Chapter V: Part 5

From Jewin-street he made his last remove, as to his London residences, into Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields. Bunhill Fields were probably, in those days, open, and airy, and quiet; at present, with the exception of the Artillery Ground itself, and the thickly-populated burial-ground which contains the bones of Bunyan and De Foe, the whole of that neighborhood is covered with a dense mass of modern houses. Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, is no longer to be found. The nearest approach that you get, even to the name, is Artillery Place, Bunhill Row, which is merely a row of new houses adjoining the Artillery Ground, and a new church, which has been erected in that busy, ordinary, and dingy street, still called Bunhill Row. Besides an Art of Logic, his Treatise on True Religion, Heresie, Schism, Toleration, and what best means _may be used against the growth of Popery_; his Familiar Letters in Latin; and a translation of a Latin Declaration of the Poles in favor of John III., their heroic sovereign--the last two published in the last year of his life; his residence in Bunhill Fields was made remarkable by the publication of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. He left, moreover, in manuscript, a Brief History of Muscovy, and of other less known Countries lying Eastward of Russia as far as Cathay, which was published in 1682, and his System of Theology, which was long supposed to have perished, but has been recovered and published of late years, much to the scandal of the orthodox.

Thus to the last did this wonderful man live and labor. Never did any man less "vapor away his patriotism." There is something singularly interesting and impressive in our idea of him, as he calmly passed his latter days in his quiet habitation in Bunhill Fields. He had outlived the great battle of king and people, in which extraordinary men and as extraordinary events had arisen, and shaken the whole civilized world. Charles I., Laud, and Strafford had fallen in their blood; the monarchy and the Church had fallen. Pym, Hampden, Marvel, Vane, and the dictator Cromwell, had not only pulled down the greatest throne in Europe, but had made all others seem to reel by the terrific precedent. All these stern agents, with the generals Ireton, Harrison, Lambert, Fleetwood, and their compeers, who had risen from the people to fight for the people, were gone, like the actors in an awful tragedy who had played their rôle; some had perished in their blood, others had been torn from their graves; the monarchy and the Church, the peerage and all the old practices and maxims, were again in the ascendant, and had taken bloody vengeance; yet this one man, he who had incited and applauded, who had defended and made glorious, through his eloquence and his learning, the whole Republican cause, was left untouched. As if some especial guardianship of Providence had shielded him, or as if the very foes who pulled the dreaded Cromwell from his grave, feared the imprecations of posterity, and shrunk from the touch of that sacred head--there sat the sublime old man at his door, feeling with grateful enjoyment the genial sunshine fall on him. There he sat, erect, serene, calm, and trusting to God the Father of mankind. He had lived even to fulfill that long-deferred task of poetic glory; the vision of Paradise Lost passed before him, and had been sung forth in the most majestic strains that had ever made classical the English tongue. His trust in Providence had been justified; he had served his country, and had yet not missed his immortality. The great and the wise came from every quarter to converse with him; and the wonderful passages through which he and his nation had lived, were food for the musings of the longest day or the most solitary moments.

Many have thought that those melancholy lines in Samson Agonistes, commencing

"O loss of sight! of thee I most complain,"

were his own wretched cogitations. But Milton, unlike Samson, had no weak seductions from the path of his great duty to reproach himself with; and far likelier were it that the whole apostrophe to light, spoken in his own character in the opening of the third book of Paradise Lost, was the more usual expression of his feelings:

"Thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sov'ran, vital lamp; but thou
Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs,
Or dim suffusion veil'd. Yet, not the more
Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt
Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief
Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath,
That wash thy hallowed feet, and warbling flow,
Nightly I visit: nor sometimes forget
Those other two equaled with me in fate,
So were I equaled with them in renown,
Blind Thamyris and blind Mæonides,
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old:
Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid,
Tunes her nocturnal note."

Such is the view that Richardson has given us of him in his declining days: "An ancient clergyman, of Dorsetshire, Dr. Wright, found John Milton in a small chamber hung with rusty green, sitting in an elbow-chair, and dressed neatly in black; pale, but not cadaverous; his hands and fingers gouty, and with chalk stones. He used, also, to sit in a gray, coarse cloth coat, at the door of his house in Bunhill Fields, in warm, sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh air; and so, as well as in his room, received the visits of people of distinguished parts as well as quality."

Much pains have been taken to represent Milton as morose and exacting in domestic life; and as proof of it has been adduced, the leaving of him by his first wife, and the statement that he made his daughters read to him in Latin and Greek, though he would not allow them to learn a syllable of those languages. If these things were true, I should be the last man to defend them, or to endeavor to gloss them over; but they are at least very doubtful. We must remember that these were the charges of his enemies, and they were many and bitter, and by no means truthful. The causes for his wife's desertion we have already examined, and they reflect discredit on her and her family, and not on him. In that account, all that is generous and honorable lies on his side. As to his daughters, probably they did not wish to learn the classical languages; and how they could read in them, while ignorant of them, so as to satisfy his ear, is not so easily conceivable, when we recollect that when Elwood did not understand what he was reading, he immediately detected it, and stopped him. Be this, however, as it may, Dr. Newton tells us, that all who had written accounts of Milton agreed that "he was affable and instructive in conversation, and of an equal and cheerful temper." It is not so easy to excuse him for refusing to leave any of his property to his daughters, "because they had been very undutiful to him." No doubt he had much to complain of in that disposition which they had imbibed from their mother and her family, but it became a great man, like Milton, to cherish a great affection toward his own children, and to manifest toward them a great forgiveness.

