CHAPTER XXXI.

HISTORY OF POETRY FROM 1650 TO 1700.

SECT. I.

ON ITALIAN POETRY.

_Filicaja--Guidi--Menzini--Arcadian Society._

|Improved tone of Italian poetry.|

1. The imitators of Marini, full of extravagant metaphors, and the false thoughts usually called _concetti_, were in their vigour at the commencement of this period. But their names are now obscure, and have been overwhelmed by the change of public taste which has condemned and proscribed what it once most applauded. This change came on long before the close of the century, though not so decidedly but that some traces of the former manner are discoverable in the majority of popular writers. The general characteristics, however, of Italian poetry became a more masculine tone, a wider reach of topics, and a selection of the most noble, an abandonment, except in the lighter lyrics, of amatory strains, and especially of such as were languishing and querulous, an anticipation, in short, as far as the circumstances of the age would permit, of that severe and elevated style which has been most affected for the last fifty years. It would be futile to seek an explanation of this manlier spirit in any social or political causes; never had Italy, in these respects, been so lifeless; but the world of poets is often not the world around them, and their stream of living waters may flow, like that of Arethusa, without imbibing much from the surrounding brine. Chiabrera had led the way by the Pindaric majesty of his odes, and had disciples of at least equal name with himself.

|Filicaja.|

2. Florence was the mother of one who did most to invigorate Italian poetry, Vincenzo Filicaja; a man gifted with a serious, pure, and noble spirit, from which congenial thoughts spontaneously arose, and with an imagination rather vigorous than fertile. The siege of Vienna in 1683, and its glorious deliverance by Sobieski, are the subjects of six odes. The third of these, addressed to the king of Poland himself, is generally most esteemed, though I do not perceive that the first or second are inferior. His ode to Rome, on Christina’s taking up her residence there, is in many parts highly poetical; but the flattery of representing this event as sufficient to restore the eternal city from decay is too gross. It is not on the whole so successful as those on the siege of Vienna. A better is that addressed to Florence on leaving her for a rural solitude, in consequence of his poverty and the neglect he had experienced. It breathes an injured spirit, something like the complaint of Cowley, with which posterity are sure to sympathize. The sonnet of Filicaja, “Italia mia,” is known by every one who cares for this poetry at all. This sonnet is conspicuous for its depth of feeling, for the spirit of its commencement, and above all, for the noble lines with which it ends; but there are surely awkward and feeble expressions in the intermediate part. _Armenti_ for regiments of dragoons could only be excused by frequent usage in poetry, which, I presume, is not the case, though we find the same word in one of Filicaja’s odes. A foreigner may venture upon this kind of criticism.

3. Filicaja was formed in the school of Chiabrera; but, with his pomp of sound and boldness of imagery, he is animated by a deeper sense both of religion and patriotism. We perceive more the language of the heart; the man speaks in his genuine character, not with assumed and mercenary sensibility, like that of Pindar and Chiabrera. His genius is greater than his skill; he abandons himself to an impetuosity which he cannot sustain, forgetful of the economy of strength and breath, as necessary for a poet as a race-horse. He has rarely or never any conceits or frivolous thoughts; but the expression is sometimes rather feeble. There is a general want of sunshine in Filicaja’s poetry; unprosperous himself, he views nothing with a worldly eye; his notes of triumph are without brilliancy, his predictions of success are without joy. He seems also deficient in the charms of grace and felicity. But his poetry is always the effusion of a fine soul; we venerate and love Filicaja as a man, but we also acknowledge that he was a real poet.

|Guidi.|

4. Guidi, a native of Pavia, raised himself to the highest point that any lyric poet of Italy has attained. His odes are written at Rome, from about the year 1685 to the end of the century. Compared with Chiabrera or even Filicaja, he may be allowed the superiority; if he never rises to a higher pitch than the latter, if he has never chosen subjects so animating, if he has never displayed so much depth and truth of feeling, his enthusiasm is more constant, his imagination more creative, his power of language more extensive and more felicitous. “He falls sometimes,” says Corniani, “into extravagance, but never into affectation.... His peculiar excellence is poetical expression, always brilliant with a light of his own. The magic of his language used to excite a lively movement among the hearers when he recited his verses in the Arcadian society.” Corniani adds, that he is sometimes exuberant in words and hyperbolical in images.[973]

[973] Vol. viii., p. 224.

5. The ode of Guidi on Fortune, appears to me, at least, equal to any in the Italian language. If it has been suggested by that of Celio Magno, entitled Iddio, the resemblance does not deserve the name of imitation; a nobleness of thought, imagery, and language, prevails throughout. But this is the character of all his odes. He chose better subjects than Chiabrera; for the ruins of Rome are more glorious than the living house of Medici. He resembles him, indeed, rather than any other poet, so that it might not always be easy to discern one from the other in a single stanza; but Guidi is a bolder, a more imaginative, a more enthusiastic poet. Both adorn and amplify a little to excess; and it may be imputed to Guidi that he has abused an advantage which his native language afforded. The Italian is rich in words, where the sound so well answers to the meaning, that it is hardly possible to hear them without an associated sentiment; their effect is closely analogous to musical expression. Such are the adjectives denoting mental elevation, as _superbo_, _altiero_, _audace_, _gagliardo_, _indomito_, _maestoso_. These recur in the poems of Guidi with every noun that will admit of them; but sometimes the artifice is a little too transparent, and though the meaning is not sacrificed to sound, we feel that it is too much enveloped in it, and are not quite pleased that a great poet should rely so much on a resource which the most mechanical slave of music can employ.

|Menzini.|

6. The odes of Benedetto Menzini are elegant and in poetical language, but such as does not seem very original, nor do they strike us by much vigour or animation of thought. The allusions to mythology which we never find in Filicaja, and rarely in Guidi, are too frequent. Some are of considerable beauty, among which we may distinguish that addressed to Magalotti, beginning, “Un verde ramuscello in piaggia aprica.” Menzini was far from confining himself to this species of poetry; he was better known in others. As an Anacreontic poet, he stands, I believe, only below Chiabrera and Redi. His satires have been preferred by some to those of Ariosto; but neither Corniani nor Salfi acquiesce in this praise. Their style is a mixture of obsolete phrases from Dante, with the idioms of the Florentine populace; and though spirited in substance, they are rather full of common-place invective. Menzini strikes boldly at priests and governments, and, what was dangerous to Orpheus, at the whole sex of women. His Art of Poetry, in five books, published in 1681, deserves some praise. As his atrabilious humour prompted, he inveighs against the corruption of contemporary literature, especially on the stage, ridiculing also the Pindaric pomp that some affected, not, perhaps, without allusion to his enemy Guidi. His own style is pointed, animated, sometimes poetical, where didactic verse will admit of such ornament, but a little too diffuse and minute in criticism.

|Salvator Rosa--Redi.|

7. These three are the great restorers of Italian poetry after the usurpation of false taste. And it is to be observed, that they introduced a new manner, very different from that of the sixteenth century. Several others deserve to be mentioned, though we can only do so briefly. The Satires of Salvator Rosa, full of force and vehemence, more vigorous than elegant, are such as his ardent genius and rather savage temper would lead us to expect. A far superior poet was a man not less eminent than Salvator, the philosophical and every way accomplished Redi. Few have done so much, in any part of science, who have also shone so brightly in the walks of taste. The sonnets of Redi are esteemed; but his famous dithyrambic, Bacco in Toscana, is admitted to be the first poem of that kind in modern language, and is as worthy of Monte Pulciano wine, as the wine is worthy of it.

|Other poets.|

8. Maggi and Lemene bore an honourable part in the restoration of poetry, though neither of them is reckoned altogether to have purified himself from the infection of the preceding age. The sonnet of Pastorini on the imagined resistance of Genoa to the oppression of Louis XIV., in 1684, though not borne out by historical truth, is one of those breathings of Italian nationality which we always admire, and which had now become more common than for a century before. It must be confessed, in general, that when the protestations of a people against tyranny become loud enough to be heard, we may suspect that the tyranny has been relaxed.

