obloquy. "MacFlecknoe" (1682) followed in the same mode, and the immortal flagellation of the dull and industrious Shadwell is as well known as the character of Buckingham. Flecknoe, absolute in all the realms of nonsense, settles which of his many sons shall succeed:

Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness from his tender years;
Shadwell, alone, of all my sons, is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.

The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,

But Shadwell never deviates into sense.

Afterwards, in the second part of "Absalom and Achitophel" he assails Og (Shadwell) once again with Doeg (Settle):

Who by my muse to all succeeding times

Shall live, in spite of their own doggerel rhymes.

"Religio Laici," which Scott regarded as one of the most admirable poems in the language, is a lively argument in verse on the credibility of the Christian faith and on the merits of the Church of England as a midway course, avoiding extremes, which had become an immortal institution because "common quiet is mankind's concern."

What, then, is chiefly left in Dryden for a reader of today? His many plays are now rarely read, but they are often magnificent and “All For Love" bears comparison with Shakespeare's version of Antony's love for Cleopatra. His critical essays, too profound for the general reader even in his own day, are still studied with profit by serious artists. And his "Fables," which are long stories told in verse, are not excelled, as narratives, in any language. The reader who takes up "Cymon and Iphigenia," or "Palamon and Arcite," is not likely to lay down the book until he has reached the end. They are little epics, and, in their finest passages, come nearer to the style of Homer

than any other poems. His noble Odes will also be remembered. of which he thought "Alexander's Feast" the best, and indeed his most perfect poem. But the "Song for St. Cecilia's Day" is quite as fine, and the well-known lines upon the Birth of Music were never equalled by him in their sweet and noble beauty:

When Jubal struck the chorded shell

His listening brethren stood around,

And, wondering, on their faces fell

To worship that celestial sound.

Less than a god they thought there could not dwell
Within the hollow of that shell

Which spoke so sweetly and so well.

Johnson, on the other hand, pronounced the "Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew" the noblest in the English tongue, and the following magnificent passage from it, as glorious a piece of stately word-music as is to be discovered in the long interval between Milton and Wordsworth, aptly closes this account of one of the greatest of English poets:

Thou youngest virgin-daughter of the skies,
Made in the last promotion of the blessed;
Whose palms, new plucked from Paradise,
In spreading branches more sublimely rise,
Rich with immortal green above the rest:
Whether, adopted to some neighbouring star,
Thou rollest above us, in thy wandering race,
Or, in procession fixed and regular
Movest with the heaven's majestic pace;
Or, called to more superior bliss,

Thou treadest with seraphims the vast abyss:
Whatever happy region is thy place,

Cease thy celestial song a little space;

Thou wilt have time enough for hymns divine,
Since Heaven's eternal year is thine.

Hear, then, a mortal Muse thy praise rehearse,
In no ignoble verse;

The theatre, which had been banned during the Puritan rule in England, came back to its own with the Restoration of Charles II. Later seventeenth-century opinion held Shakespeare in small esteem, and the older plays of Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Shirley soon gave way to a new order of drama that was the creation of the spirit of the new times. While Charles II was reigning in England, Molière was writing in France, and it was natural and inevitable that the Restoration dramatists should have been influenced by the great French master of comedy. What they did not borrow from France was directly inspired by the atmosphere of the Court of Charles II. Charles Lamb insisted that the old comedy "has no reference whatever to the world that is." That is happily true: but it had a very considerable reference to the world that existed when the second Charles frivolled at Whitehall. William Congreve was the most considerable of the Restoration dramatists. Swinburne declared that his The Way of the World is "the unequalled and unapproached masterpiece of English comedy: the one play in our language which may fairly claim a place beside, or but just beneath, the mightiest work of Molière.” Voltaire, who had heard of his genius, called on him during his stay in England, and Congreve expressed a wish not to be regarded as a dramatist but as a gentleman; whereupon the sardonic French philosopher apologised for his call. William Wycherley was thirty years older than Congreve.

He was

brought up in Paris, and his first play, Love in a Wood, was produced in 1672. His fame as a dramatist mainly rests on his two comedies The Country Wife and A Plain Dealer, both coarse enough to justify Macaulay's nausea, but both excellent in their characterisation and their humour.

Other dramatists of the period of less importance are John Vanbrugh, the architect of Blenheim Palace, George Etheridge, Otway, and Lee, who collaborated with Dryden in imitations of Corneille. Dryden himself is a Restoration dramatist, but he was far more than a dramatist, as we have seen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by H. B. Wheatley, 8 vols.; in two vols. in the Everyman's Library.

Percy Lubbock's Pepys.

Hudibras, edited by A. R. Waller.

Professor Saintsbury's Dryden.

Dryden's Poetical Works.

Dryden's Dramatic Essays in the Everyman's Library.

The Best Plays of Dryden, 2 vols., in the "Mermaid" Series.

A volume of Restoration Plays edited by Edmund Gosse.

The following volumes in the "Mermaid" Series of the Old Dramatists: Dryden (2 vols.), Otway, Farquhar, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Wycherley.

XVI

FRENCH LITERATURE IN THE AGE OF

LOUIS XIV