There is an episode in the later life of Milton which we are made acquainted with by Thomas Elwood, the Quaker, and which has something very pleasing and picturesque about it. It is that of his abode at Chalfont St. Giles, in Buckinghamshire. Elwood, who was the son of a country justice of peace, was one among the first converts to Quakerism, and has left us a most curious and amusing autobiography. In this he tells us that, while Milton lived in Jewin-street, he was introduced to him as a reader, the recompense to Elwood being that of deriving the advantage of a better knowledge of the classics, and of the foreign pronunciation of Latin. A great regard sprung up between Milton and his reader, who was a man, not only of great integrity of mind, but of a quaint humor and a poetical taste. On the breaking out of the plague in London, Milton, who was then living in Bunhill Fields, wrote to Elwood, who had found an asylum in the house of an affluent Quaker, at Chalfont, to procure him a lodging there. He did so; but before Milton could take possession of his country retreat, Elwood, with numbers of other Quakers, was hurried off to Aylesbury jail. The persecution of that sect subsiding for a while, Elwood, on his liberation, paid Milton a visit, and received the MS. of Paradise Lost to take home and read. With this, Elwood had the sense to be greatly delighted, and, in returning it, said, "Thou hast said a great deal upon _Paradise Lost_; what hast thou to say upon _Paradise Found_?" Milton was silent a moment, as pondering on what he had heard, and then began to converse on other subjects. When, however, Elwood visited him afterward in London, Milton showed him the _Paradise Regained_, saying, "This is owing to you, for you put it into my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont; which before I had not thought of."

Thus, in this abode at Chalfont, we hear the first mention of Paradise Lost, and to it we owe Paradise Regained. It is supposed that Milton wrote the whole of the latter poem there, and that he must have done, or the greater part of it, from his being able so soon after his return to show it to Elwood.

It says much for the proprietors of the cottage at Chalfont, and for the feeling of the country in general, that this simple dwelling has been sacredly preserved to this time. You see that all the others near it are much more modern. This is of the old framed timber kind, and is known, not only to the whole village, but the whole country round, as Milton's house. Mr. Dunster, in the additions to his edition of Paradise Regained, says that the cottage at Chalfont "is not pleasantly situated; that the adjacent country is extremely pleasant; but the immediate spot is as little picturesque or pleasing as can well be imagined." He might have recollected, that it could signify very little to Milton whether the spot was picturesque or not, if it were quiet, and had a good air; for Milton was, and had been, long quite blind. But, in fact, the situation, though not remarkably striking, is by no means unpleasing. It is the first cottage on the right hand as you descend the road from Beaconsfield to Chalfont St. Giles.

Standing a little above the cottage, the view before you is very interesting. The quiet old agricultural village of Chalfont lies in the valley, amid woody uplands, which are seen all round. The cottage stands facing you, with its gable turned to the road, and fronting into its little garden and field. A row of ordinary cottages is built at its back, and face the road below. To the right ascends the grass field mentioned; but this, with extensive old orchards above the house, is pleasing to the eye, presenting an idea of quiet, rural repose, and of meditative walks in the shade of the orchard-trees, or up the field, to the breezy height above. Opposite to the house, on the other side of the way, is a wheelwright's dwelling, with his timber reared among old trees, and above it a chalk-pit, grown about with bushes. This is as rural as you can desire. The old house is covered in front with a vine; bears all the marks of antiquity; and is said by its inhabitant, a tailor, to have been but little altered. There was, he says, an old porch at the door, which stood till it fell with age. Here we may well imagine Milton sitting, in the sunny weather, as at Bunhill Fields, and enjoying the warmth, and the calm sweet air. Could he have seen the view which here presented itself, it would have been agreeable; for though in this direction the ascending ground shuts out distant prospect, its green and woody upland would be itself a pleasant object of contemplation; shutting out all else, and favorable to thought. The house below consists of two rooms, the one on the left, next to the road, a spacious one, though low, and with its small diamond casements suggesting to you that it is much as when Milton inhabited it. Here he no doubt lived principally; and to all probability, here was Paradise Regained dictated to his amanuensis, most likely at that time his wife, Elizabeth Minshull. The worthy tailor and his apprentice were now mounted on a table in it, busily pursuing their labor.