|Christina’s patronage of letters.|

|Society of Arcadians.|

9. Rome was to poetry in this age what Florence had once been, though Rome had hitherto done less for the Italian muses than any other great city. Nor was this so much due to her bishops and cardinals, as to a stranger and a woman. Christina finally took up her abode there in 1688. Her palace became the resort of all the learning and genius she could assemble round her; a literary academy was established, and her revenue was liberally dispensed in pensions. If Filicaja and Guidi, both sharers of her bounty, have exaggerated her praises, much may be pardoned to gratitude, and much also to the natural admiration which those who look up to power must feel for those who have renounced it. Christina died in 1690, and her own academy could last no longer; but a phœnix sprang at once from its ashes. Crescimbeni, then young, has the credit of having planned the Society of Arcadians, which began in 1690, and has eclipsed in celebrity most of the earlier academies of Italy. Fourteen, says Corniani, were the original founders of this society; among whom were Crescimbeni and Gravina and Zappi. In course of time the Arcadians vastly increased, and established colonies in the chief cities of Italy. They determined to assume every one a pastoral name and a Greek birthplace, to hold their meetings in some verdant meadow, and to mingle with all their compositions, as far as possible, images from pastoral life; images always agreeable, because they recall the times of primitive innocence. This poetical tribe adopted as their device the pipe of seven reeds bound with laurel, and their president or director was denominated general shepherd or keeper (custode generale).[974] The fantastical part of the Arcadian society was common to them with all similar institutions; and mankind has generally required some ceremonial follies to keep alive the wholesome spirit of association. Their solid aim was to purify the national taste. Much had been already done, and in great measure by their own members, Menzini and Guidi; but their influence, which was, of course, more felt in the next century, has always been reckoned both important and auspicious to Italian literature.

[974] Corniani, viii., 301. Tiraboschi, xi., 43. Crescimbeni, Storia d’Arcadia (reprinted by Mathias.)

SECT. II.

ON FRENCH POETRY.

_Fontaine--Boileau--Minor French Poets._

|La Fontaine.|

10. We must pass over Spain and Portugal as absolutely destitute of any name which requires commemoration. In France it was very different if some earlier periods had been not less rich in the number of versifiers, none had produced poets who have descended with so much renown to posterity. The most popular of these was La Fontaine. Few writers have left such a number of verses which, in the phrase of his country, have made their fortune, and been like ready money, always at hand for prompt quotation. His lines have at once a proverbial truth and a humour of expression which render them constantly applicable. This is chiefly true of his Fables; for his Tales, though no one will deny that they are lively enough, are not reckoned so well written, nor do they supply so much for general use.

|Character of his Fables.|

11. The models of La Fontaine’s style were partly the ancient fabulists whom he copied, for he pretends to no originality; partly the old French poets, especially Marot. From the one he took the real gold of his fables themselves, from the other he caught a peculiar archness and vivacity, which some of them had possessed, perhaps, in no less degree, but which becomes more captivating from his intermixture of a solid and serious wisdom. For notwithstanding the common anecdotes, sometimes, as we may suspect, rather exaggerated, of La Fontaine’s simplicity, he was evidently a man who had thought and observed much about human nature, and knew a little more of the world than he cared to let the world perceive. Many of his Fables are admirable; the grace of the poetry, the happy inspiration that seems to have dictated the turns of expression, place him in the first rank among fabulists. Yet the praise of La Fontaine should not be indiscriminate. It is said that he gave the preference to Phædrus and Æsop above himself, and some have thought that in this he could not have been sincere. It was at least a proof of his modesty. But, though we cannot think of putting Phædrus on a level with La Fontaine, were it only for this reason, that in a work designed for the general reader, and surely fables are of this description, the qualities that please the many are to be valued above those that please the few, yet it is true that the French poet might envy some talents of the Roman. Phædrus, a writer scarcely prized enough, because he is an early school-book, has a perfection of elegant beauty which very few have rivalled. No word is out of its place, none is redundant, or could be changed for a better; his perspicuity and ease make everything appear unpremeditated, yet everything is wrought by consummate art. In many fables of La Fontaine this is not the case; he beats round the subject, and misses often before he hits. Much, whatever La Harpe may assert to the contrary, could be retrenched; in much the exigencies of rhyme and metre are too manifest.[975] He has, on the other hand, far more humour than Phædrus; and, whether it be praise or not, thinks less of his fable and more of its moral. One pleases by enlivening, the other pleases, but does not enliven; one has more felicity, the other more skill; but in such skill there is felicity.

[975] Let us take, for example, the first lines of L’Homme et la Couleuvre.

Un homme vit une couleuere. Ah méchante, dit-il, je m’en vais faire un œuvre Agréable à tout l’univers! A ces mots l’animal pervers (C’est le serpent que je veux dire, _Et non l’homme, on pourroit aisément s’y tromper_) A ces motes le serpent se laissant attrapper Est pris, mis en un sac; et, ce qui fut le pire, On resolut sa mort, _fût il coupable ou non_.

None of these lines appear to me very happy; but there can be no doubt about that in Italics, which spoils the effect of the preceding, and is feebly redundant. The last words are almost equally bad; no question could arise about the serpent’s guilt, which had been assumed before. But these petty blemishes are abundantly redeemed by the rest of the fable, which is beautiful in choice of thoughts and language, and may be classed with the best in the collection.

|Boileau.--His epistles.|

12. The first seven satires of Boileau appeared in 1666; and these, though much inferior to his later productions, are characterised by La Harpe as the earliest poetry in the French language where the mechanism of its verse was fully understood, where the style was always pure and elegant, where the ear was uniformly gratified. The Art of Poetry was published in 1673, the Lutrin in 1674; the Epistles followed at various periods. Their elaborate though equable strain, in a kind of poetry which, never requiring high flights of fancy, escapes the censure of mediocrity and monotony which might sometimes fall upon it, generally excites more admiration in those who have been accustomed to the numerous defects of less finished poets, than it retains in a later age, when others have learned to emulate and preserve the same uniformity. The fame of Pope was transcendant for this reason, and Boileau is the analogue of Pope in French literature.

|His Art of Poetry.|

13. The Art of Poetry has been the model of the Essay on Criticism; few poems more resemble each other. I will not weigh in opposite scales two compositions, of which one claims an advantage from its originality, the other from the youth of its author. Both are uncommon efforts of critical good sense, and both are distinguished by their short and pointed language, which remains in the memory. Boileau has very well incorporated the thoughts of Horace with his own, and given them a skilful adaptation to his own times. He was a bolder critic of his contemporaries than Pope. He took up arms against those who shared the public favour, and were placed by half Paris among great dramatists and poets, Pradon, Desmarests, Brebœuf. This was not true of the heroes of the Dunciad. His scorn was always bitter and probably sometimes unjust; yet posterity has ratified almost all his judgments. False taste, it should be remembered, had long infected the poetry of Europe; some steps had been lately taken to repress it, but extravagance, affectation, and excess of refinement, are weeds that can only be eradicated by a thorough cleansing of the soil, by a process of burning and paring which leaves not a seed of them in the public mind. And when we consider the gross blemishes of this description that deform the earlier poetry of France, as of other nations, we cannot blame the severity of Boileau, though he may occasionally have condemned in the mass what contained some intermixture of real excellence. We have become of late years in England so enamoured of the beauties of our old writers, and certainly they are of a superior kind, that we are sometimes more than a little blind to their faults.

|Comparison with Horace.|

14. By writing satires, epistles, and an art of poetry, Boileau has challenged an obvious comparison with Horace. Yet they are very unlike; one easy, colloquial, abandoning himself to every change that arises in his mind, the other uniform as a regiment under arms, always equal, always laboured, incapable of a bold neglect. Poetry seems to have been the delight of one, the task of the other. The pain that Boileau must have felt in writing communicates itself in some measure to the reader; we are fearful of losing some point, of passing over some epithet without sufficiently perceiving its selection; it is as with those pictures which are to be viewed long and attentively, till our admiration of detached proofs of skill becomes wearisome by repetition.

|The Lutrin.|

15. The Lutrin is the most popular of the poems of Boileau. Its subject is ill chosen; neither interest nor variety could be given to it. Tassoni and Pope have the advantage in this respect; if there leading theme is trifling, we lose sight of it in the gay liveliness of description and episode. In Boileau, after we have once been told that the canons of a church spend their lives in sleep and eating, we have no more to learn, and grow tired of keeping company with a race so stupid and sensual. But the poignant wit and satire, the elegance and correctness, of numberless couplets, as well as the ingenious adaptation of classical passages, redeem this poem, and confirm its high place in the mock-heroic line.

|General character of his poetry.|

16. The great deficiency of Boileau is insensibility. Far below Pope or even Dryden in this essential quality, which the moral epistle or satire not only admits but requires, he rarely quits two paths, those of reason and of raillery. His tone on moral subjects is firm and severe, but not very noble; a trait of pathos, a single touch of pity or tenderness, will rarely be found. This of itself serves to gives a dryness to his poetry, and it may be doubtful, though most have read Boileau, whether many have read him twice.

