Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 100.djvu/263

Rh theirs. It was too lusty for their showy and volatile spirits." The last sentences remind us of Scott's lofty apologetic tribute:

In estimating the influence of this stalwart, brawny athletes on English poetry as an art, Mr. Bell holds that he belonged to the class of writers who inaugurate an epoch, not to the lower class which spring from it, and that he effected in his day "a greater revolution in English poetry than it experienced before, or can ever probably be susceptible of again." We, at this distance of time, can only by familiar and intimate acquaintance with the literature extending from the reign of the last of the Tudors to the last of the Stuarts, appreciate even in a low degree the extent of this revolution. Dryden "simplified, strengthened, and enlarged" the expression of our national verse. "The fantastical conceits, and involved casuistry of the metaphysical poets faded before the broad light of his genius, and he established in their place a poetry massive and clear, grand and noble in the utterance, and thoroughly national in its spirit and in the integrity of its diction." We should be sorry to see the Elizabethan minstrels, and their immediate followers, with all their imperfections on their heads, discarded for the sake of Glorious John—for they were rich in qualities wherein he was poor indeed—qualities too, which, after all, take a higher place in the true regions of poetry than those by which he is distinctively ennobled; but we acquiesce in the importance attributed by his present editor to the result of his innovations.

Several hitherto unpublished letters are given in the Memoir, thanks to the industrious researches of Mr. Bell, and the courtesy of the living representative of Dryden's family. There is also "at least one new and very material fact," on which its discoverer, with a satisfaction highly natural in such a case, lays very considerable stress. This fact relates to the "cause and effect" chronology of the poet's "perversion" to Romanism. What Mr. Bell has discovered is, that, whereas it has hitherto been believed that the pension granted by James II. instantly