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Let that make thee a mother; bring thou forth
The ideas of his virtue, knowledge, worth;
Transcribe the original in new copies; give
Hastings of the better part: so shall he live
In his nobler half; and the great grandsire be
Of an heroic divine progeny :

An issue which to eternity shall last,

Yet but the irradiations which he cast.
Erect no mausoleums; for his best

Monument is his spouse's marble breast.

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ON THE MONUMENT OF THE MARQUIS OF
WINCHESTER.*

HE who in impious times undaunted stood
And midst rebellion durst be just and good,
Whose arms asserted, and whose sufferings more
Confirmed the cause for which he fought before,

Rests here, rewarded by an heavenly prince

For what his earthly could not recompense.

Pray, reader, that such times no more appear;
Or, if they happen, learn true honour here.
Arkt of thy age's faith and loyalty,

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Which, to preserve them, Heaven confined in thee.
Few subjects could a king like thine deserve;
And fewer such a king so well could serve.
Blest king, blest subject, whose exalted state
By sufferings rose and gave the law to fate!
Such souls are rare, but mighty patterns given
To earth were meant for ornaments to Heaven.

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EPITAPH ON SIR PALMES FAIRBORNE'S TOMB,

IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.‡

YE sacred relics, which your marble keep,
Here, undisturbed by wars, in quiet sleep;
Discharge the trust, which, when it was below,
Fairborne's undaunted soul did undergo,

And be the town's Palladium from the foe.

John Powlet, Marquis of Winchester, a famous Royalist of the Civil War, whose mansion at Basing after a siege of two years was taken by Cromwell and burnt in October 1645, and who was then made a prisoner, died in 1674, in his seventy-seventh year. He was buried at Englefield, in Berkshire; and this epitaph by Dryden, the former eulogist of Cromwell and the "rebellion," was engraved on the monument erected by his widow, the last of three wives. This epitaph was printed in Pope's volume of Miscellanies, 1712.

Ark has been changed, probably originally by a misprint, into ask, which appears in Scott's and all modern editions.

The tomb of Sir Palmes Fairborne in Westminster Abbey, on which this epitaph is inscribed, bears also the following inscription:-"Sacred to the immortal memory of Sir Palmes Fairborne, Knight, Governor of Tangier; in execution of which command he was mortally wounded by a shot from the Moors, then besieging the town, in the forty-sixth year of his age. October 24, 1680."

Alive and dead these walls he will defend :
Great actions great examples must attend.
The Candian siege his early valour knew,
Where Turkish blood did his young hands inbrue.
From thence returning with deserved applause,
Against the Moors his well-fleshed sword he draws;
The same the courage, and the same the cause.
His youth and age, his life and death, combine,
As in some great and regular design,
All of a piece throughout, and all divine.

Still nearer Heaven, his virtue shone more bright,
Like rising flames expanding in their height;
The martyr's glory crowned the soldier's fight.
More bravely British general never fell,

Nor general's death was e'er revenged so well;
Which his pleased eyes beheld before their close,
Followed by thousand victims of his foes.

To his lamented loss for times to come

His pious widow consecrates this tomb.

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TO THE MEMORY OF MR. OLDHAM.*

FAREWELL, too little and too lately known,
Whom I began to think and call my own:
For sure our souls were near allied, and thine
Cast in the same poetic mould as mine.
One common note on either lyre did strike,
And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike.

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To the same goal did both our studies drive :

The last set out the soonest did arrive.

Thus Nisus fell upon the slippery place,

Whilst his young friend performed and won the race. †
O early ripe! to thy abundant store
What could advancing age have added more?
It might (what nature never gives the young)
Have taught the numbers of thy native tongue. ‡
But satire needs not those, and wit will shine
Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.
A noble error, and but seldom made,
When poets are by too much force betrayed.

* John Oldham, the author of the

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Satires on the Jesuits," died in 1683, at the early age of twenty-nine. These Satires, written in 1679, and published in the height of the excitement against the Roman Catholics, had made Oldham suddenly famous. Dryden in these excellent lines gives Wanting Dryden's polish, he sometimes even exceeds Dryden in just praise to his fellow satirist. Oldham had evidently in his youth admired and studied Dryden's poems. strength as a satirist. Imitations by him of passages in Dryden's earliest poems are mentioned in the notes to "Annus Mirabilis," stanza 4, and the poem on the Death of Lord Hastings. +Æneis, v. 328.

The word numbers in this line is unwarrantably changed into smoothness in the reprints of the poem prefixed to the editions of Oldham's Works, 1722 and 1770.

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Thy generous fruits, though gathered ere their prime,
Still showed a quickness; and maturing time

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But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme.

Once more, hail, and farewell! farewell, thou young,
But ah! too short, Marcellus of our tongue!
Thy brows with ivy and with laurels bound;

But fate and gloomy night encompass thee around.

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TO THE PIOUS MEMORY OF THE ACCOMPLISHED YOUNG LADY

MRS. ANNE KILLIGREW,*

EXCELLENT IN THE TWO SISTER ARTS OF POESY AND PAINTING.

AN ODE.