|Lyric poetry lighter than before.|

17. The pompous tone of Ronsard and Du Bartas had become ridiculous in the reign of Louis XIV. Even that of Malherbe was too elevated for the public taste; none at least imitated that writer, though the critics had set the example of admiring him. Boileau, who had done much to turn away the world from imagination to plain sense, once attempted to emulate the grandiloquent strains of Pindar in an ode on the taking of Namur, but with no such success as could encourage himself or others to repeat the experiment. Yet there was no want of gravity or elevation in the prose writers of France, nor in the tragedies of Racine. But the French language is not very well adapted for the higher kind of lyric poetry, while it suits admirably the lighter forms of song and epigram. And their poets, in this age, were almost entirely men living at Paris, either in the court, or at least in a refined society, the most adverse of all to the poetical character. The influence of wit and politeness is generally directed towards rendering enthusiasm or warmth of fancy ridiculous; and without these no great energy of genius can be displayed. But, in their proper department, several poets of considerable merit appeared.

|Benserade.|

|Chaulieu.|

18. Benserade was called peculiarly the poet of the court; for twenty years it was his business to compose verses for the ballets represented before the king. His skill and tact were shown in delicate contrivances to make those who supported the characters of gods and goddesses in these fictions, being the nobles and ladies of the court, betray their real inclinations, and sometimes their gallantries. He even presumed to shadow in this manner the passion of Louis for Mademoiselle La Vallière, before it was publicly acknowledged. Benserade must have had no small ingenuity and adroitness; but his verses did not survive those who called them forth. In a different school, not essentially, perhaps, much more vicious than the court, but more careless of appearances, and rather proud of an immorality which it had no interest to conceal, that of Ninon l’Enclos, several of higher reputation grew up; Chapelle (whose real name was L’Huillier), La Fare, Bachaumont, Lainez, and Chaulieu. The first, perhaps, and certainly the last of these, are worthy to be remembered. La Harpe has said, that Chaulieu alone retains a claim to be read in a style where Voltaire has so much left all others behind, that no comparison with him can ever be admitted. Chaulieu was an original genius, his poetry has a marked character, being a happy mixture of a gentle and peaceable philosophy with a lively imagination. His verses flow from his soul, and though often negligent through indolence, are never in bad taste or affected. Harmony of versification, grace and gaiety, with a voluptuous and Epicurean, but mild and benevolent turn of thought, belong to Chaulieu, and these are qualities which do not fail to attract the majority of readers.[976]

[976] La Harpe. Bouterwek, vi. 127. Biogr. Univ.

|Pastoral poetry.|

|Segrais.|

|Deshoulières.|

|Fontenelle.|

19. It is rather singular that a style so uncongenial to the spirit of the age as pastoral poetry appears was quite as much cultivated as before. But it is still true that the spirit of the age gained the victory, and drove the shepherds from their shady bowers, though without substituting anything more rational in the fairy tales which superseded the pastoral romance. At the middle of the century, and partially till near its close, the style of D’Urfé and Scudery retained its popularity. Three poets of the age of Louis were known in pastoral; Segrais, Madame Deshoulières, and Fontenelle. The first belongs most to the genuine school of modern pastoral; he is elegant, romantic, full of complaining love; the Spanish and French romances had been his model in invention, as Virgil was in style. La Harpe allows him nature, sweetness, and sentiment, but he cannot emulate the vivid colouring of Virgil, and the language of his shepherds, though simple, wants elegance and harmony. The tone of his pastorals seems rather insipid, though La Harpe has quoted some pleasing lines. Madame Deshoulières, with a purer style than Segrais, according to the same critic, has less genius. Others have thought her Idylls the best in the language.[977] But these seem to be merely trivial moralities addressed to flowers, brooks, and sheep, sometimes expressed in a manner both ingenious and natural, but on the whole, too feeble to give much pleasure. Bouterwek observes that her poetry is to be considered as that of a woman, and that its pastoral morality would be somewhat childish in the mouth of man; whether this says more for the lady, or against her sex, I must leave to the reader. She has occasionally some very pleasing and even poetical passages.[978] The third among these poets of the pipe is Fontenelle. But his pastorals, as Bouterwek says, are too artificial for the ancient school, and too cold for the romantic. La Harpe blames, besides this general fault, the negligence and prosaic phrases of his style. The best is that entitled Ismene. It is in fact a poem for the world; yet as love and its artifices are found everywhere, we cannot censure anything as absolutely unfit for pastoral, save a certain refinement which belonged to the author in everything, and which interferes with our sense of rural simplicity.

[977] Biogr. Univ.

[978] Bouterwek, vi. 152.

|Bad epic poems.|

20. In the superior walks of poetry France had nothing of which she has been inclined to boast. Chapelain, a man of some credit as a critic, produced his long-laboured epic, La Pucelle, in 1656, which is only remembered by the insulting ridicule of Boileau. A similar fate has fallen on the Clovis of Desmarests, published in 1684, though the German historian of literature has extolled the richness of imagination it shows, and observed that if those who saw nothing but a fantastic writer in Desmarests had possessed as much fancy, the national poetry would have been of a higher character.[979] Brebœuf’s translation of the Pharsalia is spirited, but very extravagant.

[979] Bouterwek, vi. 157.

|German Poetry.|

21. The literature of Germany was now more corrupted by bad taste than ever. A second Silesian school, but much inferior to that of Opitz, was founded by Hoffmanswaldau and Lohenstein. The first had great facility, and imitated Ovid and Marini with some success. The second, with worse taste, always tumid and striving at something elevated, so that the Lohenstein swell became a by-word with later critics, is superior to Hoffmanswaldau in richness of fancy, in poetical invention, and in warmth of feeling for all that is noble and great. About the end of the century arose a new style, known by the unhappy name spiritless (geistlos), which, avoiding the tone of Lohenstein, became wholly tame and flat.[980]

[980] Id. vol. x., p. 288. Heinsius. iv. 287. Eichhorn, Geschichte der Cultur, iv. 776.

SECT. III.

ON ENGLISH POETRY.

_Waller--Butler--Milton--Dryden--The Minor Poets._

|Waller.|

22. We might have placed Waller in the former division of the seventeenth century, with no more impropriety than we might have reserved Cowley for the latter; both belong by the date of their writings to the two periods. And perhaps the poetry of Waller bears rather the stamp of the first Charles’s age than of that which ensued. His reputation was great, and somewhat more durable than that of similar poets have generally been; he did not witness its decay in his own protracted life, nor was it much diminished at the beginning of the next century. Nor was this wholly undeserved. Waller has a more uniform elegance, a more sure facility and happiness of expression, and, above all, a greater exemption from glaring faults, such as pedantry, extravagance, conceit, quaintness, obscurity, ungrammatical and unmeaning constructions, than any of the Caroline era with whom he would naturally be compared. We have only to open Carew or Lovelace to perceive the difference; not that Waller is wholly without some of these faults, but that they are much less frequent. If others may have brighter passages of fancy or sentiment, which is not difficult, he husbands better his resources, and though left behind in the beginning of the race, comes sooner to the goal. His Panegyric on Cromwell was celebrated. “Such a series of verses,” it is said by Johnson, “had rarely appeared before in the English language. Of these lines some are grand, some are graceful, and all are musical. There is now and then a feeble verse, or a trifling thought; but its great fault is the choice of its hero.” It may not be the opinion of all, that Cromwell’s actions were of that obscure and pitiful character which the majesty of song rejects, and Johnson has before observed, that Waller’s choice of encomiastic topics in this poem is very judicious. Yet his deficiency in poetical vigour will surely be traced in this composition; if he rarely sinks, he never rises very high, and we find much good sense and selection, much skill in the mechanism of language and metre, without ardour and without imagination. In his amorous poetry, he has little passion or sensibility; but he is never free and petulant, never tedious, and never absurd. His praise consists much in negations; but in a comparative estimate, perhaps negations ought to count for a good deal.

