JOHN DRYDEN.

The Gospel's pearl upon our coast;
And in these rocks for us did frame
A temple where to sound his name.
Oh! let our voice his praise exalt,
Till it arrive at heaven's vault,
Which then perhaps rebounding may
Echo beyond the Mexic bay."
Thus sang they in the English boat,
A holy and a cheerful note,
And all the way to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.

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Next in importance chronologically to Milton, and most known and worthy of study, in the order of time, is John Dryden (1631-1700). Milton, compared to him, is like the latter's own hind compared to his panther :

A milk-white hind, immortal and unchanged,
Fed on the lawns, and in the forest ranged.
The panther, sure the noblest next the hind,
And fairest creature of the spotted kind.

Dryden lived too much amongst the courtiers, and was, moreover, too much of a professional man of letters, always to care what he wrote; moreover, he was badly paid, and was a spendthrift. But he wrote like a scholar and a gentleman, and was full of thought, of force, of ease, and of strength. His verses sparkle and shine and move along with all the majesty and strength of men in chain armour-weighty and nervous, yet quick and agile. Few poets have been so happy in their sayings as Dryden: his lines remain for ever in our memory, because they are so well polished and turned. He has such a command of language that he can say any thing, and cover it with the graces of style; but he seldom rises into the purest regions of poetry, like our ancient and modern poets-like Spenser, Shelley, or Keats. John Dryden is more of a court

satirist than a great poet or a great teacher: yet, what he has done he has done so well that it can scarcely be surpassed, and it will give pleasure still.

The characters of his satires are so delicately drawn, and so true to nature, that they must live for ever. Let the reader ponder over these few lines and try to dissect them, and put in prose or in verse similar sense and sarcasm into the same, ay, or into a ten times greater space, and then he will find what a master of his art Dryden was. Here is his great character of Villiers, Duke of Buckingham:

A man so various, that he seem'd to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome;
Stiff in opinions-always in the wrong,
Was everything by starts, and nothing long;
But in the course of one revolving moon
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon:
Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.

Almost every succeeding line in the satire is as strong, smooth, and elastic as the above. Of some men he says, they belong to the herd of those

Who think too little, and who talk too much.

Of a mean hypocrite he dashes in the character in a couplet. He, he says,

Did wisely from expensive sins refrain,
And never broke the Sabbath but for gain.

And one could fill the whole of this essay with couplets equally true and bitter. When Dryden, who turned from the Protestant faith, and, oddly to express it, abjured the errors of the Church of England, to embrace those of the Church of Rome, wrote, in defence of his

RELIGIO LAICI.

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new faith, "The Hind and Panther," he gave us, in a noble poem, all that could be said on the side of his Church; and when he pictured the "faith of a layman," in the "Religio Laici," he produced a poem in which the Rationalist and Materialist are utterly confuted. The latter piece he begins in a very noble vein :

Dim as the borrow'd 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 us, not t'assure our doubtful way,
But guide us upward to a better day.

No divine ever argued better. Will any one try to say more in a sermon than there is in those full and sufficient seven lines? Again, how cleverly the poet laughs at and ridicules the Atheist, who cannot name his "first cause" God, and believes that the world grew in some chanceful and hap-hazard manner, or, as Mr. Darwin would say, on a principle of natural selection! Let the reader weigh and ponder over every word. Who, he asks, if we deny Revelation, who is God?who is the Universal He?—

Whether some soul encompassing this ball,
Unmade, unmoved, yet making, moving all,
Or various atoms' interfering dance
Leapt into form, the noble work of Chance ;
Or this great All was from eternity,

Not e'en the Stagyrite himself could see,
And Epicurus guess'd as well as he.

Thus anxious thoughts in endless circles roll
Without a centre where to fix the soul.

The works of John Milton and of John Dryden, carefully studied, tend to remove many of the failings

of our common nature, and are apt to moderate much of that looseness of thought and of writing into which most of us at the present day are only too apt to fall. They especially vindicate the majesty of our literature, and, like sturdy and gigantic trees amongst a vast undergrowth, show what worth poetry has, and how, so far from weakening the heart and understanding, it strengthens and ennobles both.

HEN a man of high and bright intellect is viciously witty, as was William Congreve, and finds success an accompaniment of his mischievous talent, he may take to himself this reflection, that dozens of people will imitate his wickedness, where not one will equal his wit or meet with similar recompence. A crowd of others followed the clever young gentleman who wrote so well, and yet was ashamed of being known as an author. There is an old anecdote of him which is so very characteristic that it will bear repeating. It relates that young M. Voltaire came to England and called on Congreve purposely to see the great author. "I am not an author," said Congreve, "I am a gentleman; I don't wish to be known as an author."-" If you were only a gentleman," was the answer, "I should not have come from so great a distance to see you." It was one of the great faults of Congreve that he never recognized the importance and the true function of authorship, which is, by pleasing and amusing, to elevate, if not to teach, but certainly