Outside, over the door, is an armorial escutcheon, at the foot of which is painted, in bold letters, MILTON. The old man, who was very civil and communicative, said that it was not really the escutcheon of Milton, but of General Fleetwood, who purchased the house for Milton, and who at that time lived at the manor-house, and lies buried in the church here. Of this, Elwood tells us nothing, but, on the contrary, that he procured the house for Milton. Whether this escutcheon be really Fleetwood's or not, I had no means of ascertaining, as it was not only very indistinct, but too high to examine without a ladder; but as Milton's armorial bearing contained spread eagles, and as there were birds in the shield, it no doubt had been intended for Milton by those who placed it there. Fleetwood's living at Chalfont might be an additional reason for Milton's choosing it for his then retreat; but Elwood, and not Fleetwood, took the house, and it is doubtful even whether Fleetwood was still living, being one of the regicides condemned, but never executed. Independent, however, of any other consideration, Milton had many old associations with Buckinghamshire, which would recommend it to him; and in summer the air amid the heaths and parks of this part of the country is peculiarly soft, delicious, and fragrant.

We come now to Milton's last house, the narrow house appointed for all living, in which he laid his bones beside those of his father. This was in the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate. He died on Sunday, the 8th of November, 1674, and was buried on the 12th. His funeral is stated to have been very splendidly and numerously attended. By the parish registry we find that he was buried in the chancel: "John Milton, gentleman. Consumption. Chancell. 12. Nov., 1674." Dr. Johnson supposed that he had no inscription, but Aubrey distinctly states that "when the two steppes to the communion-table were raysed in 1690, his stone was removed." Milton's grave remained a whole century without a mark to point out where the great poet lay, till in 1793 Mr. Whitbread erected a bust and an inscription to his memory. What is more, there is every reason to believe that his remains were, on this occasion of raising the chancel and removing the stone, disturbed. The coffin was disinterred and opened, and numbers of relic-hunters were eager to seize and convey off fragments of his bones. The matter at the time occasioned a sharp controversy, and the public were at length persuaded to believe that they were not the remains of Milton, but of a female, that by mistake had been thus treated. But when the workmen had the inscribed stone before them, and dug down directly below it, what doubt can there be that the remains were those of the poet? By an alteration in the church when it was repaired in 1682, that which was the old chancel ceased to be the present one, and the remains of Milton thus came to lie in the great central aisle. The monument erected by Whitbread marks, as near as possible, the place. The bust is by Bacon. It is attached to a pillar, and beneath it is this inscription:

JOHN MILTON,
Author of Paradise lost,[7]
Born Dec'r., 1608.
Died Nov'r., 1674.
His father, John Milton, died March, 1646.
They were both interred in this church.

*...*...*...*

Samuel Whitbread posuit, 1793.

This church is remarkable for the marriage of Oliver Cromwell having taken place in it, and for being the burial-place of many eminent men. In the chancel, in close neighborhood with Milton, lay old John Speed, the chronicler, and Fox, the martyrologist, whose monuments still remain on the wall. That of Speed is his bust, in doublet and ruff, with his right hand resting on a book, and his left on a skull. It is a niche, representing one of the folding shrines still seen in Catholic churches on the Continent. There is a monument, also, seen there, to a lady of the family of Sir Thomas Lucy, of Shakspeare notoriety; and another of some noble person, having beneath the armorial escutcheon an opening representing skulls, bones, and flames, within a barred grating, supposed to be symbolic of purgatory. The burial-ground of Bunhill Fields, where Bunyan and De Foe lie, belongs also to this parish, and their interments are contained in the registry of this church.

Thus the Prince of Poets, as Hazlitt styled him, sleeps in good company. The times in which he lived, and the part he took in them, were certain to load his name with obloquy and misrepresentation; but the solemn dignity of his life, and the lofty tone and principle of his writings, more and more suffice not only to vindicate him, but to commend him to posterity. No man ever loved liberty and virtue with a purer affection; no man ever labored in their cause with a more distinguished zeal; no man ever brought to the task a more glorious genius, accomplished with a more consummate learning. Milton was the noblest model of a devoted patriot and true Englishman; and the study of his works is the most certain means of perpetuating to his country spirits worthy of her greatness.

SAMUEL BUTLER.

"In the midst of obscurity passed the life of Butler, a man whose name can only perish with his language. The mode and place of his education are unknown; the events of his life are variously related; and all that can be told with certainty is, that he was poor."

Such are the expressive words with which Dr. Johnson winds up his meager account of the witty author of Hudibras. A more significant finish to a poet's biography could scarcely be given. A more striking instance of national neglect, and the ingratitude of posterity, is nowhere to be found.

Strensham, in Warwickshire, claims the honor of his birth. His father is said to have been an honest farmer there, with a small estate, who made a shift to educate his son at the grammar-school at Worcester, whence he is supposed to have gone to the university, but whether of Oxford or Cambridge, is matter of dispute. His brother asserted that it was Cambridge, but could not tell at which hall or college. Dr. Nash discovered that his father was owner of a house and a little land, worth about eight pounds a year, which, in Johnson's time, was still called _Butler's tenement_.

