‘O daughter of the Rose, whose cheeks unite
The differing titles of the Red and White!
Who heaven’s alternate beauty well display,
The blush of morning and the milky way.’
Or the conclusion of his epistle to Kneller:
‘More cannot be by mortal art exprest,
But venerable age shall add the rest.
For Time shall with his ready pencil stand,
Retouch your figures with his ripening hand,
Mellow your colours, and imbrown the teint,
Add every grace which Time alone can grant;
To future ages shall your fame convey,
And give more beauties than he takes away.’
Or these from the epistle to his kinsman, John Driden, more likely than any of the others to have been the unbought manifestation of genuine regard:
‘O true descendant of a patriot line!
Who while thou shar’st their lustre lendest thine!
Vouchsafe this picture of thy soul to see,
’Tis so far good as it resembles thee.
The beauties to the original I owe,
Which when I miss my own defects I show;
Nor think the kindred Muses thy disgrace;
A poet is not born in every race;
Two of a house few ages can afford,
One to perform, another to record.
Praiseworthy actions are by thee embraced,
And ’tis my praise to make thy praises last.’
The last couplet, excellent in sense, is an example of Dryden’s one metrical defect. He is not sufficiently careful to vary his vowel-sounds.
Dryden’s translations alone would give him a conspicuous place in English literature. The most important, his complete version of Virgil, has been improved upon in many ways, and yet after all it remains true, that ‘Pitt is quoted, and Dryden read.’ Had he never translated Virgil, his renderings or imitations of Juvenal, Horace, and others, would suffice to entitle him to no inconsiderable rank among those who have enriched their native literature from foreign stores. His principle of translation was correct, and accords with that of the greatest of English critics. Coleridge assured Wordsworth that there were only two legitimate systems of metrical translation, strict literality, or compensation carried to its fullest extent. Dryden most probably had not sufficient Latin to be literal; but in any case his genius would have disdained such trammels, not to mention the more prosaic, but not less potent consideration, that what is written for bread must usually be written in haste – a fact which weighed with Dryden when he discontinued rhyme in his tragedies. Thus thrown back on the system of compensation, he has richly repaid his authors for the beauties of which he has bereaved them, by the beauties which he has bestowed – or which, as he maintains, were actually latent in them – and has expressed many of their thoughts with even enhanced energy. He has, in fact, made them write very much as they would have written if they had been English poets of the seventeenth century, and his work is less translation than transfusion. They necessarily appear much metamorphosed from the originals, but the fault is less that of Dryden than of his age. Could he have attempted the same task in our day with equal resources of genius, and on the same principles of workmanship, he would have succeeded much better, for he would have enjoyed more comprehension of the spirit of his originals than was possible in the seventeenth century. The scholarship of that age had not vivified the information which it had amassed; the idealized, but still vital conceptions of the Renaissance had given place to inanimate conventionality; the people of Greece and Rome appeared to the moderns like people in books; and such warm, affectionate contact between the souls of the present and the past as afterwards inspired Shelley’s versions from Homer and Euripides was in that age impossible.
