at first. His Rival Ladies and Maiden Queen are light easy productions, partly in blank verse, and partly in rhyme; and, if imitations, founded on the school of Charles I. Another style was the French: rhyming, and more pompous in manner; what he calls heroic plays. Latterly he took to blank verse; like other writers younger than himself, whose success perhaps confirmed him in the change; as Shakespeare followed his juniors. These plays are in a freer taste, as is natural, from the metre. They are generally in a stronger and bolder style, partly inspired by Shakespeare, partly by the general turn of actors, (and latterly, by Betterton in particular,) who were by that time accustomed to act Shakespeare, and to feel the effect which he produced; as, in Dryden's second period, Hart and Mohun probably re-acted upon his taste for blustering heroes. In these later plays, similes and imagery are less common; and he purposely omits, as he tells us in the preface to the Spanish Fryar, what he calls "the Dalilahs of the theatre, which cried shame upon him," that is, his rants and turgid passages. The blustering characters in the rhyming plays are improbable on the whole; though real people, in that age, went a good way. The Duke de la Rochefoucault, I think, adopted, speaking of himself, a couplet from one of the French plays in that style: "Pour mériter son cœur, pour plaire à ses beaux yeux, J'ai fait la guerre aux rois, je l'aurois fait aux Dieux." But the fashion was at least temporary only; and they are a representation, perhaps, of an artificial state of society. The character of Dorax, like that of Pierre and Polydore in Otway, though partly artificial, is not even now impro bable. It is taken from a sort of real character, always to be found, more or less, among young men of spirit, especially military men: self-confiding manly pride; the modern sense of honour; a real feeling, not merely as to women; mixed with another sort of feeling which is partly artificial and affected, and which, it may be said, is increased in the present day, by the increase of literature. One would have thought, as these are taken from real life, that they might have been introduced into comedy. Maskwell is not such a character; he is simply odious. He has not even open daring. He is in no possible way the hero of his play, as those which I have mentioned are of theirs. He answers to the villain, not the bully, as they were called, of Dryden's plays. The Orphan and Fair Penitent are indeed domestic tragedies, though in high life; but they are tragedies. Lothario is not the hero of the Fair Penitent, however; but I suspect, to many of the audience, he divides that honour. Polydore, we are somewhere told, was always the popular character in the Orphan. Johnson remarks that "the want of morality may be justly objected to almost the whole of Otway's writings. In the tragedy of the Orphan, in which the distress arises solely from a vicious action of a young man, is this impious exclamation : : 'Tis thus that Heav'n its empire doth maintain, It may afflict, but man must not complain. How different from that in Shakespeare's Lear, of Edgar whose bastard brother had been accessary to their father Gloucester's miseries: The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Shakespeare had no love for bad characters; there is scarce any perfectly bad, that is, without excuse, in his plays. The superior morality and delicacy of the Greek tragedies, over most of ours, is very remarkable indeed; and it seems to have been kept up, in a very great degree, by the audiences themselves; who cried out upon that sort of daring passages, which ours applauded. And we find, that their great comic writer attacks Euripides for this fault; as well as for the viciousness of some of his women. It is curious, that in Dryden's later plays, two very opposite but simple characters, Dorax and Celidea, are made to adopt certain crooked schemes, one of which seems scarcely intelligible. Dryden complains, as Southern did, that the audience would have tragi-comedy. They changed very suddenly then; for Rowe never has it. In one place, Dryden defends tragi-comedy; saying, that a man who cannot write it is but half a dramatist. Probably this might be an angry retort against some critic. Notwithstanding the temporary nature of some of his subjects, and the temporary taste which he often followed, when we come to his mind in its natural, unconstrained, and at the same time, fully formed state, his way of thinking and of writing is as free from temporary and individual peculiarity, as entirely above any thing odd, far-fetched, or fantastical, as congenial to the general ideas of human nature, and as fitted, therefore, for permanent approbation and imitation, as any that can be named. AN ABSTRACT OF DRYDEN'S LIFE, FROM MALONE. The time of Dryden's birth is not exactly known. It was from 1630 to 1632. He was born at Aldwinkle, in Northamptonshire. He went to school in that neighbourhood; and about 1642 was admitted a King's Scholar at Westminster, under Dr. Busby. He went scholar to Trinity College, Cambridge, the 11th of May, 1650; and became B.A. January, 1653-4. In 1653, he succeeded to some landed property in Northamptonshire. He lived seven years at Cambridge, and took a master's degree; and then went to reside in London, 1660. He wrote a play in that year, called The Duke of Guise; but it never came out. Then, or earlier, he obtained the patronage and assistance of Sir Robert Howard; whose sister, Lady Elizabeth, he married, in or before 1665. His plays may be classed in four periods: To the temporary suspension of plays, in 1665. From their revival to the burning of the King's Theatre, in 1671-2. From thence to 1682, when he left off play writing for a time. From 1690 to 1694, when he wrote his four last. About 1667, he agreed to furnish three plays annually, for a fixed share in the Play-house, equal to £300 or £400 a year. He wrote eighteen plays in sixteen years. Five or six of them between 1667 and 1670. In 1670 he was made Laureate. Dryden is considered to have been almost the first person, who publicly expressed, in print, great admiration. for Milton's Paradise Lost. In bringing out Aurengzebe and All for Love, 1676 and 1677, he greatly praised Shakespeare, and contributed to bring his plays again into fashion. He was converted to the Romish Church in 1685. At the Revolution, he lost offices to the value of £300 a year, and the Laurel. He died 1st May, 1700. These extracts are arranged, so as to keep the plays by themselves. Every thing, however, is dated throughout so far as known. Dryden's principal productions, besides his plays and his Virgil, are: The Annus Mirabilis; written in what he called the heroic stanza; but which, since the examples of Hammond and Gray, we consider as elegiac. Dryden had used it before; and Davenant had written an epic poem in it. The political satire of Absalom and Achitophel; upon the Duke of Monmouth and Lord Shaftesbury; in which he took the opportunity of satirizing the Duke of Buckingham, under the name of Zimri; who had ridiculed his plays in the Rehearsal. The Hind and Panther; a defence of the Roman-Catholic religion, under an ill-conceived and worse managed allegory of two beasts. And the Fables; very free translations, or imitations, from Chaucer and Boccaccio. C. B. |