When we consider the humble position of the father, we can only wonder that he contrived to give him an education at a classical school at all, and may very well doubt, with the great lexicographer, whether he in reality ever did study at Cambridge. Having, however, given his son a learned education, his resources were exhausted, he had no patronage, and the young man became, and might probably think himself fortunate in doing so, a clerk to a justice of peace, Mr. Jefferys, of Earl's Croomb, in Worcestershire. Here he appears to have passed an easy and agreeable life. "He had," says Johnson, "not only leisure for study, but for recreation; his amusements were music and painting; and the reward of his pencil was the friendship of the celebrated Cooper. Some pictures, said to be his, were shown to Dr. Nash at Earl's Croomb; but when he inquired for them some years afterward, he found them destroyed to stop windows, and owns that they hardly deserved a better fate."

From this gentleman's service he passed into that of the Countess of Kent. The celebrated John Selden was then steward of the countess, and it was probably through him, or for his purposes, that Butler was introduced into the family. He was much noticed by Selden, and employed by him as an amanuensis. Whether this was the actual capacity in which he stood in the family of the countess, is, like almost every other event of his life, however, quite unknown. One thing seems certain, that, both at Mr. Jefferys' and here, he had been turned loose into great libraries, the sort of pasture that he of all others liked, and had devoured their contents to some purpose, as is manifested in his writings. These were the real colleges at which he studied, and where he laid up enormous masses of information.

His next remove was into the family of Sir Samuel Luke, one of Cromwell's officers. This was the decisive circumstance of his life. Sir Samuel was the hero of his future poem--the actual Hudibras. But he was here in the very center of republican action, and sectarian opinion and discussion. In Sir Samuel he had a new and rich study of character; in those about him, a new world, abounding with all sorts of persons, passages, and doctrines, which made him feel that he also had a world unknown still in himself, that of satirical fun infinite. Into this world he absorbed all the new views of things; the strange shapes that came to and fro; the strange phraseology and sounds of conventicle hymns that assailed his ears. The historian and poet of the new land of Goshen, where all was light, while the neighboring Egypt of royalty was all in darkness, was born into it; and Hudibras, and his Squire Ralph, Sidrophel, Talgol and Trulla, the Bear and Fiddle, all sprung into immortal existence.

The story of the utter neglect of Butler by the king and court, at the time that not only they, but all Royalists in the kingdom, were bursting with laughter over Hudibras, is too well known. Once it was hoped that he was on the verge of good fortune, and Mr. Wycherley was to introduce him to the all-powerful Duke of Buckingham. The story of this interview is too characteristic to be passed over.

"Mr. Wycherley," says Packe, "had always laid hold of an opportunity which offered of representing to the Duke of Buckingham how well Mr. Butler had deserved of the royal family, by writing his inimitable Hudibras, and that it was a reproach to the court that a person of his loyalty and wit should suffer in obscurity, and under the want he did. The duke always seemed to hearken to him with attention enough; and after some time undertook to recommend his pretensions to his majesty. Mr. Wycherley, in hopes to keep him steady to his word, obtained of his grace to name a day when he might introduce that modest and unfortunate poet to his new patron. At last an appointment was made, and the place of meeting was agreed to be the Roebuck. Mr. Butler and his friend attended accordingly; the duke joined them; but, as the d--l would have it, the door of the room where they sat was open, and his grace, who had seated himself near it, observing a pimp of his acquaintance--the creature, too, was a knight--trip by with a brace of ladies, immediately quitted his engagement to follow another kind of business, at which he was more ready than at doing good offices to men of desert, though no one was better qualified than he, both in regard of his fortune and understanding, to protect them; and from that time to the day of his death, poor Butler never found the least effect of his promise!"

The brightest gleam of his life would seem to be between his quitting Sir Samuel Luke's and the publication of his Hudibras; but when this exactly took place, and how long this lasted, we are not informed. It must, however, have taken place between the king's return, which was in 1659, and 1664, some five years or so. During this period he was made secretary to the Earl of Carberry, president of the principality of Wales, who made him steward of Ludlow Castle when the Court of Marches was revived.

This was a post in which a poet might feel himself well placed. This ancient castle of the Lacys and Mortimers stands at the west end of the town of Ludlow, on a bold rock, overlooking the River Corve, and near the confluence of that river and the Teme. Many striking events had occurred here since the time that William the Conqueror bestowed it on Roger de Montgomery, from whose descendants it passed successively into the hands of the crown, the Warines, the Lacys, and the Mortimers. On the borders of Wales, it was a strong-hold for the crown of England, and after it fell again into the hands of the king, became the palace of the President of the Marches, and often the residence of princes. Here the young king Edward V. lived, and left it only to proceed to London into the murderous hands of his uncle, Richard III., who, within two months of his quitting this quiet asylum, had him and his brother smothered in the Tower. Here Prince Arthur, eldest son of Henry VII., was married to Catharine of Aragon, who, after his death, was married to his brother, Henry VIII.; her divorce finally leading to the Reformation in England. Here Sir Philip Sidney's father, Sir Henry Sidney, had lived, as President of the Marches; and many a scene of splendor and festivity had lit up the venerable towers, on the occasion of royal visits, and other seasons of rejoicing. Above all, it was for one of those occasions that the youthful Milton had composed his Comus; and on a visit of Charles I., in 1631, to the Earl of Bridgwater, then President of the Marches, it was performed before him, the work being founded on a real incident occurring in the lord president's own family, which is thus related by Nightingale: "When he had entered on his official residence, he was visited by a large assembly of the neighboring nobility and gentry. His sons, the Lord Brackley and Sir Thomas Egerton, and his daughter, the Lady Alice, being on their journey,