So great and versatile were Dryden’s powers that, after all that has been said, his performances as a lyric poet, as a dramatist, and as a critic remain to be spoken of, and his rank in each has to be recognized as that of the foremost writer of his country in his own day. These will be treated in their appropriate places. The present is, perhaps, the most appropriate for a few words on his position as a poet. It is most difficult to determine whether he and his successor, Pope, should be placed at the bottom of the first class, or at the head of the second class of great English poets. If the very highest gifts of all – originality, creative imagination, unstudied music, unconscious inspiration, lofty ideal, the power to interpret nature, are essential conditions of rank in the first class, then assuredly Dryden and Pope must be contented with the second. If not positively excluded by the very nature of the case – if deficiency in the very highest qualities can be compensated by consummate excellence in all the rest – if intellect will supply the place of inspiration, and art that of nature – then they stand so high above the average of the second rank that it seems injurious not to place them in the first. The principle of exclusion, logically carried out, might involve the elevation above them of other writers whom we instinctively feel to be their inferiors; too absolute an insistence, on the other hand, upon the claims of intellectual power and perfect execution as qualifications for supreme poetical rank, must result in preferring Pope to Dryden. Inferior to his successor in both these respects, Dryden may still justly be preferred to him on the ground of his more ample endowment with that divine insanity without which, as Plato truly says, no one can be a poet. But this consideration cannot be invoked in his favour against Pope without admitting his inferiority to poets of the very first order; and it may be seriously questioned whether any poet can belong to the first order who is so exclusively a town poet as Dryden and Pope, and has so little knowledge of nature. The resemblances and contrasts between him and Pope have been frequently discussed; there are two other poets with whom comparison is less hackneyed and not unprofitable. In fecundity, in versatility, in energy, in the frequent application of his poetry to public affairs, in his influence on contemporary literature, position as head of a school, and incontestable superiority to all the poets around him, no less, unfortunately, in bombast and incomprehensible breaches of good taste, he strongly reminds us of Victor Hugo. Hugo, undoubtedly, was a much greater lyrical poet than Dryden, and was enkindled by spontaneous inspirations which never visited Dryden; yet the two are essentially of the same genus; the differences between them are rather characteristic of their eras than of themselves; and while Hugo’s imagination would have pined in the seventeenth century, Dryden’s intellect and Dryden’s modesty would have been highly serviceable to Hugo in the nineteenth. Another poet, whose talent and career offer many analogies to Dryden’s, is one whom Dryden himself disparages upon metrical grounds. Claudian, like Dryden, is a remarkable instance of a poet owing a large portion of his fame to his dexterous treatment of occasional subjects. As Dryden drew material for his most powerful writings from the political and religious controversies of his day, so Claudian found his themes in the exploits of Stilicho and the misdeeds of Rufinus. Both have made uninteresting subjects attractive by admirable treatment; both are greatly indebted to art and little to nature; both in their latter days4 sought relief from politics in more ideal compositions, Dryden in his Fables, Claudian in his Rape of Proserpine, a poem imbued with the characteristic qualities of Dryden.
Among the greatest services which Dryden rendered to our language and literature are to be reckoned his improvements in heroic versification, of which he has left an unsurpassed model.
‘Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full majestic line,
The long-resounding march, and energy divine.’
His changes, nevertheless, were not always improvements. He is too uniform, though not absolutely uniform, in confining the sense to the couplet; and, in adding dignity to Chaucer’s verse, he has lost something of its sweetness. Leigh Hunt well observes: ‘Though Dryden’s versification is noble, beautiful, and so complete of its kind that to an ear uninstructed in the metre of the old poet all comparison between the two in this respect seems out of the question and even ludicrous, yet the measure in which Dryden wrote not only originated, but attained to a considerable degree of its beauty in Chaucer; and the old poet’s immeasurable superiority in sentiment and imagination, not only to Dryden, but to all, up to a very late period, who have written in the same form of verse, left him in possession of beauties, even in versification, which it remains for some future poet to amalgamate with Dryden’s in a manner worthy of both, and so carry England’s noble heroic rhyme to its pitch of perfection.’ It need not be said that Pope’s magnificent eulogy solely respects Dryden as a rhyming poet. His blank verse, though in general good enough for the stage, and better than that of most of his contemporaries, is utterly destitute of the sweetness and variety of the Elizabethans.
Dryden’s works were edited with exemplary zeal and fidelity by Sir Walter Scott. The standard modern edition is Mr. Saintsbury’s; the one most convenient for general use, Mr. Christie’s.
CHAPTER II.
POETS CONTEMPORARY WITH DRYDEN
Oldham (1653-1683).
The contemporary of Dryden who approached him most nearly in satiric force, and, generally speaking, in the borderland between poetry and prose, was John Oldham (1653-1683). Not much is known of his life. The son of a Nonconformist minister, he nevertheless obtained a university education, but after leaving college was glad to accept the position of usher in Archbishop Whitgift’s free school at Croydon. Coming to town he filled the post of tutor in various families, and by his Satires upon the Jesuits (1681) gained the acquaintance of Dryden and other men of letters and the patronage of the Earl of Kingston, who seemed likely to provide for him, but at whose seat in Nottinghamshire he died of the smallpox, December, 1683.
