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Constancy-A Song.

I cannot change as others do,
Though you unjustly scorn;
Since that poor swain that sighs for you,
For you alone was born.

No, Phillis, no; your heart to move
A surer way I'll try ;

And, to revenge my slighted love,

Will still love on, will still love on, and die.

When, killed with grief, Amyntas lies,
And you to mind shall call

The sighs that now unpitied rise,

The tears that vainly fall;

That welcome hour that ends this smart

Will then begin your pain,

For such a faithful tender heart

Can never break, can never break in vain.

Song.

Too late, alas! I must confess,

You need not arts to move me; Such charms by nature you possess, "Twere madness not to love you.

Then spare a heart you may surprise,
And give my tongue the glory
To boast, though my unfaithful eyes
Betray a tender story.

Song.

My dear mistress has a heart

Soft as those kind looks she gave me, When, with love's resistless art,

And her eyes, she did enslave me. But her constancy's so weak,

She's so wild and apt to wander, That my jealous heart would break, Should we live one day asunder.

Melting joys about her move,
Killing pleasures, wounding blisses;
She can dress her eyes in love,

And her lips can warm with kisses.
Angels listen when she speaks;

She's my delight, all mankind's wonder;

But my jealous heart would break,
Should we live one day asunder.

plays the rogue here in town so extremely, that he is not to be endured; pray, if he behaves himself so at Adderbury, send me word, and let him stay till I send for him. Pray, let Ned come up to town; I have a little business with him, and he shall be back in a week. Wonder not that I have not written to you all this while, for it was hard for me to know what to write upon several accounts; but in this I will only desire you not to be too much amazed at the thoughts my mother has of you, since, being mere imaginations, they will as easily vanish, as they were groundlessly erected; for my own part, I will make it my endeavour they may. What you desired of me in your other letter, shall punctually be performed. You must, I think, obey my mother in her commands to wait on her at Aylesbury, as I told you in my last letter. I am very dull at this time, and therefore think it pity in this humour to testify myself to you any further; only, dear wife, I am your humble servant, ROCHESTER.

MY WIFE-The difficulties of pleasing your ladyship do increase so fast upon me, and are grown so numerous, that, to a man less resolved than myself never to give it over, it would appear a madness ever to attempt it more; but through your frailties mine ought not to multiply; you may therefore secure yourself that it will not be easy for you to put me out of my constant resolutions to satisfy you in all I can. I confess there is nothing will so much contribute to my assistance in this as your dealing freely with me; for since you have thought it a wise thing to trust me less and have reserves, it has been out of my power to make the best of my proceedings effectual to what I intended them. At a distance, I am likeliest to learn your mind, for you have not a very obliging way of delivering it by word of mouth; if, therefore, you will let me know the particulars in which I may be useful to you, I will shew my readiness as to my own part; and if I fail of the success I wish, it shall not be the fault of your humble servant, ROCHESTER.

I intend to be at Adderbury some time next week.

I hope, Charles, when you receive this, and know that I have sent this gentleman to be your tutor, you will be very glad to see I take such care of you, and be very grateful, which is best shewn in being obedient and diligent. You are now grown big enough to be a man, and you can be wise enough; for the way to be truly wise is to serve God, learn your book, and observe the instructions of your parents first, and next your tutor, to whom I have entirely resigned you for this seven years, and according as you employ that time, you are to be happy or unhappy for ever; but I have so good

A few specimens of Rochester's letters to his an opinion of you, that I am glad to think you will wife and son are subjoined:

I am very glad to hear news from you, and I think it very good when I hear you are well; pray be pleased to send me word what you are apt to be pleased with, that I may shew you how good a husband I can be; I would not have you so formal as to judge of the kindness of a letter by the length of it, but believe of everything that it is as you would have it.

'Tis not an easy thing to be entirely happy; but to be kind is very easy, and that is the greatest measure of happiness. I say not this to put you in mind of being kind to me; you have practised that so long, that I have a joyful confidence you will never forget it; but to shew that I myself have a sense of what the methods of my life seemed so utterly to contradict, I must not be too wise about my own follies, or else this letter had been a book dedicated to you, and published to the world. It will be more pertinent to tell you, that very shortly the king goes to Newmarket, and then I shall wait on you at Adderbury; in the meantime, think of anything you would have me do, and I shall thank you for the occasion of pleasing you.

