exaggeration, for Spence's gossip cannot be implicitly relied on. The whole of this subject is involved in much obscurity. The general impression seems to have been that the Virgil was a pecuniary success for Dryden.*

The letters from Dryden to his publisher, Tonson, during the progress of the translation, which are extant, are full of grumbling at exactions and sharp practices, and for a time friendly relations between poet and publisher were interrupted. The coinage was then much deteriorated, and Dryden complains frequently of loss by Tonson's clipped and bad money. When he had concluded the fourth Eneid, and claimed fifty pounds, he writes: "You know money is now very scrupulously received; in the last which you did me the favour to change for my wife, besides the clipped money, there were at least forty shillings brass." A letter written October 29, 1695, is in the angriest tone. On September 13, Dryden had begun a letter with "My good friend;" now the beginning is "Mr. Tonson:"

"MR. TONSON,- Some kind of intercourse must be carried on betwixt us while I am translating Virgil. Therefore I give you notice, that I have done the seventh Eneid in the country, and intend some few days hence to go upon the eighth: when that is finished, I expect fifty pounds in good silver, not such as I have had formerly. I am not obliged to take gold, neither will I ; nor stay for it beyond four and twenty hours after it is due."

And the letter proceeds with other accusations even more biting:

"You always intended I should get nothing by the second subscriptions, as I found from first to last. And your promise to Mr. Congreve that you had found a way for my benefit, which was an encouragement to my pains, came at last, for me to desire Sir Godfrey Kneller and Mr. Closterman to gather for me. I then told Mr. Congreve that I knew you too well to believe you meant me any kindness: and he promised me to believe accordingly of you, if you did not. But this is past, and you shall have your bargain, if I live to have my health."

The angry letter concludes with these words:

"I desire neither excuses nor reasons from you: for I am but too well satisfied already. The Notes and Prefaces shall be short, because you shall get the more by saving paper."

In February 1696, Dryden writes less angrily, but stiffly and complainingly. This letter begins:

"SIR,-I received your letter very kindly, because indeed I expected none: but thought you as very a tradesman as Bentley, who has cursed our Virgil so heartily."

He proceeds to say that he is not sorry that Tonson will allow him nothing for Notes, for to make them good would have cost him half a year.

He says

* Mr. Malone has clearly misunderstood several of Dryden's allusions to the subscriptions. When Dryden writes, April 1695, "If the second subscriptions rise, I will take so much the more time, because the profit will encourage me the more," Malone explains this as looking to a higher rate of subscription after a certain day named: it clearly means, however, that Dryden hopes for a rise in the number of second subscriptions of two guineas. Again, Dryden writes to Tonson, October 25, 1695, Some of your friends will be glad to take back their three guineas," on which Malone says in a note, "On receiving back their three guineas they would be placed on the list of second subscribers." The first subscribers had paid three guineas in advance: and all that Dryden means is that there were some who would be glad to have the three guineas back. Others were wanting to come in as first subscribers

that it would require seven years to translate Virgil exactly, and promises to do his best in the translation of the four remaining books, as he has hitherto done. Then he proceeds:

"Upon trial I find all of your trade are sharpers, and you not more than others; therefore I have not wholly left you. Mr. Aston does not blame you for getting as good a bargain as you could, though I could have got a hundred pounds more: and you might have spared almost all your trouble if you had thought fit to publish the proposals for the first subscriptions; for I have guineas offered me every day if there had been room: I believe, modestly speaking, I have refused already twenty-five. I mislike nothing in your letter therefore, but only your upbraiding me with the public encouragement, and my own reputation concerned in the notes, when I assure you I could not make them to my mind in less than half a year's time."

The letter concludes with a request for a little money. "Lord Derby's money would probably be no more than three guineas, the first instalment of his fiveguinea subscription:

"Having no silver by me, I desire my Lord Derby's money, deducting your own. be good, if you desire to oblige me, who am not your enemy, and may be your friend,

And let it

"JOHN DRYDEN."