'To attend their father's state,
And new intrusted scepter,'

were benighted in Haywood Forest, in Herefordshire, and the lady for a short time was lost. The adventure being related to their father on their arrival at the castle, Milton, at the request of his friend, Henry Lawes, who taught music in the family, wrote the Mask. Lawes set it to music, and it was acted on Michaelmas night; the two brothers, the young lady, and Lawes himself, each bearing a part in the representation."

This single circumstance of being the scene of the first representation of the Mask of Comus, one of Milton's most beautiful compositions, has given a perpetual interest to Ludlow Castle.

The genius of Butler was of a different stamp. It wanted the sublimity, the pathos, and tender sensibilities of that of Milton; but, on the other hand, for perception of the ridiculous; for a diving into the closest folds of cant and fanatical pretense; for a rough, bold, and humorous power of sketching ordinary life, it was unrivaled. A tower is still shown as the place where he wrote a part of his Hudibras. Whether it be the precise fact or not, it is idle to inquire. There our author has resided; there he is said to have written something or other, and the very room and spot of its composition are pointed out. It is best not to be too critical; and, on the other hand, if we believe, in general, that where a man of genius has lived he has also written, we shall seldom be far wrong. There is little doubt that here Butler, possessed of more leisure and independence than at any other period of his life, did really revise and prepare his work for press, of which the first part was published in 1663, and the second in the year following.

Here he married Mrs. Herbert, a lady of good family, with whom he lived in comfort, if not in affluence. Of the place where Comus was first acted by the real personages of it, and where Butler brought forth his Hudibras, some idea may be gratifying to the reader. It was deserted in the first year of William and Mary, in consequence of the dissolution of the Court of the Marches. From an inventory of the goods found in Ludlow Castle, bearing date 1708, in the eleventh year of Queen Anne, there appeared to be then forty rooms entire. Many of the royal apartments were in that condition; and the couch of state and the velvet hangings were preserved. In the chapel there were still to be seen on the panels many coats of arms; and in the hall many of the same kind of ornaments, together with lances, spears, firelocks, and old armor. On the accession of George I., an order came down to unroof the buildings, and strip them of their lead. Decay consequently ensued. Several panels bearing the arms of the lords president were converted into wainscoting for a public house in the town, a former owner of which enriched himself by the sale of materials clandestinely carried away. There remains, also, a rich embroidered carpet, hung up in the chancel of St. Lawrence's Church, said to be part of the covering of the council-board. The Earl of Powis, who previously held the castle in virtue of a long lease, acquired the reversion in fee by purchase from the crown in 1811.

The whole is now a scene of venerable ruin. The castle rises from the point of a headland, and its foundations are ingrafted into a bare gray rock. The north front consists of square towers with high connecting walls, which are embattled with deep interstices; and the old fosse, and part of the rock, have been formed into walks, which in 1722 were planted with beech, elm, and lime trees by the Countess of Powis, and those trees, now grown to maturity, add exceedingly to the dignity and beauty of the scene. Through a chasm on the west runs the broad and shallow River Teme. It were too long to describe all this mass of ruins, with its various courts, remains of barracks, and escutcheoned walls. The first view of the interior of the castle is fine. The court is an irregular square area, not very spacious, but the lofty embattled structures with which it is surrounded, though in ruin, still preserve their original outlines. The spacious hall is of sixty feet by thirty, the height about thirty-five feet, and is ornamented with a door with a beautiful pointed arch. The once elegant saloon, where the splendid scene of Comus was first exhibited; where chivalry exhausted her choicest stores, both of invention and wealth, and where hospitality and magnificence blazed for many ages in succession, without diminution or decay, is now totally dilapidated, and neither roof nor floor remains.

From the time of Butler's quitting this scene of his ease and happiness, he seems to have experienced only poverty and neglect. His wife's fortune is said to have been lost through bad securities; his expectations from the royal person, or the royal party whom he had so immensely served, were wholly disappointed; and in 1680 he died, where, on the authority of the son of his truest friend and benefactor, Mr. Longueville, he had lived some years, in Rose-street, Covent Garden. Mr. Longueville exerted himself to raise a subscription for his interment in Westminster Abbey, but in vain; he therefore buried him at his own cost in the church-yard of Covent Garden. About sixty years afterward, Mr. Bailey, a painter, Mayor of London, and a friend to Butler's principles, bestowed on him that monument in Westminster Abbey, which is well known.

Such were the life, fortunes, and death of the author of Hudibras, whose name, as Johnson justly observes, can only perish with his language. It was his misfortune to look for protection to a monarch, who only protected courtesans, and the most disgusting of libertines. Butler should have been a pimp, and not a poet, and he would soon have found employment enough. His neglect is but one opprobrium more added to the memory of a monarch, whose whole life was a nuisance and a disgrace to the country which tolerated him.

