moral lessons which the poet takes the opportunity to inculcate from so unexpected an incident. The 34th stanza has a tenderness and simplicity which every lover of true poetry must admire :

This careful husband had been long away,

Whom his chaste wife and little children mourn;
Who on their fingers learned to tell the day

On which their father promised to return.

I will only point out to attention the beautiful and happily expressed simile of the eagle in stanzas 107 and 108, and then, in imitation of honest John Bunyan,

No more detain the readers in the porch,

Or keep them from the daylight with a torch.

The title of Annus Mirabilis did not, according to Mr. Malone, originate with Dryden, a prose tract, so entitled, being published in 1662.* Neither was he the last that used

in a certain degree, of ordinary occurrence. Dryden's ocular testimony is not, however, so incredible as that of the bard, who averred

So have I seen, in Araby the blest,

A Phoenix couched upon her funeral nest.

Such chases, if not frequent, have sometimes happened. In the north of England, in ancient days, a stag and a famous greyhound, called Hercules, after a desperate course, were found dead within a few paces of each other, and interred with this inscription—

Hercules killed Hart of grece,

And Hart of grece killed Hercules.

* Malone's Prose Works of Dryden, vol. iii. p. 250.