Oldham’s poems consist partly of odes, formal and elaborate compositions, and partly of the satires which in his age in some measure supplied the place of the modern journal and review. A secret and unconscious harmony pervades all branches of the contemporary art of every epoch; and in the stately and somewhat stilted lyrics of Oldham and his compeers we discern the counterpart of the elaborate frontispieces with temples and triumphal arches, chariots and cornucopias, tritons and nereids, which the engravers of the age prefixed to its literature. The engraving is hardly art, and the verse is hardly poetry; we are nevertheless conscious of a vigour and a substance which command respect. The work is compact and solid at any rate, and displays much of the force of the Giants, if little of the inspiration of the Gods. Oldham would fain be extravagant in praise of wine; but there is not the least trace of genuine Bacchic frenzy in his laboured dithyramb. The epicedion on his friend Mouvent is a serious composition indeed, forty-two mortal stanzas, with, nevertheless, sufficient good things to justify the praise bestowed on it by Pope. The ode to Ben Jonson is remarkable as expressing the feelings of the men of the Restoration towards the poet who they really thought had reformed the stage, and delivered it from the reprehensible licentiousness of Shakespeare. Like Oldham’s other lyrical compositions, it abounds with most dissonant lines, but has also some noble ones, as these, for example:
‘Let meaner spirits stoop to low precarious fame,
Content on gross and coarse applause to live
And what the dull and senseless rabble give;
Thou didst it still with noble scorn contemn,
Nor wouldst that wretched alms receive,
The poor subsistence of some bankrupt, sordid name:
Thine was no empty vapour, raised beneath,
And formed of common breath,
The false and foolish fire, that’s whisked about
By popular air, and glares awhile, and then goes out;
But ’twas a solid, whole, and perfect globe of light,
That shone all over, was all over bright,
And dared all sullying clouds, and feared no darkening night.’
Oldham’s principal celebrity, however, is derived from his satires. He had the knack of stinging invective, and has been not unjustly compared to Churchill. His Satires on the Jesuits exactly suited the time of the Popish Plot, at present they repel by their one-sidedness. All satire, except that inspired by fancy, is apt to become repulsive by its natural tendency to dwell upon the meanest and lowest aspects of human nature; and this is pre-eminently the case with Oldham, who is always ridiculing or denouncing, always drawing his illustrations from the base and offensive, and seldom diversifies his low matter with an ennobling thought. Yet he evinces so much manly sense, and his style is so nervous, that it is impossible not to admire his vigour, and wish him a more inviting subject. His metre and rhyme frequently stand in need of Dryden’s generous apology:
‘O early ripe! to thy abundant store
What could advancing age have added more?
It might, what Nature never gives the young,
Have taught the smoothness of thy native tongue.
But satire needs not these, and wit will shine
Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.’
All this notwithstanding, Oldham had the root of the matter in him, and has described, as only a poet could, the ambition, the toil, and the triumph of a poet:
‘’Tis endless, Sir, to tell the many ways
Wherein my poor deluded self I please:
How, when the fancy lab’ring for a birth,
With unfelt throes, brings its rude issue forth:
How, after, when imperfect, shapeless thought
Is, by the judgment, into fashion wrought:
When at first search, I traverse o’er my mind,
None, but a dark and empty void I find:
Some little hints, at length, like sparks break thence,
And glimm’ring thoughts, just dawning into sense:
Confus’d, awhile, the mixt ideas lie
With nought of mark to be discover’d by;
Like colours undistinguish’d in the night,
Till the dusk images mov’d to the light,
Teach the discerning faculty to choose,
Which it had best adopt, and which refuse.
Here rougher strokes, touch’d with a careless dash,
Resemble the first setting of a face:
There finish’d draughts in form more full appear,
And in their justness ask no further care,
Meanwhile, with inward joy, I proud am grown,
To see the work successfully go on;
And prize myself in a creating-power,
That could make something, what was nought before.
Sometimes a stiff unwieldy thought I meet,
Which to my laws, will scarce be made submit:
But when, after expense of pains and time,
’Tis manag’d well, and taught to yoke in rhime,
In triumph, more than joyful warriors would,
Had they some stout and hardy foe subdu’d:
And idly think, less goes to their command,
That makes arm’d troops in well-placed order stand,
Than to the conduct of my words, when they
March in due ranks, are set in just array.