Mr Morgan I have sent in this errand, because he

never deceive me; dear child, learn your book and be obedient, and you shall see what a father I will be to you. You shall want no pleasure while you are good, and that you may be so are my constant prayers.

ROCHESTER.

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such a favourite for his taste and accomplishments, that Charles is said to have asked him if he had not obtained from Nature a patent to be Apollo's viceroy. His estate, his time, and morals, were squandered away at court; but latterly the poet redeemed himself, became a constant attender of parliament, in which he had a seat, opposed the arbitrary measures of James II. and assisted to bring about the Revolution. James had seduced Sedley's daughter, and created her Countess of Dorchester -a circumstance which probably quickened the poet's zeal against the court. 'I hate ingratitude,' said the witty Sedley; 'and as the king has made my daughter a countess, I will endeavour to make his daughter a queen'-alluding to the Princess Mary, married to the Prince of Orange. Sir Charles wrote plays and poems, which were extravagantly praised by his contemporaries. Buckingham eulogised the witchcraft of Sedley, and Rochester spoke of his 'gentle prevailing art.' His songs are light and graceful, with a more studied and felicitous diction than is seen in most of the court-poets. One of the finest, Ah! Chloris, that I now could sit, has been often printed as the composition of the Scottish patriot, Duncan Forbes of Culloden, Lord President of the Court of Session: the verses occur in Sedley's play, The Mulberry Garden, 1668. Sedley's conversation was highly prized, and he lived on, delighting all his friends, till past his sixtieth year. As he says of one of his own heroines, he

Bloomed in the winter of his days,
Like Glastonbury thorn.

Song.

Ah! Chloris, that I now could sit
As unconcerned as when
Your infant beauty could beget
No pleasure, nor no pain.
When I the dawn used to admire,
And praised the coming day,
I little thought the growing fire
Must take my rest away.

Your charms in harmless childhood lay
Like metals in a mine;

Age from no face took more away,
Than youth concealed in thine.

But as your charms insensibly

To their perfection prest,
Fond love as unperceived did fly,
And in my bosom rest.

My passion with your beauty grew,
And Cupid at my heart,
Still as his mother favoured you,
Threw a new flaming dart.

Each gloried in their wanton part;
To make a lover, he

Employed the utmost of his art—

To make a beauty, she.

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Though now I slowly bend to love,

Uncertain of my fate,

If your fair self my chains approve, I shall my freedom hate.

Lovers, like dying men, may well
At first disordered be,

Since none alive can truly tell
What fortune they must see.

Song.

Love still has something of the sea,
From whence his mother rose;
No time his slaves from doubt can free,
Nor give their thoughts repose.

They are becalmed in clearest days,
And in rough weather tossed;
They wither under cold delays,
Or are in tempests lost.

One while they seem to touch the port,
Then straight into the main
Some angry wind, in cruel sport,
The vessel drives again.

At first disdain and pride they fear,
Which, if they chance to 'scape,
Rivals and falsehood soon appear
In a more dreadful shape.

By such degrees to joy they come,
And are so long withstood;
So slowly they receive the sum,
It hardly does them good.

'Tis cruel to prolong a pain ;
And to defer a joy,
Believe me, gentle Celemene,
Offends the winged boy.

A hundred thousand oaths your fears
Perhaps would not remove;
And if I gazed a thousand years,
I could no deeper love.

Song.

Phillis, men say that all my vows
Are to thy fortune paid;
Alas! my heart he little knows,
Who thinks my love a trade.

Were I of all these woods the lord,
One berry from thy hand
More real pleasure would afford
Than all my large command.

My humble love has learned to live
On what the nicest maid,
Without a conscious blush, may give
Beneath the myrtle shade.

Of costly food it hath no need,
And nothing will devour;

But like the harmless bee can feed,

And not impair the flower.

A spotless innocence like thine
May such a flame allow;

Yet thy fair name for ever shine

As doth thy beauty now.