There was yet another cause of displeasure with Tonson. The publisher was very anxious that Dryden should dedicate the work to King William; and this Dryden resolutely refused to do. Hoping to gain his point, and perhaps counting on help from the trick in convincing Dryden at the last moment, Tonson caused the face of Eneas in the old engravings to be altered so as to make a resemblance to the King. Dryden himself mentions this in a letter to his sons, at Rome, of September 3, 1697, after the publication of the work. The mention of the trick is preceded by a complaint that Tonson had caused the miscarriage of all letters from the father to the sons, and from the sons to the father, during the past year. "I am of your opinion that by Tonson's means almost all our letters have miscarried for this last year. But, however, he has missed of his design in the dedication, though he had prepared the book for it, for in every figure of Æneas he has caused him to be drawn like King William, with a hooked nose." It is, however, clear from a subsequent letter to Tonson himself, that the complaint as to the loss of letters imputed nothing more than carelessness or choice of a bad agent. Writing to Tonson in November 1697, about forwarding a letter to his sons, he says: "I value not any price for a double letter: let me know it, and it shall be paid; for I dare not trust it by the post; being satisfied by experience that Ferrand will do by this, as he did by two letters which I sent my sons about my dedication to the King, of which they received neither." This passage has been overlooked by Scott and by other biographers who, with Scott, have regarded Dryden's complaint as a charge against Tonson of having deliberately intercepted his correspondence with his sons. If designed systematic suppression of letters had been charged, it is impossible to understand how Dryden could have remained on friendly terms with his publisher. The trick of giving Æneas

King William's hooked nose was a current joke, and gave rise to an excellent epigram.

The literary world had looked forward to the publication of Dryden's translation of Virgil as a great event. "The expectation of his work," says Johnson, was undoubtedly great: the nation considered its honour as interested in the event. One gave him the different editions of his author, another helped him in the subordinate parts. The arguments of the several books were given him by Addison." The editions of Virgil were given by Gilbert Dolben, son of Dryden's friend, the Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster, afterwards Archbishop of York, who is eulogized in “Absalom and Achitophel :"

"Him of the western dome, whose weighty sense

Flows in fit words and heavenly eloquence."

Dr. Knightly Chetwode wrote the Life of Virgil and the Preface to the Pastorals; and Addison supplied not only the arguments of the books, but also an Essay on the Georgics. The translations of the first Georgic and of the greatest part of the last Eneid were made at Denham Court, in Buckinghamshire, the seat of Sir William Bowyer, baronet: and the seventh Eneid was translated at Burleigh, the house of the Earl of Exeter.

The sale of the Virgil, published in July 1697, was so rapid that the first edition was all disposed of in a few months, and a second appeared in the following year, revised by Dryden. He wrote to his sons at Rome, in November 1697: "My Virgil succeeds in the world beyond its desert or my reputation. You know the profits might have been more, but neither my conscience nor my honour would suffer me to take them; but I never can repent of my constancy, since I am thoroughly persuaded of the justice of the cause for which I suffer." This refers, of course, to his refusal to comply with the wishes of his publisher and others that he should dedicate the Virgil to King William. It must be allowed that, after the Revolution, Dryden maintained on the whole a dignified and manly attitude. On the death of Queen Mary in 1694, he had been pressed by some of his friends to write a funereal poem of compliment, and he had refused to do so. To have turned his back on James or to have renounced his new religion would have been so indecent, that either for a man of Dryden's intelligence and pride was impossible; but the struggle must have been painful, in straitened circumstances,

"Old Jacob, by deep judgment swayed,

To please the wise beholders,

Has placed old Nassau's hook-nosed head
On poor Æneas' shoulders.

"To make the parallel hold tack,

Methinks there's little lacking;
One took his father pick-a-pack,
And t'other sent his packing."

against the necessities of the position in which the Revolution of 1688 placed him; and there are signs in a letter written by him to Montagu, in 1699, when he was hoping for some substantial favour from the Government through Montagu's good offices, of a disposition to soften and modify his utterances in politics, and to humour and conciliate Montagu, natural enough in one who felt the pangs of poverty and was smarting under bitter disappointment, but yet not quite accordant with thorough independence and single-mindedness.

