Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 100.djvu/265

Rh thoughtfully, or refrain from judging at all." Be our lot with the few. What a time Christendom takes to learn that one clause in the Sermon on the Mount,.

Another point in Dryden's life on which his editor has thrown new light, concerns his marriage with Lady Elizabeth Howard—the registry of which is now given to the public, dated November, 1663. The terms of it serve to disallow the usual tradition that Lady Elizabeth's family disapproved of, and held aloof from, the match.

The letters now first published, six in number, are interesting, and eminently like the writer. One addressed to his friend William Walsh (whom he calls in the notes to Virgil "the best critic in our language") is as full of minute verbal criticism as are the recently printed epistles of Gray. There are others relating to the state of affairs under William III., and the literary schemes of the now aged and broken ex- laureate. "I have undertaken to translate all Virgil," he tells Mr. Walsh (1693): "and as an essay have already paraphrased the third Georgic, as an example; it will be published in Tonson's next Miscellanies, in Hilary term. I propose to do it by subscription, having an hundred and two brass cuts, with the coat of arms of the subscribers to each cut; every subscriber to pay five guineas—half in hand; besides another inferior subscription of two guineas for the rest, whose names are only written in a catalogue, printed with the book." What a set of snobs the catalogued must have seemed beside the Quality magnates who rejoiced in their brass cuts and heraldic pomp!

Passing from the Life to the Poems, we may observe that Mr. Bell prints the latter in the order of their composition. This method he considers preferable to the prevalent mode of classification, as presenting the "authentic materials of a mental autobiography," and tracing the poet "onwards in his relations with contemporary literature:" a method especially valuable in the instance of Dryden, "whose individual progress is identical with a revolution in English poetry." The volume opens accordingly with the elegy on Lord Hastings—chiefly known as containing the widely ridiculed lines on small-pox—composed in the writer's seventeenth year. The volume closes with the "Absalom and Achitophel," brought out thirty-two years later. In the intervening pages we have the heroic stanzas on the Death of Cromwell; the "Astræa Redux;" the Address to Clarendon, to the Duchess of Cleveland, to the Duchess of York, to the Earl of Roscommon (on his Essay on translated verse), and to Nat. Lee (on his Alexander the Great); also the Essay on Satire (the occasional cause of Dryden's memorable cudgelling in Rose-alley, whence its style, the Rose-alley Satire), and the "Annus Mirabilis," which Dryden declared he would have called an epic, but for its brevity, and want of unity in the action. To these and the remaining minor poems Mr. Bell prefixes concise elucidatory introductions, and appends useful expository notes. Dryden's writings are so thronged with allusions to the questions of his day, to excitements that have been extinct for generations past, and to topics of interest long, long forgotten, that a large supply of explanations is indispensable to all but the "knowing" few. Mr. Bell has not erred in being too brief in this respect—some of his illustrative details being perhaps needlessly copious, while in other instances lie might advantageously insert a bit of exegesis where now is a