I heard thee wish my lambs might stray
Safe from the fox's power,

Though every one become his prey,
I'm richer than before!

DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE.

MARGARET, DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE (16241673), was specially distinguished for her faithful attachment to her lord in his long exile during the time of the Commonwealth, and for her indefatigable pursuit of literature. She was the daughter of Sir Charles Lucas, and one of the maids of honour to Henrietta Maria. Having accompanied the queen to France, she met with the Marquis (afterwards Duke) of Newcastle, and was married to him at Paris in 1645. The marquis took up his residence at Antwerp, till the troubles were over, and there his lady wrote and published (1653) a volume, entitled Poems and Fancies. The marquis assisted her in her compositions, a circumstance which Horace Walpole has ridiculed in his Royal and Noble Authors; and so indefatigable were the noble pair, that they filled nearly twelve volumes, folio, with plays, poems, orations, philosophical fancies, &c. It pleased God,' she said, 'to command his servant Nature, to indue me with a poetical and philosophical genius even from my very birth.' In her dresses the duchess was as peculiar as in her books. 'I took great delight,' she confesses, 'in attiring myself in fine dressing and fashions, especially such fashions as I did invent myself.' Of these we learn something from Secretary Pepys. 'Met my Lady Newcastle going with her coaches and footmen all in velvet; herself with her velvet cap, her hair about her ears, many black patches about her mouth, without anything about her neck, and a black vest fitted to the body.' Pepys afterwards saw her in her coach, with a hundred boys and girls running after her! The duchess wrote the life of her husband the duke, a work which Charles Lamb considered a jewel for which no casket was rich enough. It is interesting from the complete devotion of the writer to her husband (whom she ranks above Julius Cæsar), and from the picture it presents of antiquated gallantry, chivalrous loyalty, and pure affection. Loving and flattering one another, the duke and duchess lived on in their eccentric magnificent way for many years; and when both were gone, a stately monument in Westminster Abbey bore record that there lay the loyal Duke of Newcastle and his Duchess,' adding, in language written by the duchess, which Addison admired, 'Her name was Margaret Lucas, youngest sister to the Lord Lucas of Colchester; a noble family, for all the brothers were valiant, and all the sisters virtuous. The most popular of the duchess's poetical effusions is entitled The Pastime and Recreation of the Queen of Fairies in Fairy Land. It often echoes the imagery of Shakspeare, but has some fine lines, descriptive of the elfish queen :

She on a dewy leaf doth bathe,
And as she sits, the leaf doth wave;
There like a new-fallen flake of snow,
Doth her white limbs in beauty shew.
Her garments fair her maids put on,
Made of the pure light from the sun.

Mirth and Melancholy is another of these fanciful personifications. The former woos the poetess to dwell with her, promising sport and pleasure, and drawing a gloomy but forcible and poetical sketch of her rival, Melancholy :

Her voice is low, and gives a hollow sound;
She hates the light, and is in darkness found;
Or sits with blinking lamps, or tapers small,
Which various shadows make against the wall.
She loves nought else but noise which discord makes,
As croaking frogs whose dwelling is in lakes;
The raven's hoarse, the mandrake's hollow groan,
And shrieking owls which fly i' the night alone;
The tolling bell, which for the dead rings out;
A mill, where rushing waters run about;
The roaring winds, which shake the cedars tall,
Plough up the seas, and beat the rocks withal.
She loves to walk in the still moonshine night,
And in a thick dark grove she takes delight;
In hollow caves, thatched houses, and low cells,
She loves to live, and there alone she dwells.

KATHERINE PHILIPS.

MRS KATHERINE PHILIPS (1631-1664) was honoured with the praise of Cowley and Dryden, and Jeremy Taylor addressed to her a Discourse on Friendship. Her poetical name of Orinda was highly popular with her contemporaries. amiable lady was the wife of James Philips of the Priory, Cardigan.

Against Pleasure-an Ode.
There's no such thing as pleasure here;
'Tis all a perfect cheat,
Which does but shine and disappear,
Whose charm is but deceit;
The empty bribe of yielding souls,
Which first betrays, and then controls.