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a

THOU youngest virgin-daughter of the skies,
Made in the last promotion of the blest ;b
Whose palms, new plucked from Paradise,
In spreading branches more sublimely rise,^
Rich with immortal green above the rest : b
Whether, adopted to some neighbouring star,
Thou rollst above us in thy wandering race,
Or in procession fixed and regular
Moved with the heaven's majestic pace,

Or called to more superior bliss,

Thou treadst with seraphims the vast abyss:
Whatever happy region be 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.

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* Mrs. (or, as would now be said, Miss) Anne Killigrew was daughter of the Rev. Dr. Henry Killigrew, Master of the Savoy, and a Prebendary of Westminster. Her father had in early life written a tragedy; and Dryden alludes to him as a poet in the second stanza of this poem. Thomas Killigrew, the court wit, and Sir William Killigrew, both play-writers, were his brothers, and Miss Killigrew's uncles. She was maid of honour to the Duchess of York, afterwards Queen. She died of small-pox in 1685, in the twenty-fifth year of her age. Her poems were collected and published after her death, in a quarto volume, 1686, with this poem of Dryden prefixed, and with the motto on the title-page, "Immodicis brevis est ætas, et rara senectus" (Martial, vi, 29). The poem was reprinted by Dryden in his third Miscellany volume, 1694. The text here is corrected from the first publication and the reprint in 1694.

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If by traduction came thy mind,
Our wonder is the less to find

A soul so charming from a stock so good;
Thy father was transfused into thy blood:
So wert thou born into the tuneful strain,
(An early, rich, and inexhausted vein.)
But if thy pre-existing soul

Was formed at first with myriads more,

It did through all the mighty poets roll

Who Greek or Latin laurels wore,

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And was that Sappho last, which once it was before.

Thou hast no dross to purge from thy rich ore :

If so, then cease thy flight, O heaven-born mind !

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Nor can thy soul a fairer mansion find

Than was the beautious frame she left behind :

Return, to fill or mend the quire of thy celestial kind.

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May we presume to say that, at thy birth,

New joy was sprung in heaven as well as here on earth? 40
For sure the milder planets did combine

On thy auspicious horoscope to shine,

And even the most malicious were in trine.*

Thy brother-angels at thy birth

Strung each his lyre, and tuned it high,
That all the people of the sky

Might know a poetess was born on earth;
And then, if ever, mortal ears

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Had heard the music of the spheres.

And if no clustering swarm of bees

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On thy sweet mouth distilled their golden dew,

'Twas that such vulgar miracles +

Heaven had not leisure to renew :

For all the blest fraternity of love

Solemnized there thy birth, and kept thy holiday above.

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O gracious God! how far have we

Profaned thy heavenly gift of Poesy!
Made prostitute and profligate the Muse,
Debased to each obscene and impious use,
Whose harmony was first ordained above,

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For tongues of angels and for hymns of love!

* Another allusion to trines as of happy auspice is in

see note.

Annus Mirabilis," stanza 292, where

+ Miracles here rhymes with bees. See notes on "Astræa Redux," 106; "The Medal," 164; and "Threnodia Augustalis," 414.

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Oh wretched we! why were we hurried down
This lubric* and adulterate age,

(Nay, added fat pollutions of our own,)

To increase the steaming ordures of the stage?
What can we say to excuse our second fall?
Let this thy Vestal, Heaven, atone for all :
Her Arethusian stream remains unsoiled,+
Unmixed with foreign filth and undefiled;

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Her wit was more than man, her innocence a child.

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By great examples daily fed,

What in the best of books, her father's life, she read.

And to be read herself she need not fear;

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Each test and every light her Muse will bear,

Though Epictetus with his lamp were there.

Even love (for love sometimes her Muse exprest),

Was but a lambent flame which played about her breast ;
Light as the vapours of a morning dream,

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So cold herself, whilst she such warmth exprest,
'Twas Cupid bathing in Diana's stream.

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Born to the spacious empire of the Nine,

One would have thought she should have been content
To manage well that mighty government;

But what can young ambitious souls confine?
To the next realm she stretched her sway,
For Painture near adjoining lay,

A plenteous province and alluring prey.
A Chamber of Dependences was framed,
As conquerors will never want pretence,
(When armed, to justify the offence),

And the whole fief in right of Poetry she claimed.

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* The old French spelling lubrique has here been preserved inconsistently in all editions to the latest. In the poem to Sir George Etherege, line 6, the spelling artique for arctic is needed for the rhyme.

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↑ "Her Arethusian stream.' One of Dryden's forced classical allusions. Arethusa, according to the ancient fable, was changed by Diana into a fountain to save her from the amorous pursuit of Alpheus, the god of the river of that name in Elis. Alpheus then mingled the waters of his river with those of Arethusa. Diana opened a secret passage under the earth and the sea, through which the waters of Arethusa, disappearing in Elis, rose in the island of Ortygia, near Sicily. The river Alpheus followed her also under the sea, and rose in Ortygia.

1 Painture, a word from the French peinture, now obsolete. In the poem to Sir Godfrey Kneller, Dryden uses the word "picture" for the art of painting.

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