powers. There was no one central fire in his nature, which, with a lifting current, gathered up and elevated his thoughts, stirred the flame, or bore its sparks in one brilliant shower toward heaven.

This weakness of the faith elements is seen in his religious belief. He drifted from Puritanism through the Church of England over into Catholicism, resting at length under a charge of mercenary tergiversation. There are two classes, who, by a bias of nature, are inclined toward the Catholic Church. The erudite, on whom antiquity has profoundly impressed itself, whose piety is of a meditative, poetic cast; and who, like fragile and beautiful blue-bells, care not so much for the depth of the soil they thrive in, as to feel the rock, unbroken, earth-centred, just beneath them; and those with whom religion is a matter of necessity rather than choice, a thing of fears and superstitions, and who covet the shelter of a church which will take all risks upon itself, and guarantee its disciples on easy terms. Dryden seems to us to belong to the second class. A superstitious feeling is shown in his casting the nativity of his son; and his restlessness under religious influences, yet sensitiveness to them, in his dislike of the clergy. Kings and preests are in a manner bound,

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For reverence sake, to be close hypocrites."

How did this ethical weakness in Dryden affect him in art? He is admitted to have possessed fine powers. Passages of striking beauty are found in his works; but they are thinly scattered, and do not cluster anywhere in such number or order as

to constitute one great work. His plays are so polluted, that we no more covet their wit than the garments that smoulder with buried kings. He wrote them avowedly under the mean, mercantile inspiration of the sentiment, "He who lives to please, must please to live." Falling by these words of shrewd concession from the heights of the moral world, there happened to lie under him, for his reception, nothing but the sensuality of a court society, just passing out of life by spontaneous decay. Here, at this altar of lust, he ministered, and his plays have perished with it. In his ruling sentiment, just given, he struck the key-note of dissolution in the English drama, of its sad dissolving melody. Ceasing to be filled with its own life, and anxious only for immediate gains, it has sunk from an art to an avocation; and its composers, from artists to playwrights. Only great actors enable it for a brief period to return to the tragedies of Shakespeare.

His poems are largely satirical, didactic, polemic. The excellencies that lie on this low grade, he attained; conciseness of thought, aptness of expression, pomp and majesty of language, an occasional beautiful image, critical prefaces rivalling in interest the poems that follow them, lively versions, vigorous translations, and an increasing mastery of the formal conditions of verse. Against these attainments lie the facts, that his works as a whole are heavy, tedious; that they never quite justify his talent; that he seems to feel a better impulse than that which he obeys; to work at little things with

passing visions of greater ones; and in the end is content, that his poems, for the most part, should be burned, a sentiment in which he and the world may well be at one again. Says Voltaire of him "An author who would have had a glory without a blemish, if he had only written the tenth part of his works."

To us his weakness is that of the circle in which he moved. He lacked virile, moral force, which is to the poet what it is to the man, the spring, the coil of his intellectual mechanism, driving his ideas, giving them firm rotation, and causing them ́ to cleave to the function and motion that are in them, as the earth revolves under its own gravitative impulse. The moral nature is looked on as merely formal, didactic, preceptive; it is rather the very essence, the organizing power of spiritual life; and unless one is by it thrown at some point into sympathy with pregnant principles, geared into the permanent world of ideas, belted to human progress, his work must be cold and poor and transient, waiting on oblivion.

* Voltaire, p. 82.

LECTURE VII.

The balance of Two Periods, the Creative and the Critical.-The School of Pope-its Value-Relation to Poetry and Prose.Causes which produced it, (a) Natural Sequence of Criticism on Creation, (6) External Influences, (c) Science and Philosophy of the Time.

Social Spirit of the Period.-Improved by Literature.—The Papers of Steele and Addison.-Service of.-Qualities of Literary Leadership.-Chief Men-Swift and Pope, Steele and Addison.

Two periods in English Literature stand in natural equipoise, both great under their own specific forms, the creative period of the time of Queen Elizabeth, and the critical period of the time of Queen Anne. We have spoken of the transition under Dryden by which English Letters passed over from Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, to Pope, Swift and Addison. This period of pre-eminent art is held in very different honor by different critics, and has been assigned a rank varying from the highest almost to the lowest. The early portion of the eighteenth century was long regarded as the Augustan age of England. Its spirit ruled the entire century, and only slowly lost ground at its close. It was the reduction of its influence, the reaction against it, that gave occasion to a second creative period at the commencement of the present century, This artistic tendency, made ready for in a half-century, dominant during two-thirds of a century, and declining in the remaining third, exhibits two phases,

the first under Pope and Addison, the second under Johnson. The key-note of its spirit and method was most clearly given early in the eighteenth century by Pope, who was its best embodiment.

In the æsthetical product there are two constituents, the substance and the form. Though these are much less separable than the way in which they are sometimes spoken of would seem to imply, they may, by the manner in which they are contemplated by the mind in its productive attitudes give quite diverse results. The intellectual substance of a conception may remain much the same, and yet its emotional force be materially modified by minor variations of expression; as the same clouds accept a hundred shades of beauty according to the light that falls upon them. The emotional element is much more subtile and evanescent than the intellectual one, and comes and goes on conditions so delicate, that we are more cognizant of the results than of the means by which they are wrought.

The form and spirit are so mutually dependent, that they only exist in and by each other. There can be no modification of the one member without a corresponding change in the other. But the mind, in its analytic, creative act, can bend its attention to the spiritual substance of its conception, made up as this is of thought and feeling; or it may direct its constructive vision to the form which the product is to assume. In the one attitude, the mind is more thoroughly creative, in the other, more carefully critical; in the one, it works more from within, and thinks of the form only as the con