'Tis true, it looks at distance fair;
But if we do approach,
The fruit of Sodom will impair,
And perish at a touch;
It being then in fancy less,
And we expect more than possess.

For by our pleasures we are cloyed,
And so desire is done;

Or else, like rivers, they make wide
The channels where they run;
And either way true bliss destroys,
Making us narrow, or our joys.
We covet pleasure easily,

But ne'er true bliss possess ;
For many things must make it be,

But one may make it less;
Nay, were our state as we could choose it,
'Twould be consumed by fear to lose it.

What art thou, then, thou winged air,
More weak and swift than fame,
Whose next successor is Despair,

And its attendant Shame?
The experienced prince then reason had,
Who said of Pleasure-' It is mad.'

JOHN DRYDEN.

This

JOHN DRYDEN, one of the great masters of English verse, and whose masculine satire has never been excelled, was born at Aldwinckle, in Northamptonshire, August 9, 1631. His father, Erasmus Driden (the poet first spelled the name with a y), was a strict Puritan, of an ancient family, long established in Northamptonshire, and possessed of a small estate, Blakesley-worth about £60 per annum-which the poet inherited. He was the eldest of fourteen children. His .

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His grandeur he derived from Heaven alone,
For he was great ere Fortune made him so;
And wars, like mists that rise against the sun,
Made him but greater seem, not greater grow.
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Nor was he like those stars which only shine
When to pale mariners they storms portend;
He had his calmer influence, and his mien

mother was Mary, daughter of the Rev. H. certain portion of the arrear was paid, and a Pickering, rector of Aldwinckle All Saints. Dryden pension of £100 per annum was granted to him was educated first at Westminster, and afterwards in addition to his salary as laureate and histoat Trinity College, Cambridge. His first acknow- riographer. Dryden went on manufacturing his ledged publication was a poem on the death of rhyming plays, in accordance with the vitiated Lord Hastings, 1649. Next year he wrote some French taste which then prevailed. He got incommendatory verses prefixed to the poems of volved in controversies and quarrels, chiefly at John Hoddesdon; but his most important and the instigation of Rochester, who set up a wretched promising early production was a set of Heroic rhymester, Elkanah Settle, in opposition to Dryden. Stanzas on the death of Cromwell (1659), which The great poet was also successfully ridiculed by possess a certain ripeness of style and versification Buckingham in his Rehearsal. In November that foretold future excellence. In all Waller's 1681, Dryden published the satire of Absalom and poem on the same subject, there is nothing equal Achitophel, written in the style of a scriptural to such verses as the following: narrative, the names and situations of personages in the holy text being applied to those contemporaries to whom the author assigned places in his poem. The Duke of Monmouth was Absalom; and the Earl of Shaftesbury, Achitophel; while the Duke of Buckingham was drawn under the character of Zimri. The success of this bold political satire—the most vigorous and elastic, the most finely versified, varied, and beautiful, which the English language can boast—was almost unprecedented. Dryden was now placed above all his poetical contemporaries. Shortly afterwards (March 1682), he continued the feeling against Shaftesbury in a poem called The Medal, a Satire against Sedition. The attacks of a rival poet, Shadwell, drew another vigorous satire from Dryden, Mac-Flecknoe (October 1682). A month afterwards, a second part of Absalom and Achitophel was published, but the body of the poem was written by Nahum Tate. Dryden contributed about two hundred lines, containing highly wrought characters of Settle and Shadwell, under the names of Doeg and Og. His antagonists,' says Scott, 'came on with infinite zeal and fury, discharged their ill-aimed blows on every side, and exhausted their strength in violent and ineffectual rage; but the keen and trenchant blade of Dryden never makes a thrust in vain, and never strikes but at a vulnerable point.' In the same year was published Dryden's Religio Laici, a poem written to defend the Church of England against the dissenters, yet evincing a sceptical spirit with regard to revealed religion. The opening of this poem is singularly solemn and majestic :

Did love and majesty together blend.

