literature of France, again, was singularly deficient in political Satire and in the Ode, while the genius of Dryden raised the lyric and satirical poetry of this country beyond their reputation in any other living language. And if a casual similarity between the two writers is observable through a common development of one class of fictions, the Fable of La Fontaine was conceived chiefly in the Greek, while the Fable of Dryden was conceived exclusively in the Romantic style. It would be difficult, in truth, to discover any two schools of imaginative thought, of the same age, and in the same scale of civilisation, more alien from each other than the poetry of Dryden from the poetry of Versailles.

The charge of Gallicism, therefore, with which the works of Dryden have been assailed, can only relate to a period anterior to the imitative bias assumed by the literature of France in the seventeenth century. But, considered in this point of view, it involves the question of our possession of a national literature. For it is certain that the whole course of English poetry, between the ages of Chaucer and Scott, betrays at least an equal obligation to the early imagination of France. Such a theory, moreover, must cast a similar imputation on the originality of Milton; for the Fabliaux of the French bear no stronger resemblance to the poetry of Dryden than their Mysteries and Moralities to the design of the Comus and Paradise Lost.. But there is no more basis for the assertion that the poetical genius of England was of Norman origin, than for the assertion that England was a Norman nation. The primitive literature of the Anglo-Saxon age had acquired a form for centuries before the conquests of the Northmen first kindled the chivalrous imagination of France. The early poetry of England, at the same time, interfused into its system both French and Saracenic invention; and it added to its creations the Genius of the Fabliasts, as it had added the Griffin of Arabia. We readily acknowledge the influence which the Norman poetry, as the first of its period in creative power, may have exerted over the national imagination of this country; but only as the introduction of Norman manners may have promoted the social civilisation of a Saxon

race.

In order to apprehend the true distinction between originality and imitation, we must entertain a correct appreciation of the constructive character of literature, and distinguish between obligations directly resulting from prior invention, and obligations indirectly arising from the inevitable progressive character of human thought. As the languages of modern Europe arose principally from the conflicting force of

the Latin and the Teutonic, so its literature arose principally from the union of a foreign with an indigenous element. Fusion formed the invariable basis both of the Romantic dialects and the Romantic poetry. Yet the blending of a special with a cognate element gave both to the language and to the literature of each country the idiosyncrasy which constituted their national form.

Dryden has, perhaps, rendered himself peculiarly obnoxious to a charge of imitation in another shape; but it is one which calls for a very different verdict. We allude to the occasional borrowing of a subject or a design as distinguished from a systematic imitation of style. It was a maxim, indeed, of Sir William Jones, that the adoption of a subject already entertained by an elder writer was inconsistent with any pretension to mental originality; and Sir William professed to have abandoned his scheme of an epic poem on the legend of King Arthur in deference to his own canon. But the theory of the Eastern philologist would throw a slur on the finest productions of modern language. It was thus that Shakspeare drew from writings which have since fallen into obscurity, the subjects of several of his finest dramas; and it was in a manner not essentially dissimilar, it may be surmised, that Dante drew from the Mysteries of the Trouvères the scheme of his Divine Comedy. Those poems, moreover, which are avowedly reconstructions of older writings, can claim only a secondary merit; and they are simply the pastime of the original poet. Nor does the casual construction of a tragedy on the basis of the Spanish drama involve a greater disparagement of the powers of Dryden than the conception of the Comus on the basis of the Italian Masque implies a reproach on the originality of Milton.*

If, then, these principles and deductions are sound-if the laws of originality and imitation have been fairly stated, we must clearly refer to other grounds than the want of an inventive power the oblivion into which the works of Dryden have so singularly fallen. To have created in one age a system of versification which should have continued for another century, the dominant school of English poetry, unsupported by the factitious influence of a Court, implied at once felicity of execution and grandeur and novelty of design. When, indeed, we con

* We have alluded above to the French Mysteries as having possibly shadowed forth the design of the Comus. And we think there is little reason to doubt that the Italian Masque, of an age intervening between the Mysteries and the Comus, received in some degree the impress of the early French poetry.

trast the achievements of Dryden with those of succeeding writers, we are forced to admit that the eighteenth century produced no such instance of versatile power. That the author of the Odes for St. Cecilia's Day should have composed the acute theological disquisition of the Hind and the Panther, -that the master of satire should have drawn the characters of Don Sebastian and the Spanish Friar-implied, indeed, a closer approximation to the chimæra of universal talent, than perhaps any other precedent can supply.

Many of the poems of Dryden, moreover, possess a value, irrespective of their imaginative merit, as illustrations of political and social history. Shall we then, in this dilemma, accept the solution which is thrown out by Augustus von Schlegel, who would ascribe their neglect, at this day, to that very historical character which constitutes, in our view, their secondary merit? But such a theory, if acknowledged in the abstract sense in which it is enunciated by the German critic, would apply with equal force to the historical dramas of his great idol.