Then straight I grow a strange exalted thing,
And equal in conceit at least a king:
As the poor drunkard, when wine stums his brains,
Anointed with that liquor, thinks he reigns;
Bewitch’d by these delusions, ’tis I write,
(The tricks some pleasant devil plays in spite)
And when I’m in the freakish trance, which I,
Fond silly wretch, mistake for ecstacy,
I find all former resolutions vain,
And thus recant them, and make new again.
“What was’t I rashly vow’d? shall ever I
Quit my beloved mistress, Poetry?
Thou sweet beguiler of my lonely hours,
Which thus glide unperceiv’d, with silent course:
Thou gentle spell, which undisturb’d dost keep
My breast, and charm intruding care asleep:
They say thou’rt poor, and un-endow’d, what tho’?
For thee, I this vain, worthless world forego:
Let wealth and honour be for fortune’s slaves,
The alms of fools, and prize of crafty knaves:
To me thou art, whate’er th’ambitious crave,
And all that greedy misers want or have.
In youth or age, in travel or at home;
Here, or in town, at London, or at Rome;
Rich, or a beggar, free, or in the Fleet,
What’er my fate is, ’tis my fate to write.”’
Oldham’s talent, depending upon masculine sense and vigour of expression rather than upon the more ethereal graces of poetry, was of the kind to expand and mellow by age and practice. Had he lived longer he would undoubtedly have left a name conspicuous in English literature. As it is, he can only be regarded as a bright satellite revolving at a respectful distance around the all-illumining orb of Dryden. Before passing to Marvell and Butler, the only two really original poets after Dryden besides the veterans Cowley and Waller, who belong to the preceding period, it will be convenient to despatch a group of minor bards, whose inclusion in the standard collections of poetry, involving memoirs by a master of biography, has given them more celebrity than they in most instances deserve.
Lord Rochester (1647-1680).
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), is principally known to posterity by his vices and his repentance. The latter has helped to preserve the memory of the former, which have also left abiding traces in a number of poems not included in his works, and some of which, it may be hoped, are wrongly attributed to him. For a number of years Rochester obtained notoriety as, after Buckingham, the most dissolute character of a dissolute age; but at the same time a critic and a wit, potent to make or mar the fortunes of men of letters. ‘Sure,’ says Mr. Saintsbury, ‘to play some monkey trick or other on those who were unfortunate enough to be his intimates.’ Many a literary cabal was instigated by him, many a libel and lampoon flowed from his pen, among others, The Session of the Poets, correctly characterized by Johnson as ‘merciless insolence.’ Worn out by a life of excess, he died at thirty-three, and his penitence, largely due to the arguments and exhortations of Burnet, afforded the latter material for a narrative which Johnson, entirely opposed as he was to the author’s political and ecclesiastical principles, declares that ‘the critic ought to read for its elegance, the philosopher for its arguments, and the saint for its piety.’
Rochester’s acknowledged poems fall into two divisions of unequal merit. The lyrical and amatory are in general very insipid. The more serious pieces, especially when expressing the discomfort of a sated votary of pleasure, frequently want neither force nor weight. Four particularly fine lines, quoted without indication of authorship in Goethe’s Wahrheit und Dichtung, have frequently occasioned speculation as to their origin. They come from Rochester’s Satyr against Mankind, and read:
‘Then Old Age and Experience, hand in hand,
Lead him to Death, and make him understand,
After a search so painful and so long,
That all his life he has been in the wrong.’
Goldsmith’s ‘best-natured man, with the worst-natured muse,’ is purloined from Rochester, who is also the propounder of the paradox, ‘All men would be cowards if they durst.’ Some of his songs are not devoid of merit. After all, however, nothing of his is so well known as the anticipatory epitaph on Charles II., ascribed sometimes to him, sometimes to Buckingham, and very likely due to neither:
‘Here lies our mutton-eating king,
Whose word no man relies on;
Who never said a foolish thing,
And never did a wise one.’
Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon (1633? -1684), was a very different character, both as a man and as a poet. He is accused of no fault but a love of gaming, and the purity of his Muse merited the well-known eulogium:
‘In all Charles’s days
Roscommon only boasts unsullied bays.’