When monarchy was restored, Dryden went over
with the tuneful throng who welcomed in Charles
II. He had done with the Puritans, and he wrote
poetical addresses to the king and the lord chan-
cellor Astræa Redux (1660); a Panegyric, ad-
dressed to the king on his coronation (1661); To
Lord Chancellor Clarendon (1662). The amuse-
ments of the drama revived after the Restoration,
and Dryden became a candidate for theatrical
laurels. His numerous dramas will be afterwards
noticed. In December 1663, he married the Lady
Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Earl of Berk-
shire. The match was an unhappy one; the lady's
conduct had not been free from reproach, and her
temper was violent. The poet afterwards revenged
himself by constantly inveighing against matri-
mony. In his play of the Spanish Friar, he most
unpolitely states that 'woman was made from the
dross and refuse of a man;' upon which his
antagonist, Jeremy Collier, remarks, with some
humour and smartness, 'I did not know before
that a man's dross lay in his ribs; I believe it
sometimes lies higher.' All Dryden's plays are
marked with licentiousness, that vice of the age,
which he fostered, rather than attempted to check.
In 1667, he published a long poem, Annus Mira-
bilis, being an account of the great events of the
previous twelve months, 1665-6-the Dutch War,
the Plague, and the Fire of London. This poem
abounds in vigorous, picturesque description.
Dryden's next work (published in 1668) was an
Essay on Dramatic Poesy, in which he vindicates
the use of rhyme in tragedy. The style of his
prose was easy, natural, and graceful. The poet
undertook to write for the king's players no less
than three plays a year, for which he was to
receive one share and a quarter in the profits of
the theatre said to be about £300 per annum.
He was afterwards made poet-laureate and royal
historiographer, with a salary of £100 each office,
and with the laureateship was the usual tierce of
wine. It appears that, in 1684, four years of the
laureate pension were due, and the poet wrote to
Lord Rochester, First Lord of the Treasury, sup-
plicating some payment to account,_or
small employment in the Customs or Excise.' A

some

Reason and Religion.

Dim as the borrowed beams of moon and stars
To lonely, weary, wandering travellers,
Is Reason to the soul; and as on high
Those rolling fires discover but the sky,
Not light us here; so Reason's glimmering ray
Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way,
But guide us upward to a better day.
And as those nightly tapers disappear,
When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere;
So pale grows Reason at Religion's sight;
So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light.

Dryden's doubts about religion were dispelled by
his embracing the Roman Catholic faith. Satis-
fied or overpowered by the prospect of an infal-
lible guide, he closed in with the court of James
II. and gladly exclaimed :

Good life be now my task-my doubts are done. His pension was at first stopped by James, but it was resumed. Mr Bell, one of the late editors of Dryden, has stated that the pension was

resumed while the poet was still a Protestant, in 1685-6: 'the defence of the Duchess of York's paper, in which Dryden for the first time espoused the doctrines of the Church of Rome, appeared late in 1686.' We regret to find that this defence cannot be maintained. Dryden's pension was restored by letters-patent on the 4th of March 1685-6, but 'his apostasy,' says Lord Macaulay, 'had been the talk of the town at least six weeks before. See Evelyn's Diary, January 19, 1685-6.' And certainly, in Evelyn's Diary of the date specified, is an entry alluding to the talk that Dryden and his sons had gone over to the Romish Church, by which Evelyn thought the church would gain no great credit. The poet's change of religion happening at a time when it suited his interests to become a Catholic, was looked upon with suspicion. The candour evinced by Dr Johnson on this subject, and the patient inquiry of Sir Walter Scott, may be noted. We may lament the fall of the great poet, but his conduct is not necessarily open to the charge of sordid and unprincipled selfishness. He brought up his family, and died in his new belief. The first public fruits of Dryden's change of creed were his allegorical poem of the Hind and Panther (April 1687), in which the main argument of the Roman Church-all that has or can be said for tradition and authority-is fully stated. "The wit in the Hind and Panther,' says Hallam, 'is sharp, ready, and pleasant; the reasoning is sometimes admirably close and strong; it is the energy of Bossuet in verse.' The hind is the Church of Rome; the panther, the Church of England. The Independents, Quakers, Anabaptists, and other sects are represented as bears, hares, boars, &c. The Calvinists are strongly but coarsely caricatured:

More haughty than the rest, the wolfish race
Appear, with belly gaunt and famished face-
Never was so deformed a beast of grace.
His ragged tail betwixt his legs he wears,*
Close clapped for shame, but his rough crest he rears,
And pricks up his predestinating ears.

