gratuitous advice was given to the poor. The apothecaries viciously attacked the pious work of charity, and Garth held their meanness up to ridicule in a mock-heroic poem, The Dispensary (1699), which passed through a great number of editions. It was through the zeal of Garth that Dryden received due honour in burial; and he was prominent in founding the Kit-Kat Club. In 1715 his topographical poem of Claremont appeared, in direct emulation of Denham's Cooper's Hill. The fun has all faded out of The Dispensary, and Garth is no longer in the least degree attractive. But his didactic verse is the best between Dryden and Pope, though we see beginning in it the degradation of the overmannered style of the eighteenth century. In the fourth canto of the Dispensary Garth sums up, with all his characteristic good nature, and more vivacity than usual, the condition of English poetry at the close of the seventeenth century:

"Mortal, how dar'st thou with such lies address

My awful seat, and trouble my recess?

In Essex marshy hundreds is a cell,

Where lazy fogs, and drizzling vapours dwell:
Thither raw damps on drooping wings repair,
And shiv'ring quartans shake the sickly air.
There, when fatigu'd, some silent hours I pass,
And substitute physicians in my place;
Then dare not, for the future, once rehearse
The dissonance of such unequal verse;

But in your lines let energy be found,

And learn to rise in sense, and sink in sound.
Harsh words, tho' pertinent, uncouth appear,
None please the fancy, who offend the ear;
In sense and numbers if you wou'd excel,
Read Wycherley, consider Dryden well;
In one, what vigorous turns of fancy shine,
In th' other, syrens warble in each line;
If Dorset's sprightly muse but touch the lyre,
The smiles and Graces melt in soft desire,
And little Loves confess their amorous fire.
The Tiber now no courtly Gallus sees,
But smiling Thames enjoys his Normanbys;

And gentle Isis claims the ivy crown,

To bind th' immortal brows of Addison;

As tuneful Congreve tries his rural strains,

Pan quits the woods, the list'ning fauns the plains;
And Philomel, in notes like his, complains;

And Britain, since Pausanias was writ,
Knows Spartan virtue, and Athenian wit,

When Stepney paints the godlike acts of kings,
Or, what Apollo dictates, Prior sings :

The banks of Rhine a pleased attention show,

And silver Sequana forgets to flow."

Of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea (1660-1720), it is impossible to say whether she was the last of the old or the first of the new romantic school. At a period when the study of external nature was completely excluded from poetry, Lady Winchelsea introduced into her verses novel images taken directly from rustic life as she saw it round about her. Her Nocturnal Reverie has been highly praised by Wordsworth, and is a singularly beautiful description of the sights and sounds that attend a summer night in the country:

"In such a night, when passing clouds give place,
Or thinly veil the heavens' mysterious face,
When in some river, overhung with green,
The waving moon and trembling leaves are seen,
When freshened grass now bears itself upright,
And makes cool banks to pleasing rest invite,
Whence spring the woodbine, and the bramble-rose,
And where the sleepy cowslip sheltered grows,
Whilst now a paler hue the foxglove takes,

1

Yet chequers still with red the dusky brakes,
Where scattered glow-worms, but in twilight fine,—
Shew trivial beauties, watch their hour to shine,
While Salisbury stands the test of every light,
In perfect charms and perfect beauty bright;
When odours, which declined repelling day,
Through temperate air uninterrupted stray;
When darkened groves their softest shadows wear,
And falling waters we distinctly hear;
When through the gloom more venerable shows
Some ancient fabric awful in repose;

While sunburned hills their swarthy looks conceal,
And swelling haycocks thicken up the vale;
When the loosed horse now, as his pasture leads,
Comes slowly grazing thro' the adjoining meads,
Whose stealing pace and lengthened shade we fear,
Till torn-up forage in his teeth we hear;
When nibbling sheep at large pursue their food,
And unmolested kine rechew the cud;
When curlews cry beneath the village walls,

And to her straggling brood the partridge calls;
Their short-lived jubilee the creatures keep,

Which but endures, whilst tyrant Man doth sleep."

Lady Winchelsea's temper was so foreign to the taste of her own age that she achieved no success among her contemporaries, although Swift admired her, and from a line of hers, "We faint beneath the aromatic pain,” Pope borrowed one of his most celebrated phrases. Her poems, not all of which have seen the light, consist of odes and miscellaneous lyrics, besides several dramatic pieces; the original MSS. are in the possession of the present writer.

To

As the seventeenth century approached its close, the poetry of England was invaded more and more completely by a Latinism which repulsed and finally silenced all that was not in sympathy with it, and gave an exaggerated importance to all that was. attribute this tendency to the popularity of those translations of the Latin poets published by Dryden, or to the precepts of the Aristotelian critics of France, is to evade the difficulty. These writings were welcomed, and therefore exercised influence, because the public ear was ready to receive them. The rules of Rapin and Le Bossu did not create a taste-they only justified and fortified it. Every section of poetry responded to the change of manner. The very study of nature was contracted into channels as close as had sufficed to give Horace and Juvenal their satiric picturesqueness of detail. The desire of finding such channels is perhaps the most definite symptom we can point to as leading to such a condition of things. The extreme facility of Renaissance invention had wearied the mind of Europe, and an appetite for

individual inspiration gave way to a passion for regularity and intellectual discipline, until only such terrestrial forms of poetical fancy gave satisfaction as Rome rather than Greece or Italy had nourished. The taste for poetry, in the abstract, as a species of literature, retained its hold on the public even when the art had been despoiled of all its lyric and idyllic charms, of half its colour and its music, and of much of its variety. In order to adapt it to these new conditions, there was a curious relapse to the most primitive instincts of men; and as though the age of Hesiod had returned, readers looked to verse for instruction in those common things of life that had been resigned to prose, in the practice of medicine, in the cultivation of an orchard, in the theories of metaphysics, in the conduct of the politics of Europe. Dryden alone had retained to the last some reverberations of the great romantic music of Elizabeth. When he died the Latinists were absolutely paramount, and the poets of the next quarter of a century knew no Apollo but Horace.

CHAPTER II

DRAMA AFTER THE RESTORATION

THE drama took a place in English literature during the last third of the seventeenth century relatively more prominent than it has ever taken since. Certain sections of society were passionately addicted to theatrical amusement, and their appetites had been whetted by eighteen years of enforced privation. All theatres had been closed by ordinance of the Lords and Commons on the 2d September 1642, and in 1647, for fear of a relapse, this order had been stringently repeated. On the 21st of May 1656 Davenant obtained permission to rig up a semi-private stage in Rutland House, but it was not until August 1660 that Killigrew and he secured each a patent to open a public theatre in London. This vacuum of eighteen years sufficed to mark a condition which it did not cause, namely, the complete decline and fall of the exhausted Jacobean drama. In 1642 only one dramatist of the old school, Shirley, was still alive, and of his plays all the most important had already been acted. It was no serious attack on literature to exclude from the boards the plays of such men as Brome and Jasper Mayne. The poets of the old school soon grew tired of writing for an imaginary stage, and their successors were found unprejudiced when the time came for resuming the real drama.

In response to the universal demand for theatrical amusements at the Restoration, various playwrights instantly came forward. But these men had seen no stage plays in England for nearly twenty