Constancy-A Song. I cannot change as others do, No, Phillis, no; your heart to move And, to revenge my slighted love, Will still love on, will still love on, and die. When, killed with grief, Amyntas lies, 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, 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, And her lips can warm with kisses. She's my delight, all mankind's wonder; But my jealous heart would break, 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. 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, Song. Ah! Chloris, that I now could sit Your charms in harmless childhood lay Age from no face took more away, But as your charms insensibly To their perfection prest, My passion with your beauty grew, Each gloried in their wanton part; Employed the utmost of his art— To make a beauty, she. 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 Since none alive can truly tell Song. Love still has something of the sea, They are becalmed in clearest days, One while they seem to touch the port, At first disdain and pride they fear, By such degrees to joy they come, 'Tis cruel to prolong a pain ; A hundred thousand oaths your fears Song. Phillis, men say that all my vows Were I of all these woods the lord, My humble love has learned to live Of costly food it hath no need, But like the harmless bee can feed, And not impair the flower. A spotless innocence like thine Yet thy fair name for ever shine As doth thy beauty now. I heard thee wish my lambs might stray Though every one become his prey, 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, 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; 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. 'Tis true, it looks at distance fair; For by our pleasures we are cloyed, Or else, like rivers, they make wide But ne'er true bliss possess ; But one may make it less; What art thou, then, thou winged air, And its attendant Shame? 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 . (6) His grandeur he derived from Heaven alone, Nor was he like those stars which only shine 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 some Reason and Religion. Dim as the borrowed beams of moon and stars Dryden's doubts about religion were dispelled by 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 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 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 Whom Thou hast promised never to forsake! 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. |