|Butler’s Hudibras.|

23. Hudibras was incomparably more popular than Paradise Lost; no poem in our language rose at once to greater reputation. Nor can this be called ephemeral, like that of most political poetry. For at least half a century after its publication it was generally read, and perpetually quoted. The wit of Butler has still preserved many lines; but Hudibras now attracts comparatively few readers. The eulogies of Johnson seem rather adapted to what he remembered to have been the fame of Butler, than to the feelings of the surrounding generation; and since his time, new sources of amusement have sprung up, and writers of a more intelligible pleasantry have superseded those of the seventeenth century. In the fiction of Hudibras there was never much to divert the reader, and there is still less left at present. But what has been censured as a fault, the length of dialogue, which puts the fiction out of sight, is, in fact, the source of all the pleasure that the work affords. The sense of Butler is masculine, his wit inexhaustible, and it is supplied from every source of reading and observation. But these sources are often so unknown to the reader that the wit loses its effect through the obscurity of its allusions, and he yields to the bane of wit, a purblind mole-like pedantry. His versification is sometimes spirited, and his rhymes humorous; yet he wants that ease and flow which we require in light poetry.

|Paradise Lost--Choice of subject.|

24. The subject of Paradise Lost is the finest that has ever been chosen for heroic poetry; it is also managed by Milton with remarkable skill. The Iliad wants completeness; it has an unity of its own, but it is the unity of a part where we miss the relation to a whole. The Odyssey is perfect enough in this point of view; but the subject is hardly extensive enough for a legitimate epic. The Æneid is spread over too long a space, and perhaps the latter books have not that intimate connection with the former that an epic poem requires. The Pharsalia is open to the same criticism as the Iliad. The Thebaid is not deficient in unity or greatness of action; but it is one that possesses no sort of interest in our eyes. Tasso is far superior both in choice and management of his subject to most of these. Yet the Fall of Man has a more general interest than the Crusade.

|Open to some difficulties.|

25. It must be owned, nevertheless, that a religious epic labours under some disadvantages; in proportion as it attracts those who hold the same tenets with the author, it is regarded by those who dissent from him with indifference or aversion. It is said that the discovery of Milton’s Arianism, in this rigid generation, has already impaired the sale of Paradise Lost. It is also difficult to enlarge or adorn such a story by fiction. Milton has done much in this way; yet he was partly restrained by the necessity of conforming to Scripture.

|Its arrangement.|

26. The ordonnance or composition of the Paradise Lost is admirable; and here we perceive the advantage which Milton’s great familiarity with the Greek theatre, and his own original scheme of the poem had given him. Every part succeeds in an order, noble, clear, and natural. It might have been wished, indeed, that the vision of the eleventh book had not been changed into the colder narration of the twelfth. But what can be more majestic than the first two books, which open this great drama? It is true that they rather serve to confirm the sneer of Dryden that Satan is Milton’s hero; since they develop a plan of action in that potentate, which is ultimately successful; the triumph that he and his host must experience in the fall of man being hardly compensated by their temporary conversion into serpents; a fiction rather too grotesque. But it is, perhaps, only pedantry to talk about the hero, as if a high personage were absolutely required in an epic poem to predominate over the rest. The conception of Satan is doubtless the first effort of Milton’s genius. Dante could not have ventured to spare so much lustre for a ruined archangel, in an age when nothing less than horns and a tail were the orthodox creed.[981]

[981] Coleridge has a fine passage which I cannot resist my desire to transcribe. “The character of Satan is pride and sensual indulgence, finding in itself the motive of action. It is the character so often seen in little on the political stage. It exhibits all the restlessness, temerity, and cunning which have marked the mighty hunters of mankind from Nimrod to Napoleon. The common fascination of man is that these great men, as they are called, must act from some great motive. Milton has carefully marked in his Satan the intense selfishness, the alcohol of egotism, which would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. To place this lust of self in opposition to denial of self or duty, and to show what exertions it would make, and what pains endure, to accomplish its end, is Milton’s particular object in the character of Satan. But around this character he has thrown a singularity of daring, a grandeur of sufferance, and a ruined splendour, which constitute the very height of poetic sublimity.” Coleridge’s Remains, p. 176.

In reading such a paragraph as this, we are struck by the vast improvement of the highest criticism, the philosophy of æsthetics, since the days of Addison. His papers in the Spectator on Paradise Lost were, perhaps, superior to any criticism that had been written in our language; and we must always acknowledge their good sense, their judiciousness, and the vast service they did to our literature, in settling the Paradise Lost on its proper level. But how little they satisfy us, even in treating of the _natura naturata_, the poem itself! and how little conception they show of the _natura naturans_, the individual genius of the author! Even in the periodical criticism of the present day, in the midst of much that is affected, much that is precipitate, much that is written for mere display, we find occasional reflections of a profundity and discrimination which we should seek in vain through Dryden or Addison, or the two Wartons, or even Johnson, though much superior to the rest. Hurd has perhaps the merit of being the first who in this country aimed at philosophical criticism; he had great ingenuity, a good deal of reading, and a facility in applying it; but he did not feel very deeply, was somewhat of a coxcomb, and having always before his eyes a model neither good in itself, nor made for him to emulate, he assumes a dogmatic arrogance, which, as it always offends the reader, so for the most part stands in the way of the author’s own search for truth.

|Characters of Adam and Eve.|

27. Milton has displayed great skill in the delineations of Adam and Eve; he does not dress them up, after the fashion of orthodox theology, which had no spell to bind his free spirit, in the fancied robes of primitive righteousness. South, in one of his sermons, has drawn a picture of unfallen man, which is even poetical; but it might be asked by the reader, Why then did he fall? The first pair of Milton are innocent of course, but not less frail than their posterity; nor except one circumstance, which seems rather physical intoxication than anything else, do we find any sign of depravity super-induced upon their transgression. It might even be made a question for profound theologians whether Eve, by taking amiss what Adam had said, and by self-conceit, did not sin before she tasted the fatal apple. The necessary paucity of actors in Paradise Lost is perhaps the apology of Sin and Death; they will not bear exact criticism, yet we do not wish them away.

|He owes less to Homer than the tragedians.|

28. The comparison of Milton with Homer has been founded on the acknowledged pre-eminence of each in his own language, and on the lax application of the word epic to their great poems. But there was not much in common either between their genius or its products; and Milton has taken less in direct imitation from Homer than from several other poets. His favourites had rather been Sophocles and Euripides; to them he owes the structure of his blank verse, his swell and dignity of style, his grave enunciation of moral and abstract sentiment, his tone of description, neither condensed like that of Dante, nor spread out with the diffuseness of the other Italians and of Homer himself. Next to these Greek tragedians, Virgil seems to have been his model; with the minor Latin poets, except Ovid, he does not, I think, show any great familiarity; and though abundantly conversant with Ariosto, Tasso, and Marini, we cannot say that they influenced his manner, which, unlike theirs, is severe and stately, never light, nor in the sense we should apply the words to them, rapid and animated.[982]

[982] The solemnity of Milton is striking in those passages where some other poets would indulge a little in voluptuousness, and the more so, because this is not wholly uncongenial to him. A few lines in Paradise Lost are rather too plain, and their gravity makes them worse.

|Compared with Dante.|

29. To Dante, however, he bears a much greater likeness. He has, in common with that poet, an uniform seriousness, for the brighter colouring of both is but the smile of a pensive mind, a fondness for argumentative speech, and for the same strain of argument. This, indeed, proceeds in part from the general similarity, the religious and even theological cast of their subjects; I advert particularly to the last part of Dante’s poem. We may almost say, when we look to the resemblance of their prose writings, in the proud sense of being born for some great achievement, which breathes through the Vita Nuova, as it does through Milton’s earlier treatises, that they were twin spirits, and that each might have animated the other’s body, that each would, as it were, have been the other, if he had lived in the other’s age. As it is, I incline to prefer Milton, that is, the Paradise Lost, both because the subject is more extensive, and because the resources of his genius are more multifarious. Dante sins more against good taste, but only, perhaps, because there was no good taste in his time; for Milton has also too much a disposition to make the grotesque accessory to the terrible. Could Milton have written the lines on Ugolino? Perhaps he could. Those on Francesca? Not, I think, every line. Could Dante have planned such a poem as Paradise Lost? Not certainly, being Dante in 1300; but, living when Milton did, perhaps he could. It is, however, useless to go on with questions that no one can fully answer. To compare the two poets, read two or three cantos of the Purgatory or Paradise, and then two or three hundred lines of Paradise Lost. Then take Homer, or even Virgil, the difference will be striking. Yet, notwithstanding this analogy of their minds, I have not perceived that Milton imitates Dante very often, probably from having committed less to memory while young (and Dante was not the favourite poet of Italy when Milton was there), than of Ariosto and Tasso.