JOHN DRYDEN.

Dryden should have been transferred to the volume of the dramatic poets if the quality of his dramas had borne any relative proportion to their quantity, or to the quality of his poetry; but it is the latter which gives him his great and lasting distinction. They are his Satires, and Fables, and Translations; his Absalom and Achitophel; his Hind and Panther; his Palemon and Arcite; the Flower and the Leaf; and, in short, all those racy and beautiful stories which he threw into modern poetry from Chaucer and Boccacio; with his Virgil, and lyrical compositions, and, at the head of these, his Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, that stamp his character with the English public as one of the most vigorous, harmonious, and truly British writers. Dryden displayed no great powers of creation; perhaps the literary hurry of his life prevented this; but he contemplated for years a national epic on Prince Arthur, and probably, had he possessed perfect leisure for carrying out this design, he would have astonished us as much with the display of that faculty as he delights us with the masterly vigor of his reasoning powers; with his harmony and nerve of style; and with the stiletto stabs of his annihilating satire. But from any necessity of criticism on his genius, the familiar acquaintance of every true lover of poetry with the merits and beauties which have fixed his immortality, fortunately for my space, fully exempts me. Even over the long succession of literary events in his life we must pass, and fix our attention on his homes and haunts. For nearly forty years, from 1660 to 1700, he was before the public as an active author; and on the disappearance of Milton from the field of life, he became, and continued to be, the most marked man of his time; yet it is astonishing how little is known of his town haunts and habits. Of his publications, the appearance of his dramas, the controversies into which he fell with his literary cotemporaries, his change of religion, and his clinging to the despotic government of the Stuarts, we know enough; but of his home life next to nothing. That he lived in Gerrard-street, and was a constant frequenter of Will's Coffee-house, Covent Garden, seems to be almost all that is known of his town resorts. Like Addison, and most literary men who have married titled ladies, he did not find it contribute much to his comfort. His wife was Lady Elizabeth Howard, the eldest daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, and sister of his friend, Sir Robert Howard. Her temper is said to have been very peculiar, and that she looked down on Dryden as of inferior rank, though he was descended from a very old family, mixed with the most distinguished men of the nobility, and _was_ the _first man_ of his time; but conceit or the blindness of aristocratic pride do not alter the real nature or proportion of things, except in the vision of the person afflicted with them. Dryden was the great personage, and his titled wife the little one, and on him, therefore, lay the constant pressure of the unequal yoke he bore.

What, no doubt, rendered the conduct of his wife worse, was the pride of her family on the one hand, and the unlucky connection of Dryden's brothers with ordinary trades. His family, and that of his mother, the Pickerings, had taken a decided part during the civil wars for the Parliament, while that of his wife had been as zealous on the Royalist side. Besides this, Erasmus, his immediate younger brother, was in trade in King-street, Westminster; James, the fourth brother, was a tobacconist in London; one of his sisters was married to a bookseller in Little Britain, and another to a tobacconist in Newgate-street; these would be dreadful alliances to a family proud and poor. "No account," says Mitford, in his life of the poet, "has been transmitted of the person of Dryden's wife, nor has any portrait of her been discovered. I am afraid her personal attractions were not superior to her mental endowments; that her temper was wayward, and that the purity of her character was sullied by some early indiscretions. A letter from Lady Elizabeth to her son at Rome is preserved, as remarkable for the elegance of the style as the correctness of the orthography. She says: 'Your father is much at woon as to his health, and his defnese is wosce, but much as he was when he was heare; give me a true account how my deare son Charles is head dus.' Can this be the lady who had formerly held captive in her chains the gallant Earl of Chesterfield?"

"Lady Elizabeth Dryden," says Scott, "had long disturbed her husband's domestic happiness. 'His invectives,' says Malone, 'against the married state were frequent and bitter, and were continued till the latest period of his life;' and he adds, from most respectable authority, that the family of the poet held no intimacy with his lady, confining their intercourse to mere visits of ceremony. How could they? how could the tobacconist, and the other tobacconist's wife, and the little bookseller's wife of Little Britain, venture under the roof of the proud lady of the proud house of Howard, with 'her weak intellects and her violent temper?'"

A similar alienation, also, it is said, took place between her and her relatives, Sir Robert Howard, perhaps, being excepted; for her brother, the Honorable Edward Howard, talks of Dryden's being engaged in a translation of Virgil as a thing he had learned merely by common report. Her wayward disposition, Malone says, was, however, the effect of a disordered imagination, which, shortly after Dryden's death, degenerated into absolute insanity, in which state she remained until her own death in 1714, probably in the seventy-ninth year of her age.