But he has nothing of the salt and savour of Rochester’s more serious poetry, and is at best an elegant versifier, who, in his only considerable original poem, the Essay on Translated Verse, thinks justly, reasons clearly, and expresses himself with considerable spirit when the subject requires. The most original feature of his literary character is his preference in a rhyming age for blank verse, which he enforces in theory, but is far from recommending by his practice. In his rhymed pieces he is a better versifier than poet, and in his blank verse the contrary. Milton’s eyes were just closed; Shakespeare and Fletcher were still acted; but the secret of beautiful versification, apart from rhyme, seems to have been entirely lost.
John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire (1649-1721).
Poetry afforded a subject for verse to another noble writer, John Sheffield, successively Earl of Mulgrave, Marquis of Normanby, and Duke of Buckinghamshire (1649-1721), who achieved real if moderate distinction as soldier, statesman, and scholar. As a poet his reputation rests entirely upon his Essay on Poetry, which contains many just thoughts expressed in pleasing numbers, although the author’s deference to the conventional dicta of criticism leads him into idolatry, not only of Homer and Virgil, but of Bossu. To have fostered the genius of Pope by judicious praise is the highest distinction of ‘Granville the polite and knowing Walsh.’ Congreve, to be treated more fully as a dramatist, stands somewhat higher than these as an inditer of heroic couplets; but a severer criticism must be passed, if any criticism is needed, upon Pomfret, Duke, Stepney, and the other versifiers of the day who have burrowed their way into the stock collections of poetry.
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678).
Andrew Marvell was a virtuous man whose good qualities contrast so forcibly with the characteristic failings of his age, that he appears by contrast even more virtuous than he actually was. His integrity made him the hero of legend, for, although the Court would no doubt have been glad to gain him, it is hardly credible that the prime minister should by the king’s order have personally waited upon him ‘up two pair of stairs in a little court in the Strand.’ But the apocryphal anecdote attests the real veneration inspired by his independence in a venal age. Born in the neighbourhood of Hull on March 31st, 1621, he studied at Cambridge, travelled for some years on the Continent, and settled down about 1650 as tutor to the daughter of Lord Fairfax. At this period he wrote his exquisite poem, The Garden, and other pieces of a similar character. He also wrote in 1650 the poem on Cromwell’s return from Ireland, which may have gained for him in 1653 the appointment of tutor to Cromwell’s ward, William Dutton. Other pieces of a like description followed, and in 1657 Marvell became joint Latin secretary with Milton, an office for which Milton had recommended him four years previously. His poem on the Protector’s death in the following year is justly declared by Mr. Firth to be ‘the only one distinguished by an accent of sincerity and personal affection.’ He was elected for Hull to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, and continued to sit for the remainder of his life. He was the last Member of Parliament who received a salary from his constituents, to whose interests he in return attended so diligently that upwards of three hundred letters from him upon their concerns and general politics are extant in the Hull archives.
Marvell could scarcely be called a republican. He had been devoted to the Protectorate, and would probably have been easily reconciled to the Restoration if the government had been ably and honestly conducted. In wrath at the general maladministration he betook himself to satires, which circulated in manuscript. At first he attacked Clarendon, but eventually concluded that the only remedy would be the final expulsion of the house of Stuart. In 1672 and 1673 he appeared in print as a prose controversialist with The Rehearsal Transprosed, a witty attack on a work by Parker, Bishop of Oxford, wherein, in the author’s own words, ‘the mischiefs and inconveniences of toleration were represented, and all pretences pleaded in behalf of liberty of conscience fully answered.’ He silenced his opponent, and escaped being himself silenced through the interposition of Charles II., whose native good sense and easiness of temper inclined him to toleration, and who promoted the freedom of Nonconformists as a means of obtaining liberty for the Church of Rome. Marvell, however, was not to be reconciled, and in 1677 put forth an anonymous pamphlet to prove, what was but too true, that a design had long been on foot to establish absolute monarchy and subvert the Protestant religion. His sudden death on August 18th, 1678, was attributed to poison, but, according to a physician who wrote some years afterwards, was occasioned by that prejudice of the faculty against Peruvian bark which is recorded by Temple and Evelyn.