30. Each of these great men chose the subject that suited his natural temper and genius. What, it is curious to conjecture, would have been Milton’s success in his original design, a British story? Far less surely than in Paradise Lost; he wanted the rapidity of the common heroic poem, and would always have been sententious, perhaps arid and heavy. Yet, even as religious poets, there are several remarkable distinctions between Milton and Dante. It has been justly observed that, in the Paradise of Dante, he makes use of but three leading ideas, light, music, and motion, and that Milton has drawn Heaven in less pure and spiritual colours.[983] The philosophical imagination of the former, in this third part of his poem, almost defecated from all sublunary things by long and solitary musing, spiritualizes all it touches. The genius of Milton, though itself subjective, was less so than that of Dante; and he has to recount, to describe, to bring deeds and passions before the eye. And two peculiar causes may be assigned for this difference in the treatment of celestial things between the Divine Comedy and the Paradise Lost; the dramatic form which Milton had originally designed to adopt, and his own theological bias towards anthropomorphitism, which his posthumous treatise on religion has brought to light. This was, no doubt, in some measure inevitable in such a subject as that of Paradise Lost; yet much that is ascribed to God, sometimes with the sanction of Scripture, sometimes without it, is not wholly pleasing; such as “the oath that shook Heaven’s vast circumference,” and several other images of the same kind, which bring down the Deity in a manner not consonant to philosophical religion, however it may be borne out by the sensual analogies, or mythic symbolism of Oriental writing.[984]

[983] Quarterly Review, June, 1825. This article contains some good and some questionable remarks on Milton; among the latter I reckon the proposition, that his contempt for women is shown in the delineation of Eve; an opinion not that of Addison or of many others who have thought her exquisitely drawn. It is true that, if Milton had made her a wit or a _blue_, the fall would have been accounted for with as little difficulty as possible, and spared the serpent his trouble.

[984] Johnson thinks that Milton should have secured the consistency of this poem by keeping immateriality out of sight, and enticing his reader to drop it from his thoughts. But here the subject forbade him to preserve consistency, if, indeed, there be inconsistency in supposing a rapid assumption of form by spiritual beings. For, though the instance that Johnson alleges of inconsistency in Satan’s animating a toad was not necessary, yet his animation of the serpent was absolutely indispensable. And the same has been done by other poets, who do not scruple to suppose their gods, their fairies or devils, or their allegorical personages, inspiring thoughts, and even uniting themselves with the soul, as well as assuming all kinds of form, though their natural appearance is almost always anthropomorphic. And, after all, Satan does not animate a real toad, but takes the shape of one. “Squat like a toad close by the ear of Eve.” But he does enter a real serpent, so that the instance of Johnson is ill chosen. If he had mentioned the serpent, everyone would have seen that the identity of the animal serpent with Satan is part of the original account.

|Elevation of his style.|

31. We rarely meet with feeble lines in Paradise Lost,[985] though with many that are hard, and, in a common use of the word, might be called prosaic. Yet few are truly prosaic; few wherein the tone is not some way distinguished from prose. The very artificial style of Milton, sparing in English idiom, and his study of a rhythm, not always the most grateful to our ears, but preserving his blank verse from a trivial flow, is the cause of this elevation. It is, at least, more removed from a prosaic cadence than the slovenly rhymes of such contemporary poets as Chamberlayne. His versification is entirely his own, framed on a Latin and chiefly a Virgilian model, the pause less frequently resting on the close of the line than in Homer, and much less than in our own dramatic poets. But it is also possible that the Italian and Spanish blank verse may have had some effect upon his ear.

[985] One of the few exceptions is in the sublime description of Death, where a wretched hemistich, “Fierce as ten furies,” stands as an unsightly blemish.

|His blindness.|

32. In the numerous imitations, and still more numerous traces of older poetry which we perceive in Paradise Lost, it is always to be kept in mind that he had only his recollection to rely upon.[986] His blindness seems to have been complete before 1654; and I scarcely think that he had begun his poem, before the anxiety and trouble into which the public strife of the commonwealth and the restoration had thrown him, gave leisure for immortal occupations. Then the remembrance of early reading came over his dark and lonely path like the moon emerging from the clouds. Then it was that the muse was truly his; not only as she poured her creative inspiration into his mind, but as the daughter of Memory, coming with fragments of ancient melodies, the voice of Euripides and Homer and Tasso; sounds that he had loved in youth, and treasured up for the solace of his age. They who, though not enduring the calamity of Milton, have known what it is, when afar from books, in solitude, or in travelling, or in the intervals of worldly care, to feed on poetical recollections, to murmur over the beautiful lines whose cadence has long delighted their ear, to recall the sentiments and images which retain by association the charm that early years once gave them--they will feel the inestimable value of committing to the memory, in the prime of its power, what it will easily receive and indelibly retain. I know not, indeed, whether an education that deals much with poetry, such as is still usual in England, has any more solid argument among many in its favour, than that it lays the foundation of intellectual pleasures at the other extreme of life.

[986] I take this opportunity of mentioning, on the authority of Mr. Todd’s Inquiry into the Origin of Paradise Lost (edit. of Milton, vol. ii., p. 229), that Lauder, whom I have taxed with ignorance, Vol. III., p. 522, really published the poem of Barlæus on the nuptials of Adam and Eve.

|His passion for music.|

|Faults in Paradise Lost.|

33. It is owing, in part, to his blindness, but more, perhaps, to his general residence in a city, that Milton, in the words of Coleridge, is “not a picturesque but a musical poet;” or, as I would prefer to say, is the latter more of the two. He describes visible things, and often with great powers of rendering them manifest, what the Greeks called εναργεια [enargeia], though seldom with so much circumstantial exactness of observation, as Spenser or Dante; but he feels music. The sense of vision delighted his imagination, but that of sound wrapped his whole soul in ecstacy. One of his trifling faults may be connected with this, the excessive passion he displays for stringing together sonorous names, sometimes so obscure that the reader associates nothing with them, as the word Namancos in Lycidas, which long baffled the commentators. Hence, his catalogues, unlike those of Homer and Virgil, are sometimes merely ornamental and misplaced. Thus, the names of unbuilt cities come strangely forward in Adam’s vision,[987] though he has afterwards gone over the same ground with better effect in Paradise Regained. In this there was also a mixture of his pedantry. But, though he was rather too ostentatious of learning, the nature of his subject demanded a good deal of episodical ornament. And this, rather than the precedents he might have alledged from the Italians and others, is, perhaps, the best apology for what some grave critics have censured, his frequent allusions to fable and mythology. These give much relief to the severity of the poem, and few readers would dispense with them. Less excuse can be made for some affectation of science which has produced hard and unpleasing lines; but he had been born in an age when more credit was gained by reading much than by writing well. The faults, however, of Paradise Lost are, in general, less to be called faults than necessary adjuncts of the qualities we most admire, and idiosyncrasies of a mighty genius. The verse of Milton is sometimes wanting in grace, and almost always in ease; but what better can be said of his prose? His foreign idioms are too frequent in the one; but they predominate in the other.

[987] Par. Lost, xi., 386.

|Its progress to fame.|

34. The slowness of Milton’s advance to glory is now generally owned to have been much exaggerated; we might say that the reverse was nearer the truth. “The sale of 1,300 copies in two years,” says Johnson, “in opposition to so much recent enmity, and to a style of versification new to all and disgusting to many, was an uncommon example of the prevalence of genius. The demand did not immediately increase; for many more readers than were supplied at first the nation did not afford. Only 3,000 were sold in eleven years.” It would hardly however be said, even in this age, of a poem 3,000 copies of which had been sold in eleven years, that its success had been small; and I have some few doubts, whether Paradise Lost, published eleven years since, would have met with a greater demand. There is sometimes a want of congeniality in public taste which no power of genius will overcome. For Milton it must be said by every one conversant with the literature of the age that preceded Addison’s famous criticism, from which some have dated the reputation of Paradise Lost, that he took his place among great poets from the beginning. The fancy of Johnston that few dared to praise it, and that “the revolution put an end to the secrecy of love,” is without foundation; the government of Charles II. was not so absurdly tyrannical, nor did Dryden, the court’s own poet, hesitate, in his preface to the State of Innocence, published soon after Milton’s death, to speak of its original, Paradise Lost, as “undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced.”

|Paradise Regained.|

35. The neglect which Paradise Lost never experienced, seems to have been long the lot of Paradise Regained. It was not popular with the world; it was long believed to manifest a decay of the poet’s genius, and, in spite of all the critics have written, it is still but the favourite of some whose predilections for the Miltonic style are very strong. The subject is so much less capable of calling forth the vast powers of his mind, that we should be unfair in comparing it throughout with the greater poem; it has been called a model of the shorter epic, an action comprehending few characters and a brief space of time.[988] The love of Milton for dramatic dialogue, imbibed from Greece, is still more apparent than in Paradise Lost; the whole poem, in fact, may almost be accounted a drama of primal simplicity, the narrative and descriptive part serving rather to diversify and relieve the speeches of the actors, than their speeches, as in the legitimate epic, to enliven the narration. Paradise Regained abounds with passages equal to any of the same nature in Paradise Lost; but the argumentative tone is kept up till it produces some tediousness, and perhaps, on the whole, less pains have been exerted to adorn and elevate even that which appeals to the imagination.