The obloquy and censure which Dryden's change of religion entailed upon him, is glanced at in the Hind and Panther, with more depth of feeling than he usually evinced :

If joys hereafter must be purchased here
With loss of all that mortals hold so dear,
Then welcome infamy and public shame,
And last, a long farewell to worldly fame!
'Tis said with ease, but oh, how hardly tried
By haughty souls to human honour tied !
O sharp convulsive pangs of agonising pride!
Down, then, thou rebel, never more to rise,
And what thou didst, and dost so dearly prize,
That fame, that darling fame, make that thy sacrifice!
'Tis nothing thou hast given; then add thy tears
For a long race of unrepenting years:
'Tis nothing yet, yet all thou hast to give;
Then add those may-be years thou hast to live:
Yet nothing still; then poor and naked come;
Thy Father will receive his unthrift home,
And thy blest Saviour's blood discharge the mighty

sum.

He had previously, in the same poem, alluded to the weight of ancient witness or tradition, which

* An allusion, no doubt, to the Geneva gown.

had prevailed over private reason; and his feelings were strongly excited:

But, gracious God! how well dost Thou provide
For erring judgments an unerring guide!
Thy throne is darkness in the abyss of light,
A blaze of glory that forbids the sight.
O teach me to believe Thee thus concealed,
And search no farther than Thyself revealed,
But her alone for my director take

Whom Thou hast promised never to forsake!
My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires,
My manhood, long misled by wandering fires,
Followed false lights; and when their glimpse was gone,
My pride struck out new sparkles of her own.
Such was I, such by nature still I am;

Be Thine the glory, and be mine the shame!

The Revolution in 1688 deprived Dryden of his offices. But the want of independent income seems only to have stimulated his faculties, and his latter unendowed years produced the noblest of his works. Besides several plays, he gave to the world, in 1692, versions of Juvenal and Persius, in which he was aided by his sons; and a translation of Virgil, published in 1697, but the work of nearly three years. This is considered the least happy of all his great works. Dryden was deficient in sensibility, while Virgil excels in tenderness and in a calm and serene dignity." This laborious undertaking brought the poet a sum of about 1200. His publisher, Tonson, endeavoured in vain to get the poet to inscribe the translation to King William, and failing in this, he took care to make the engraver 'aggravate the nose of Æneas in the plates into a sufficient resemblance of the hooked promontory of the Deliverer's countenance.' The immortal Ode to St Cecilia, commonly called Alexander's Feast, was Dryden's next work (1697); and it is the loftiest and most imaginative of all his compositions. No one has ever qualified his admiration of this noble poem.' In 1700, Dryden published his Fables, 7500 verses, more or less, as the contract with Tonson bears, being a partial delivery to account of 10,000 verses, which he agreed to furnish for the sum of 250 guineas, to be made up to £300 upon publication of a second edition. The poet was then in his sixty-eighth year, but his fancy was brighter and more prolific than ever; it was like a brilliant sunset, or a river that expands in breadth, and fertilises a wider tract of country, ere it is finally engulfed in the ocean. The Fables are imitations of Boccaccio and Chaucer, and afford the finest specimens of Dryden's happy versification. No narrative poems in the language have been more generally admired or read. They shed a glory on the last days of the poet, who died on the 1st of May 1700. A subscription was made for a public funeral; and his remains, after being embalmed, and lying in state twelve days, were interred with great pomp in Westminster Abbey.

Dryden has been very fortunate in his critics, annotators, and biographers. His life by Johnson is the most carefully written, the most eloquent and discriminating, of all the Lives of the Poets. Malone collected and edited his essays and other prose writings. Sir Walter Scott wrote a copious life of the poet, and edited a complete edition of his works, the whole extending to eighteen volumes. A late edition (1870) has been ably and carefully edited by Mr W. D. Christie.

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