A fairer solution of the difficulty is to be found in the altered condition of society, which has wrought a corresponding change in the literary taste of the nation, and in the indiscriminate reaction of opinion, which has tended to confound the original writings of Dryden and Pope with the degenerate productions of their followers. The poetical character of an age is inevitably influenced and directed by the social tone of the existing generation, by its customs, its modes of life, its very habits of thought, its most transient conventionalities. In whatever degree these ephemeral conditions become attributes of national poetry, they invest the literature of the day with characteristics which are proportionately distasteful to a new development of society. Thus the sway of the licentious poetry of medieval France, whose intellectual merit was as great as its conformity to the age of its composition was exact, necessarily declined before the stiff etiquette and artificial morality of the Court of Versailles.

It may be asserted perhaps, by some, that the license assumed by Shakspeare is scarcely less gross than that which pervades the comedies of Dryden; and therefore that the general principle we have maintained, in its application to the works of different dramatists, should either be compatible with their common popularity, or work their common proscription. But the circumstances of the two writers, even conceding their alleged similarity in license, were wholly different. The character of society, in our own day, exhibits no such antagonism to the sixteenth as to the seventeenth century-no such difference from the age of Elizabeth as from the age of Charles the Second. The license of the

former period was the necessary attribute of an imperfect civilisation, that of the latter was the result of retrogressive sensuality. In every social state, men more readily tolerate those violations of their canons of propriety which arise from a natural condition of manners, than those which result from artificial convention. A rigorous application of the notions which grew up with the age of Anne, as an universal test of poetical propriety, would involve nearly the whole imaginative literature of Europe, from the songs of the Troubadours to the plays of Massinger, in a sweeping and indiscriminate proscription. The feeble writings of such men as Gower would then represent the poetry of medieval England. The poetry of Dryden has been unjustly, though not unnaturally, included in a common condemnation with his comedy. It is, in truth, the general tendency of our judgment to confound what is elevating and just with what is irreverent and degrading, in the productions of the same mind. A slur is thrown upon Childe Harold because it was the work of the author of Don Juan, and upon the tragedy of Manfred because its author wrote also the tragedy of Cain.

Not only, however, was the popularity of Dryden supplanted by the external influence of social refinement, but his very school was overthrown by a total change in the character of versification. It has been succeeded, in great measure, by a school of descriptive poetry. The poetry of subjective thought was replaced by the poetry of objective reflection. Does not such a revolution, it has been asked, imply a fundamental defect in the system of Dryden; and is it not one which no change of manners could have achieved? But such an argument is somewhat sophistical. It assumes, in the first place, that the fault has rested not with us, but with our ancestors-that the nineteenth century has displayed a more correct appreciation of poetry than the seventeenth. Yet even granting an assumption which it would be difficult to prove, the hypothesis proceeds on the further assumption, that the abandonment in practice of a school of poetry condemns the productions of its founder. It will be presumed that we are no worshippers of schools. Creation and originality are the first attributes of genius. The establishment of a school, through an habitual imitation of a great master, affords an unquestionable proof of the degeneracy of the imagination. Chaucer and Spenser, Shakspeare and Milton, seldom sought for any other archetype than Nature. The period of imitation is generally commensurate with the slumber of true poetry. The era, therefore, of Dryden and Pope, and that of Byron and Scott and Wordsworth, far from

discording with each other, may be said to have constituted successive links in the chain of Fancy.

rests.

But it is not enough, in order to establish such a proposition, to assume the poetical superiority of the present over the seventeenth century: it is not enough to assume the erroneous character of the system which Dryden created. It is necessary also to assume that the later phase of our national poetry is to be referred, solely or chiefly, to a revulsion of taste, and not to a natural development of thought. But the force of probability is directly opposed to the postulate on which this reasoning The mere growth of civilisation would probably promote the introduction of descriptive verse. Descriptive poetry appears necessarily the most remote from narrative or epic poetry. And as the descriptive element has been the last to be raised into predominance of the various systems which have as yet been cultivated in this country, so the narrative or epic element was the first to be introduced both under the rise of imaginative power in Greece, and during its revival, among the continental nations, in the age of chivalry. It would be more reasonable, therefore, to refer the origin of descriptive poetry to the progress of society than to a violent change in taste. The hypothesis in question, therefore, essentially depends on three successive assumptions which are similarly destitute of probability and

reason.

The reaction of the present century from the miserable bondage in which poetry had been held by the school of the immediately preceding age, was characterised by an ignorance corresponding to its want of discrimination. Mr. Keats and his fellow-thinkers, in their ludicrous invectives against Dryden and Pope, appeared incapable of determining intrinsic merit by any other characteristic than external style; and accordingly judged by a common rule the original and the copy.

But it has been said that Pope, as the first imitator of Dryden, eclipsed and displaced the author whom he copied; as in the schools of sculpture and painting the fame of the disciple has sometimes outshone that of the master; or, as in the theatre of Spain, the dramas of Cervantes have been supplanted by the dramas of Calderon. It has been said, again, that the similarity of the two poets, in point of versification, is inconsistent with the pretensions of Pope as an original writer. But these conflicting positions seem similarly indefensible. A poet, if he would be popular, must, in a certain degree, be the creature of society; even if he would be unpopular, he cannot hope, in his own day, to alter the social constitution. Pope, it must be remembered, had already begun to write poetry before