[988] Todd’s Milton, vol. v., p. 308.

|Samson Agonistes.|

36. Samson Agonistes is the latest of Milton’s poems; we see in it, perhaps, more distinctly than in Paradise Regained, the ebb of a mighty tide. An air of uncommon grandeur prevails throughout; but the language is less poetical than in Paradise Lost; the vigour of thought remains, but it wants much of its ancient eloquence. Nor is the lyric tone well kept up by the chorus; they are too sententious, too slow in movement, and, except by the metre, are not easily distinguishable from the other personages. But this metre is itself infelicitous; the lines being frequently of a number of syllables, not recognised in the usage of English poetry, and, destitute of rhythmical language, fall into prose. Milton seems to have forgotten that the ancient chorus had a musical accompaniment.

37. The style of Samson, being essentially that of Paradise Lost, may show us how much more the latter poem is founded on the Greek tragedians than on Homer. In Samson we have sometimes the pompous tone of Æschylus, more frequently the sustained majesty of Sophocles; but the religious solemnity of Milton’s own temperament, as well as the nature of the subject, have given a sort of breadth, an unbroken severity, to the whole drama. It is, perhaps, not very popular even with the lovers of poetry; yet, upon close comparison, we should find that it deserves a higher place than many of its prototypes. We might search the Greek tragedies long for a character so powerfully conceived and maintained as that of Samson himself; and it is only conformable to the sculptural simplicity of that form of drama which Milton adopted, that all the rest should be kept in subordination to it. “It is only,” Johnson says, “by a blind confidence in the reputation of Milton, that a drama can be praised in which the intermediate parts have neither cause nor consequence, neither hasten nor retard the catastrophe.” Such a drama is certainly not to be ranked with Othello and Macbeth, or even with the Œdipus or the Hippolytus; but a similar criticism is applicable to several famous tragedies in the less artificial school of antiquity, to the Prometheus and the Persæ of Æschylus, and if we look strictly, to not a few of the two other masters.

|Dryden. His earlier poems.|

38. The poetical genius of Dryden came slowly to perfection. Born in 1631, his first short poems, or, as we might rather say, copies of verses, were not written till he approached thirty; and though some of his dramas, not indeed of the best, belong to the next period of his life, he had reached the age of fifty, before his high rank as a poet had been confirmed by indubitable proof. Yet he had manifested a superiority to his immediate contemporaries; his Astræa Redux, on the Restoration, is well versified; the lines are seldom weak, the couplets have that pointed manner which Cowley and Denham had taught the world to require; they are harmonious, but not so varied as the style he afterwards adopted. The Annus Mirabilis, in 1667, is of a higher cast; it is not so animated as the later poetry of Dryden, because the alternate quatrain, in which he followed Davenant’s Gondibert, is hostile to animation; but it is not less favourable to another excellence, condensed and vigorous thought. Davenant, indeed, and Denham may be reckoned the models of Dryden, so far as this can be said of a man of original genius, and one far superior to theirs. The distinguishing characteristic of Dryden, it has been said by Scott, was the power of reasoning and expressing the result in appropriate language. This, indeed, was the characteristic of the two we have named, and so far as Dryden has displayed it, which he eminently has done, he bears a resemblance to them. But it is insufficient praise for this great poet. His rapidity of conception and readiness of expression are higher qualities. He never loiters about a single thought or image, never labours about the turn of a phrase. The impression upon our minds that he wrote with exceeding ease, is irresistible, and I do not know that we have any evidence to repel it. The admiration of Dryden gains upon us, if I may speak from my own experience, with advancing years, as we become more sensible of the difficulty of his style, and of the comparative facility of that which is merely imaginative.

|Absalom and Achitophel.|

39. Dryden may be considered as a satirical, a reasoning, a descriptive and narrative, a lyric poet, and as a translator. As a dramatist, we must return to him again. The greatest of his satires is Absalom and Achitophel, that work in which his powers became fully known to the world, and which, as many think, he never surpassed. The admirable fitness of the English couplet for satire had never been shown before; in less skilful hands it had been ineffective. He does not frequently, in this poem, carry the sense beyond the second line, which, for the most part, enfeebles the emphasis; his triplets are less numerous than usual, but energetic. The spontaneous ease of expression, the rapid transitions, the general elasticity and movement have never been excelled. It is superfluous to praise the discrimination and vivacity of the chief characters, especially Shaftesbury and Buckingham. Satire, however, is so much easier than panegyric, that with Ormond, Ossory, and Mulgrave, he has not been quite so successful. In the second part of Absalom and Achitophel, written by Tate, one long passage alone is inserted by Dryden. It is excellent in its line of satire, but the line is less elevated; the persons delineated are less important, and he has indulged more his natural proneness to virulent ribaldry. This fault of Dryden’s writings, it is just to observe, belonged less to the man than to the age. No libellous invective, no coarseness of allusion, had ever been spared towards a private or political enemy. We read with nothing but disgust the satirical poetry of Cleveland, Butler, Oldham, and Marvell, or even of men whose high rank did not soften their style, Rochester, Dorset, Mulgrave. In Dryden there was, for the first time, a poignancy of wit which atones for his severity, and a discretion even in his taunts which made them more cutting.

|Mac Flecknoe.|

40. The Medal, which is in some measure a continuation of Absalom and Achitophel, as it bears wholly on Shaftesbury, is of unequal merit, and on the whole falls much below the former. In Mac Flecknoe, his satire on his rival Shadwell, we must allow for the inferiority of the subject, which could not bring out so much of Dryden’s higher powers of mind; but scarcely one of his poems is more perfect. Johnson, who admired Dryden almost as much as he could anyone, has yet, from his proneness to critical censure, very much exaggerated the poet’s defects. “His faults of negligence are beyond recital. Such is the unevenness of his compositions, that ten lines are seldom found together without something of which the reader is ashamed.” This might be true, or more nearly true, of other poets of the seventeenth century. Ten good consecutive lines will, perhaps, rarely be found, except in Denham, Davenant and Waller. But it seems a great exaggeration as to Dryden. I would particularly instance Mac Flecknoe as a poem of about four hundred lines, in which no one will be condemned as weak or negligent, though three or four are rather too ribaldrous for our taste. There are also passages, much exceeding ten lines, in Absalom and Achitophel, as well as in the later works, the Fables, which excite in the reader none of the shame for the poet’s carelessness, with which Johnson has furnished him.

|The Hind and Panther.|

41. The argumentative talents of Dryden appear, more or less, in the greater part of his poetry; reason in rhyme was his peculiar delight, to which he seems to escape from the mere excursions of fancy. And it is remarkable that he reasons better and more closely in poetry than in prose. His productions more exclusively reasoning are the Religio Laici and the Hind and Panther. The latter is every way an extraordinary poem. It was written in the hey-day of exultation, by a recent proselyte to a winning side, as he dreamed it to be, by one who never spared a weaker foe, nor repressed his triumph with a dignified moderation. A year was hardly to elapse before he exchanged this fulness of pride for an old age of disappointment and poverty. Yet then too his genius was unquenched, and even his satire was not less severe.

|Its singular fable.|

42. The first lines in the Hind and Panther are justly reputed among the most musical in our language; and perhaps we observe their rhythm the better because it does not gain much by the sense; for the allegory and the fable are seen, even in this commencement, to be awkwardly blended. Yet, notwithstanding their evident incoherence, which sometimes leads to the verge of absurdity, and the facility they give to ridicule, I am not sure that Dryden was wrong in choosing this singular fiction. It was his aim to bring forward an old argument in as novel a style as he could; a dialogue between a priest and a parson would have made but a dull poem, even if it had contained some of the excellent paragraphs we read in the Hind and Panther. It is the grotesqueness and originality of the fable that give this poem its peculiar zest, of which no reader, I conceive, is insensible; and it is also by this means that Dryden has contrived to relieve his reasoning by short but beautiful touches of description, such as the sudden stream of light from heaven which announces the conception of James’s unfortunate heir near the end of the second book.

|Its reasoning.|

43. The wit in the Hind and Panther is sharp, ready, and pleasant, the reasoning is sometimes admirably close and strong; it is the energy of Bossuet in verse. I do not know that the main argument of the Roman church could be better stated; all that has been well said for tradition and authority, all that serves to expose the inconsistencies of a vacillating protestantism, is in the Hind’s mouth. It is such an answer as a candid man should admit to any doubts of Dryden’s sincerity. He who could argue as powerfully as the Hind may well be allowed to have thought himself in the right. Yet he could not forget a few bold thoughts of his more sceptical days, and such is his bias to sarcasm that he cannot restrain himself from reflections on kings and priests when he is most contending for them.[989]

[989] By education most have been misled; So they believe because they so were bred. The priest continues what the nurse began, And thus the child imposes on the man. Part. iii.