Poor Dryden! what with his wife--consort one can not call her, and helpmeet she was not--and with a tribe of tobacconist brothers on one hand, and proud Howards on the other; and a host of titled associates, and his bread to dig with his pen, one pities him from one's heart. Well might he, when his wife once said it would be much better for her to be a book than a woman, for then she should have more of his company, reply, "I wish you were, my dear, an almanac, and then I could change you once a year." It is not well to look much into such a home, except for a warning. Yet the outside of that life, like many others, would have deceived an ordinary spectator. There all was brilliant and imposing. "Whether," says Sir Walter Scott, "we judge of the rank which Dryden held in society by the splendor of his titled and powerful friends, or by his connections among men of genius, we must consider him as occupying at one time as high a station, in the very foremost circle, as literary reputation could gain for its owner. Independent of the notice with which he was honored by Charles himself, the poet numbered among his friends most of the distinguished nobility. The great Duke of Ormond had already begun that connection which subsisted between Dryden and three generations of the house of Butler. Thomas Lord Clifford, one of the Cabal ministry, was uniform in patronizing the poet, and appears to have been active in introducing him to the king's favor. The Duke of Newcastle loved him sufficiently to present him with a play for the stage; the witty Earl of Dorset, then Lord Buckhurst, and Sir Charles Sedley, admired in that loose age for the peculiar elegance of his loose poetry, were his intimate associates, as is evident from the turn of The Essay on Dramatic Poesy, where they are the speakers. Wilmot, earl of Rochester, soon to act a very different part, was then anxious to vindicate Dryden's writings; to mediate for him with those who distributed the royal favor, and was thus careful, not only of his reputation, but his fortune. In short, the author of what was then held the first style of poetry, was sought for by all among the great and gay who wished to maintain some character for literary taste. It was then Dryden enjoyed those genial nights described in the dedication of the Assignation, when 'discourse was neither too serious nor too light, but always pleasant, and for the most part instructive; the raillery neither too sharp upon the present, nor too censorious upon the absent; and the cups such only as raised the conversation of the night, without disturbing the business of the morrow.' He had not yet experienced the disadvantages attendant on such society, or learned how soon literary eminence becomes the object of detraction, of envy, of injury, even from those who can best feel its merit, if they are discouraged by dissipated habits from emulating its flight, or hardened by perverted feeling against loving its possessors." But all this came; and, in the mean time, the poet had to work, like Pegasus in the peasant's cart, for the means to maintain this intercourse with such lofty society. And what did all these great friends do for him? They procured him no good post in return for good services rendered to their party, but the poet's meager office of the laureateship, which, added to that of historiographer to royalty, brought him £200 a year, and his butt of canary. Poor Dryden! with the cross wife, and the barren blaze of aristocracy around him, the poorest coal-heaver need not have envied him.

Neither did "glorious John" escape his share of annoyance from his cotemporaries of the pen, nor from the publishers. He had a controversy with his friend and brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, on the true nature of dramatic poetry, which speedily degenerated into personal bitterness, and a long estrangement. Then came the Rehearsal, that witty farce in which he was ridiculed in the character of Bayes, and his literary productions, as well as personal characteristics, held up to the malicious merriment of the world by a combination of the wits and fashionable pen-men of the time; among them the notorious Villiers, duke of Buckingham, the author of Hudibras, the Bishop of Rochester, and others. The miserable Elkanah Settle was set up as a rival of him; and after these rose in succession the hostile train of the licentious Lord Rochester, Lord Shaftesbury, Milbourne, Blackmore, and others, by whom every species of spite, misrepresentation, and ridicule were for years heaped upon him. Nor did his enemies restrain themselves to the use of the pen in their attacks upon him. One of the most prominent events of Dryden's life is that of a ruffianly attack upon him as he returned from his club at Will's Coffee-house, on a winter's night. Lord Mulgrave had published a satire, called an Essay on Satire, in which Rochester and other wits and profligates of the time were introduced. The poem was a wretched affair; but Dryden, to oblige Mulgrave, had undertaken to revise it. Much labor he could not have bestowed upon it, it was so flat and poor; but Rochester thought fit to attribute it to Dryden himself; and a set of ruffians, supposed to be hired by him and the Duchess of Portsmouth, who had been also reflected on, fell on the poet as he passed through Rose-street, Covent Garden, on his way from Will's Coffee-house to his own house in Gerrard-street. A reward of £50 was in vain offered in the London Gazette and other newspapers for the discovery of the perpetrators of the outrage. The beating was, in those loose times, thought a good joke. The Rose Alley ambuscade became almost proverbial; and even Mulgrave, the real author of the satire, and upon whose shoulders the blows ought in justice to have descended, in his Art of Poetry, thus mentions the circumstance with a pitiful sneer:

"Though praised and punished for another's rhymes,
His own deserve as great applause _sometimes_."

Thus attacked with pens and cudgels by the envious writers of the day, Dryden was nearly starved by the booksellers. On one occasion, provoked by the refusal of timely supplies by Jacob Tonson, he did not do as Johnson did by Cave, knock him down with a quarto, but ran him through with a triplet, describing the bibliopole's person:

"With leering looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair,
With two left legs, and Judas-colored hair,
And frowzy pores that taint the ambient air."