As a writer of prose, Marvell is both powerful and humorous, but is not a Junius or a Pascal to impart permanent interest to transitory themes, and make the topics of the day topics for all time. As a poet he ranks with those who have been said to be stars alike of evening and of morning. His earliest and most truly poetical compositions belong in spirit to the period of Charles I., when the strains of the Elizabethan lyric were yet lingering. After passing through a transition stage of manly verse still breathing a truly poetical spirit, but mainly concerned with public affairs, he settles down as a satirist endowed with all the vigour, but, at the same time, with all the prosaic hardness of the Restoration. His most inspired poem, Thoughts in a Garden, written under the Commonwealth, and originally composed in Latin, nevertheless rings like a voice from beyond the Civil Wars. Here are the three loveliest of nine lovely stanzas:
‘What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
‘Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.
‘Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,
Or at some fruit-tree’s mossy root,
Casting the body’s vest aside
My soul into the boughs does glide:
There, like a bird, it sits and sings,
There whets and claps its silver wings,
And, till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.’
‘These wonderful verses,’ says Mr. Palgrave of the entire poem, ‘may be regarded as a test of any reader’s insight into the most poetical aspects of poetry.’
As a satirist it is Marvell’s error to confound satire with lampoon. He has the saeva indignatio which makes the avenger, but spends too much of it upon individuals. Occasionally some fine personification gives promise of better things, but the poet soon relapses into mere personalities. This may be attributed in great measure to the circumstances under which these compositions appeared. They could only be circulated clandestinely, and the writer may be excused if he did not labour to exalt what he himself regarded as mere fugitive poetry. The most celebrated of these pieces are the series of Advices to a Painter, in which the persons and events of the day are described to an imaginary artist for delineation in fitting, and therefore by no means flattering, colours. It is to Marvell’s honour that he succeeds best with a fine subject. When, in his poems on the events of the Commonwealth, he escapes from mere sarcasm and negation, and speaks nobly upon really noble themes, he soars far above the Marvell of the Restoration, though even here his verse is marred by lapses into the commonplace, and by his besetting infirmity of an inability to finish with effect, leaving off like a speaker who sits down rather from the failure of his voice than the exhaustion of his theme. The panegyric on Cromwell’s anniversary, and the poem on his death, abound nevertheless with fine, though faulty passages, of which the following may serve as an example:
‘O human glory vain! O Death! O wings!
O worthless world! O transitory things!
Yet dwelt that greatness in his shape decayed,
That still, though dead, greater than death he laid,
And in his altered face you something feign
That threatens Death he yet will live again.
Not much unlike the sacred oak which shoots
To heaven its branches, and through earth its roots,
Whose spacious boughs are hung with trophies round,
And honoured wreaths have oft the victor crowned,
When angry Jove darts lightning through the air
At mortal sins, nor his own plant will spare,
It groans and bruises all below, that stood
So many years the shelter of the wood.
The tree, erewhile foreshortened to our view,
When fallen shows taller yet than as it grew;
So shall his praise to after times increase,
When truth shall be allowed, and faction cease;
And his own shadows with him fall; the eye
Detracts from objects than itself more high;
But when Death takes from them that envied state,
Seeing how little, we confess how great.’
Marvell’s position as the satirist of his era from the Puritan and Republican point of view, was filled upon the Cavalier side by Samuel Butler, who, if general reputation and excellence in his own walk of verse are to be allowed as criterions, may claim to be the third poet of the age after Milton and Dryden. It is true that Butler, though endowed with abundance of fancy, was, strictly speaking, no poet; that he is entirely destitute of the dignity and tenderness which Marvell can display with a congenial theme; and that he possesses nothing of Dryden’s power of exalting unpromising subjects into poetry. But he infinitely surpasses Marvell when they meet on the common ground of satire; and though he cannot be said to surpass Dryden, their methods are so different that no proper comparison can be drawn. When writing in Dryden’s manner Butler is respectable, but he has the field of burlesque epic entirely to himself. Supremacy in a low style of composition is a surer passport to fame than moderate merit in a high one. With all the defects of Restoration literature, it had a faculty for producing masterpieces, and it must be admitted that Butler’s Hudibras stands as decidedly at the head of its class as Paradise Lost, or Absalom and Achitophel, or Pilgrim’s Progress, or Pepys’s Diary at the head of theirs.