“Call you this backing of your friends?” his new allies might have said.

|The Fables.|

44. The Fables of Dryden, or stories modernised from Boccaccio and Chaucer, are at this day probably the most read and the most popular of Dryden’s poems. They contain passages of so much more impressive beauty, and are altogether so far more adapted to general sympathy than those we have mentioned, that I should not hesitate to concur in this judgment. Yet Johnson’s accusation of negligence is better supported by these than by the earlier poems. Whether it were that age and misfortune, though they had not impaired the poet’s vigour, had rendered its continual exertion more wearisome, or, as is perhaps the better supposition, he reckoned an easy style, sustained above prose, in some places, rather by metre than expression, more fitted to narration, we find much which might appear slovenly to critics of Johnson’s temper. He seems, in fact, to have conceived, like Milton, a theory that good writing, at least in verse, is never either to follow the change of fashion, or to sink into familiar phrase, and that any deviation from this rigour should be branded as low and colloquial. But Dryden wrote on a different plan. He thought, like Ariosto, and like Chaucer, whom he had to improve, that a story, especially when not heroic, should be told in easy and flowing language, without too much difference from that of prose, relying on his harmony, his occasional inversions, and his concealed skill in the choice of words, for its effect on the reader. He found also a tone of popular idiom, not perhaps old English idiom, but such as had crept into society, current among his contemporaries; and though this has in many cases now become insufferably vulgar, and in others looks like affectation, we should make some allowance for the times in condemning it. This last blemish, however, is not much imputable to the Fables. Their beauties are innumerable; yet few are very well chosen; some, as Guiscard and Sigismunda, he has injured through coarseness of mind, which neither years nor religion had purified; and we want in all the power over emotion, the charm of sympathy, the skilful arrangement and selection of circumstance, which narrative poetry claims as its highest graces.

|His Odes--Alexander’s Feast.|

45. Dryden’s fame as a lyric poet depends a very little on his Ode on Mrs. Killigrew’s death, but almost entirely on that song for St. Cecilia’s Day, commonly called Alexander’s Feast. The former, which is much praised by Johnson, has a few fine lines, mingled with a far greater number ill conceived and ill expressed; the whole composition has that spirit which Dryden hardly ever wanted, but it is too faulty for high praise. The latter used to pass for the best work of Dryden and the best ode in the language. Many would now agree with me that it is neither one nor the other and that it was rather over-rated during a period when criticism was not at a high point. Its excellence indeed is undeniable; it has the raciness, the rapidity, the mastery of language which belong to Dryden; the transitions are animated, the contrasts effective. But few lines are highly poetical, and some sink to the level of a common drinking song. It has the defects, as well as the merits of that poetry which is written for musical accompaniment.

|His translation of Virgil.|

46. Of Dryden as a translator it is needless to say much. In some instances, as in an ode of Horace, he has done extremely well; but his Virgil is, in my apprehension, the least successful of his chief works. Lines of consummate excellence are frequently shot, like threads of gold, through the web; but the general texture is of an ordinary material. Dryden was little fitted for a translator of Virgil; his mind was more rapid and vehement than that of his original, but by far less elegant and judicious. This translation seems to have been made in haste; it is more negligent than any of his own poetry, and the style is often almost studiously, and as it were spitefully, vulgar.

|Decline of poetry from the Restoration.|

|Some minor poets enumerated.|

47. The supremacy of Dryden from the death of Milton in 1674 to his own in 1700 was not only unapproached by any English poet, but he held almost a complete monopoly of English poetry. This latter period of the seventeenth century, setting aside these two great names, is one remarkably sterile in poetical genius. Under the first Stuarts, men of warm imagination and sensibility, though with deficient taste and little command of language, had done some honour to our literature; though once neglected, they have come forward again in public esteem, and if not very extensively read, have been valued by men of kindred minds full as much as they deserve. The versifiers of Charles II. and William’s days have experienced the opposite fate; popular for a time, and long so far known at least by name as to have entered rather largely into collections of poetry, they are now held in no regard, nor do they claim much favour from just criticism. Their object in general was to write like men of the world; with ease, wit, sense, and spirit, but dreading any soaring of fancy, any ardour of moral emotion, as the probable source of ridicule in their readers. Nothing quenches the flame of poetry more than this fear of the prosaic multitude, unless it is the community of habits with this very multitude; a life such as these poets generally led, of taverns and brothels, or, what came much to the same, of the court. We cannot say of Dryden, that “he bears no traces of those sable streams;” they sully too much the plumage of that stately swan, but his indomitable genius carries him upwards to a purer empyrean. The rest are just distinguishable from one another, not by any high gifts of the muse, but by degrees of spirit, of ease, of poignancy, of skill and harmony in versification, of good sense and acuteness. They may easily be disposed of. Cleveland is sometimes humorous, but succeeds only in the lightest kinds of poetry. Marvell wrote sometimes with more taste and feeling than was usual, but his satires are gross and stupid. Oldham, far superior in this respect, ranks perhaps next to Dryden; he is spirited and pointed, but his versification is too negligent, and his subjects temporary. Roscommon, one of the best for harmony and correctness of language, has little vigour, but he never offends, and Pope has justly praised his “unspotted bays.” Mulgrave affects ease and spirit, but his Essay on Satire belies the supposition that Dryden had any share in it. Rochester, with more considerable and varied genius, might have raised himself to a higher place than he holds. Of Otway, Duke, and several more, it is not worth while to give any character, The Revolution did nothing for poetry; William’s reign, always excepting Dryden, is our _nadir_ in works of imagination. Then came Blackmore with his epic poems of Prince Arthur and King Arthur, and Pomfret with his Choice, both popular in their own age, and both intolerable by their frigid and tame monotony in the next. The lighter poetry, meantime, of song and epigram did not sink along with the serious; the state of society was much less adverse to it. Rochester, Dorset, and some more whose names are unknown, or not easily traced, do credit to the Caroline period.

48. In the year 1699, a poem was published, Garth’s Dispensary, which deserves attention, not so much for its own merit, though it comes nearest to Dryden, at whatever interval, as from its indicating a transitional state in our versification. The general structure of the couplet through the seventeenth century may be called abnormous; the sense is not only often carried beyond the second line, which the French avoid, but the second line of one couplet and the first of the next are not seldom united in a single sentence or a portion of one, so that the two, though not rhyming, must be read as a couplet. The former, when as dexterously managed as it was by Dryden, adds much to the beauty of the general versification; but the latter, a sort of adultery of the lines already wedded to other companions at rhyme’s altar, can scarcely ever be pleasing, unless it be in narrative poetry, where it may bring the sound nearer to prose. A tendency, however, to the French rule of constantly terminating the sense with the couplet, will be perceived to have increased from the Restoration. Roscommon seldom deviates from it, and in long passages of Dryden himself there will hardly be found an exception. But, perhaps, it had not been so uniform in any former production as in the Dispensary. The versification of this once famous mock-heroic poem is smooth and regular, but not forcible; the language clear and neat; the parodies and allusions happy. Many lines are excellent in the way of pointed application, and some are remembered and quoted, where few call to mind the author. It has been remarked that Garth enlarged and altered the Dispensary in almost every edition, and what is more uncommon, that every alteration was for the better. This poem may be called an imitation of the Lutrin, inasmuch as but for the Lutrin, it might probably not have been written, and there are even particular resemblances. The subject, which is a quarrel between the physicians and apothecaries of London, may vie with that of Boileau in want of general interest; yet it seems to afford more diversity to the satirical poet. Garth, as has been intimated, is a link of transition between the style and turn of poetry under Charles and William, and that we find in Addison, Prior, Tickell, and Pope, in the reign of Anne.