"Tell the dog," said the poet to the messenger by whom he sent these complimentary lines, "that he who wrote these can write more." But he needed not to write more; they were as effective as he could desire. Jacob, however, on his part, could make his tongue as pungent as Dryden could his verse. Johnson, in the "Life of Dryden," relates that Lord Bolingbroke one day making a call on Dryden, he heard another person enter the house. "That," said Dryden, "is Tonson. You will take care not to depart before he goes away; for I have not completed the sheet which I promised him; and if you leave me unprotected, I shall suffer all the rudeness to which his resentment can prompt his tongue."

Perhaps the happiest hours of Dryden's life, next to those spent over his finest compositions in his study, were passed at Will's Coffee-house. After dinner, at two o'clock, he used to repair thither, where assembled all the most famous men of the time. There he reigned supreme. He had a chair placed for him by the chimney in winter, and near the balcony in summer; where, says his biographer, he pronounced, _ex cathedrâ_, his opinions upon new publications, and in general upon all matters of doubtful criticism. Latterly, all who had occasion to ridicule and attack him, represent him as presiding in this little senate. His opinions, however, were not maintained with dogmatism, but he listened to criticism, provided it was just, from whatever unexpected and undignified quarter it happened to come. In general, however, it may be supposed that few ventured to dispute his opinion, or to place themselves in the gap between him and the object of his censure.

Dryden's house, which he appears to have resided in from the period of his marriage till his death, was, as I have said, in Gerrard-street; the fifth on the left hand, coming from Little Newport-street, now No. 43. The back windows looked upon the gardens of Leicester House, of which circumstance the poet availed himself to pay a handsome compliment to the noble owner. His excursions to the country seem to have been frequent; perhaps the more so, as Lady Elizabeth always remained in town. In his latter days, the friendship of his relations, John Dryden, of Chesterton, and Mrs. Steward, of Cotterstock, rendered their houses agreeable places of abode to the aged poet. They appear, also, to have had a kind solicitude about his little comforts, of value infinitely beyond the contributions they made toward aiding him.

The principal traits of his domestic life have been collected together by Malone. From these, and from the pen of Congreve, we learn that he was, in youth, of handsome form and agreeable countenance; modest in his manner, reluctant to intrude himself on the notice and company of others, easily chilled and rebuffed by any thing like a distant behavior. He is described as most amiable and affectionate in his family, generous beyond his means, and most forgiving of injuries; all noble traits of character. Malone related, on the authority of Lady Dryden, that at that time the poet's little estate at Blakesley was occupied by one Harriots, grandson of the tenant who held it in Dryden's time, who stated that his grandfather used to take great pleasure in talking of him. He was, he said, the easiest and the kindest landlord in the world; and never raised the rent during the whole time he possessed the estate. The two most unfortunate circumstances in his life, next to his marriage, was his going over from Puritanism to popery, and from the liberal opinions of his family to the adherence of the worst of kings. For these changes it would be difficult to assign any better motive than that of mending his fortunes. But if this were the case, he was bitterly punished for it in both instances. The monarchs that he flattered were Stuarts, and the last of them being driven out, left him to encounter all the scorn, the sarcasms and sacrifices that were sure to come against him with the Dutch monarch of 1688. He was, instead of gaining more from royalty by his change, deprived of that which he had--the laureateship and office of historiographer; and saw them conferred, with £300 a year, on his unworthy rival, Shadwell. The change of his religion was equally unpropitious. His sons became more connected with Rome than England. Charles, the eldest, was chamberlain of the household of Pope Innocent XII., but having suffered by a fall from a horse, he returned to England, and was drowned in attempting to swim across the Thames at Datchett, near Windsor, in August, 1704. The second son, John, also went to Rome, and acted as the deputy of Charles, in the pope's household; he died at Rome. Both of these sons were poetical, and published. Erasmus Henry, the third son, went also to Rome, and became a captain in the pope's guards. He afterward returned to England, and succeeded to the family title of baronet, but not to the estate of Canons-Ashby, where he, however, continued to live with the proprietor, Edward Dryden, his cousin, till his death in 1710. Thus terminated the race of the great satiric poet.

In the county of Northampton there are various places connected with Dryden. He was of the old family of the Drydens, or Dridens, of Canons-Ashby, which family there still remains. The poet was born at the parsonage-house of Aldwinkle All-Saints. His father was Erasmus Dryden, and his mother Mary Pickering, the daughter of the rector of Aldwinkle, a son of the well-known Sir Gilbert Pickering, a zealous Puritan. It appears that our author's father lived at Tichmarsh, and that his son was born under his grandfather's roof. At Tichmarsh, accordingly, we find Dryden receiving his first education, whence he proceeded to Westminster, and studied under Dr. Busby, and thence to Cambridge.

Scott says, "If we can believe an ancient tradition, the poem of the 'Hind and Panther' was chiefly composed in a country retirement at Rushton, in Northamptonshire. There was an embowered walk at this place, which, from the pleasure which the poet took in it, retained the name of Dryden's Walk; and here was erected, about the middle of the last century, an urn, with the following inscription: 'In memory of Dryden, who frequented these shades, and is here said to have composed his poem of "The Hind and Panther."'"