Of Dryden's translation of Virgil little more need be said here than that it was naturally regarded as of greater merit at the time of its publication than justice warrants or later fame confirms; more was then thought of the power of the translator's verse than of his accuracy or of harmony with Virgil's genius: Dryden's fame cast a halo round the work, which must always as a whole be regarded as a great achievement, and as making an epoch in our literature. The work at its best has many blemishes and inequalities, and Dryden's muse was not congenial with Virgil's sweet simplicity and naturalness. It has been said by one eminently fitted to judge—the poet Wordsworth—that wherever Virgil can be fairly said to have had his eye upon his object, Dryden always spoils the passage.

*

Dryden's second Ode for the annual musical festival of St. Cecilia's Day, the more admired and celebrated of the two, the "Alexander's Feast," was composed in 1697, soon after the publication of the Virgil. The day of the festival was November 22. In a letter to his sons at Rome written in September, he says: “I am writing a song for St. Cecilia's Feast, who, you know, is the patroness of music. This is troublesome, and no way beneficial; but I could not deny the stewards, who came in a body to my house to desire that kindness, one of them being Mr. Bridgman, whose parents are your mother's friends.” This passage is interesting in two ways: first, on account of a story of Lord Bolingbroke's having been told by Dryden that he had finished the ode in one night; and secondly, on account of a statement professing to come from Walter Moyle, that Dryden received from the Society forty pounds for this ode. It is improbable that Dryden did not receive payment for his Ode, and forty pounds would not have been an extraordinary sum. This statement may be true, though Dryden wrote beforehand that he did not expect his labour to be beneficial. The story of Dryden's speech to Lord Bolingbroke does not rest on very good authority it is said by Dr. Warton to have been told him by a Mr. Berenger, who heard it from Gilbert West, who heard it from Pope, to whom Lord Bolingbroke is said to have told it. The story is that Bolingbroke, then Mr. St. John, visiting Dryden one morning, found him excited, and was told by the poet: "I have been up all night; my musical friends made me promise

to write them an Ode for their Feast of St. Cecilia: I have been so struck with the subject which occurred to me, that I could not leave it till I had completed it : here it is finished at one sitting." This story after all is not irreconcilable with a statement in a letter of two months before, that he was then writing an Ode. It is possible that he was intending it, and saying or thinking that he was writing it two months before, and that the poem may have been virtually finished in one night of prolonged work and excitement.*

He had intended, after the Ode, to re-fashion for the stage a play written by his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, "The Conquest of China by the Tartars." "It will cost me six weeks' study," he wrote to his sons, "with the probable benefit of a hundred pounds." But this play never appeared; it is not known why Dryden relinquished the design. Some little time before this, Dryden had written a Life of Lucian for an intended edition, which did not appear till after his death. In 1698 he addressed a short poem to George Granville, afterwards Lord Lansdowne, one of his most kind and generous friends, on his tragedy, "Heroic Love," and he took occasion in this poem to complain in strong language of a recent revival, with alterations, of his "Conquest of Granada" by the company then acting in Drury Lane Theatre. There had been again a separation among the players in 1695, Betterton heading a secession from Drury Lane to the old theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields.

The famous work of Jeremy Collier, a non-juring clergyman, on the immorality and profaneness of the English stage, denouncing plays in general, specially reprobating the licentiousness of the English comedies of the age, and indicting Dryden as one of the principal offenders, was published in March 1698. It is idle to pretend that the censures bestowed on Dryden and other contemporary writers were undeserved. Dryden took occasion in a short poem addressed soon after to Mr. Motteux, on his tragedy called “Beauty in Distress," to reply to Collier's work. The answer was adroit. He dwelt more on Collier's general diatribe against theatrical representations than on his special charges of indecency and immorality, and, lightly confessing occasional faults, endeavoured to represent Collier's attack on himself as instigated by resentment for his own attacks on clergymen :—

"What I have loosely or profanely writ

Let them to fires, their due desert, commit:
Nor when accused by me, let them complain
Their faults and not their function I arraign."

Sir Richard Blackmore, a physician and author of two long heroic poems, had already in 1695, in the Preface to his “Prince Arthur," censured Dryden in strong

* See the General Introduction to the Songs, Odes, and Lyrical Pieces, p. 366 of this volume, where proof is given from Dryden's copy of Spenser in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, that he had thought of a theme for an Ode for St. Cecilia's Day, distinct from those of the two odes which he composed.