SECT. IV.

ON LATIN POETRY.

|Latin poets of Italy.|

|Ceva.|

|Sergardi.|

49. The Jesuits were not unmindful of the credit their Latin verses had done them in periods more favourable to that exercise of taste than the present. Even in Italy, which had ceased to be a very genial soil, one of their number, Ceva, may deserve mention. His Jesus Puer is a long poem, not inelegantly written, but rather singular in some of its descriptions, where the poet has been more solicitous to adorn his subject than attentive to its proper character; and the same objection might be made to some of its episodes. Ceva wrote also a philosophical poem, extolled by Corniani, but which has not fallen into my hands.[990] Averani, a Florentine of various erudition, Cappellari, Strozzi, author of a poem on chocolate, and several others, both within the order of Loyola and without it, cultivated Latin poetry with some success.[991] But, though some might be superior as poets, none were more remarkable or famous than Sergardi, best known by some biting satires under the name of Q. Sectanus, which he levelled at his personal enemy Gravina. The reputation, indeed, of Gravina with posterity has not been affected by such libels; but they are not wanting either in poignancy and spirit, or in a command of Latin phrase.[992]

[990] Corniani, viii., 214. Salfi, xiv., 257.

[991] Bibl. Choisie, vol. xxii. Salfi, xiv., 238, et post.

[992] Salfi, xiv., 299. Corniani, viii., 280.

|Of France--Quillet.|

50. The superiority of France in Latin verse was no longer contested by Holland or Germany. Several poets of real merit belong to this period. The first in time was Claude Quillet, who, in his Callipædia, bears the Latinised name of Leti. This is written with much elegance of style and a very harmonious versification. No writer has a more Virgilian cadence. Though inferior to Sammarthanus, he may be reckoned high among the French poets. He has been reproached with too open an exposition of some parts of his subject; which applies only to the second book.

|Menage.|

51. The Latin poems of Menage are not unpleasing; he has, indeed, no great fire or originality, but the harmonious couplets glide over the ear, and the mind is pleased to recognise the tesselated fragments of Ovid and Tibullus. His affected passion for Mademoiselle Lavergne, and lamentations about her cruelty are ludicrous enough, when we consider the character of the man, as Vadius in the Femmes Savantes of Molière. They are perfect models of want of truth; but it is a want of truth to nature, not to the conventional forms of modern Latin verse.

|Rapin on gardens.|

52. A far superior performance is the poem on gardens, by the Jesuit, Réné Rapin. For skill in varying and adorning his subject, for a truly Virgilian spirit in expression, for the exclusion of feeble, prosaic, or awkward lines, he may, perhaps, be equal to any poet, to Sammarthanus, or to Sannazarius himself. His cadences are generally very gratifying to the ear, and in this respect he is much above Vida.[993] But his subject, or his genius, has prevented him from rising very high; he is the poet of gardens, and what gardens are to nature, that is he to mightier poets. There is also too monotonous a repetition of nearly the same images, as in his long enumeration of flowers in the first book; the descriptions are separately good, and great artifice is shown in varying them; but the variety could not be sufficient to remove the general sameness that belongs to a horticultural catalogue. Rapin was a great admirer of box and all topiary works, or trees cut into artificial forms.

[993] As the poem of Rapin is not in the hands of everyone who has taste for Latin poetry, I will give as a specimen the introduction to the second book:--

Me nemora atque omnis nemorum pulcherrimus ordo, Et spatia umbrandum latè fundanda per hortum Invitant; hortis nam si florentibus umbra Abfuerit, reliquo deerit sua gratia ruri. Vos grandes luci et silvæ aspirate canenti; Is mihi contingat vestro de munere ramus, Unde sacri quando velant sua tempora vates, Ipse et amem meritam capiti imposuisse coronam. Jam se cantanti frondosa cacumina quercus Inclinant, plauduntque comis nemora alta coruscis. Ipsa mihi læto fremitu, assensuque secundo E totis plausum responsat Gallia silvis. Nec me deinde suo teneat clamore Cithæron, Mænalaque Arcadicis toties lustrata deabus. Non Dodonæi saltus, silvæque Molorchi, Aut nigris latè ilicibus nemorosa Calydne, Et quos carminibus celebravit fabula lucos: Una meos cantus tellus jam Franca moretur, Quæ tot nobilibus passim lætissima silvis, Conspicienda sui latè miracula ruris Ostendit, lucisque solum commendat amœnis.

One or two words in these lines are not strictly correct; but they are highly Virgilian, both in manner and rhythm.

53. The first book of the Gardens of Rapin is on flowers, the second on trees, the third on waters, and the fourth on fruits. The poem is of about 3,000 lines, sustained with equable dignity. All kinds of graceful associations are mingled with the description of his flowers, in the fanciful style of Ovid and Darwin; the violet is Ianthis, who lurked in valleys to shun the love of Apollo, and stained her face with purple to preserve her chastity; the rose is Rhodanthe, proud of her beauty, and worshipped by the people in the place of Diana, but changed by the indignant Apollo to a tree, while the populace, who had adored her, are converted into her thorns, and her chief lovers into snails and butterflies. A tendency to conceit is perceived in Rapin, as in the two poets to whom we have just compared him. Thus, in some pretty lines, he supposes Nature to have “tried her ‘prentice hand” in making a convolvulus before she ventured upon a lily.[994]

[994] Et tu rumpis humum et multo te flore profundis, Qui riguas inter serpis, convolvule, valles; Dulce rudimentum meditantis lilia quondam Naturæ, cum sese opera ad majora pararet.

54. In Rapin there will generally be remarked a certain redundancy, which fastidious critics might call tautology of expression. But this is not uncommon in Virgil. The Georgics have rarely been more happily imitated, especially in their didactic parts, than by Rapin in the Gardens; but he has not the high flights of his prototype; his digressions are short and belong closely to the subject; we have no plague, no civil war, no Eurydice. If he praises Louis XIV., it is more as the founder of the garden of Versailles, than as the conqueror of Flanders, though his concluding lines emulate, with no unworthy spirit, those of the last Georgic.[995] It may be added, that some French critics have thought the famous poem of Delille on the same subject inferior to that of Rapin.

[995] Hæc magni insistens vestigia sacra Maronis, Re super hortensi, Claro de monte canebam, Lutetia in magna; quo tempore Francica tellus Rege beata suo, rebusque superba secundis, Et sua per populos latè dare jura volentes Cæperat, et toti jam morem imponere mundo.

|Santeul.|

55. Santeul (or Santolius) has been reckoned one of the best Latin poets whom France ever produced. He began by celebrating the victories of Louis and the virtues of contemporary heroes. A nobleness of thought and a splendour of language distinguish the poetry of Santeul, who furnished many inscriptions for public monuments. The hymns which he afterwards wrote for the breviary of the church of Paris have been still more admired, and at the request of others he enlarged his collection of sacred verse. But I have not read the poetry of Santeul, and give only the testimony of French critics.[996]

[996] Baillet. Biogr. Universelle.

|Latin Poetry in England.|

56. England might justly boast, in the earlier part of the century, her Milton; nay, I do not know that, with the exception of a well-known and very pleasing poem, though perhaps hardly of classical simplicity, by Cowley on himself, Epitaphium Vivi Auctoris, we can produce anything equally good in this period. The Latin verse of Barrow is forcible and full of mind, but not sufficiently redolent of antiquity.[997] Yet versification became, about the time of the Restoration, if not the distinctive study, at least the favourite exercise, of the university of Oxford. The collection entitled Musæ Anglicanæ, published near the end of the century, contains little from any other quarter. Many of these relate to the political themes of the day, and eulogise the reigning king, Charles, James, or William; others are on philosophical subjects, which they endeavour to decorate with classical phrase. The character of this collection does not, on the whole, pass mediocrity; they are often incorrect and somewhat turgid, but occasionally display a certain felicity in adapting ancient lines to their subject, and some liveliness of invention. The golden age of Latin verse in England was yet to come.

[997] Walker’s Memoir on Italian Tragedy, p. 201. Salfi, xii. 57.