This caused one of the wits to write : Old Jacob, by deep judgment swayed To please the wise beholders, Has placed old Nassau's hook-nosed head One of Dryden's works in these his latter years is his magnificent Ode for St. Cecilia's Day,' the song of 'Alexander's Feast,' which he is said to have written in a single night. A musical society had been formed in London in 1683 for the celebration of St. Cecilia's Day, and a festival was held annually on November 22, when an ode composed for the occasion was sung. Dryden composed the ode for 1687, but the grander one, the Alexander's Feast,' belongs to 1697. It consists of seven noble stanzas, of which we may find room for two I 'Twas at the royal feast for Persia won By Philip's warlike son; Aloft in awful state The godlike hero sate On his imperial throne; His valiant peers were placed around, Their brows with roses and with myrtles bound: (So should desert in arms be crowned.) The lovely Thais, by his side, Sate like a blooming Eastern bride, In flower of youth and beauty's pride. None but the brave, None but the brave, None but the brave deserve the fair. In the second stanza the bard Timotheus is described, who sings to Alexander the glory of his birth as the son of Jove; and in the third stanza he sings the praise of Bacchus; then in the fourth stanza the fall of Darius is pathetically described-- IV Soothed with the sound the king grew vain, Fought all his battles o'er again; And thrice he routed all his foes, and thrice he slew the slain. The master saw the madness rise, His glowing cheeks, his ardent eyes; He sung Darius great and good, Fallen from his high estate, The various turns of chance below; Dryden continued cheerful and busy till the last. In 1699, the year before his death, he writes to a beautiful young kinswoman in the country: I am still drudging on; always a poet and never a good one. I pass my time sometimes with Ovid, and sometimes with our old English poet Chaucer; translating such stories as best please my fancy, and intend, besides them to add somewhat of my own; so that it is not impossible, but ere the summer be passed, I may come down to you with a volume in my hand, like a dog out of the water, with a duck in his mouth. In London the young poets like Congreve looked upon him with reverence. and glorious John' sat as a king in Will's Coffee House in Covent Garden, in his own arm-chair, which had its settled place in the summer in the balcony and in the winter by the fireside. He died on May Day in 1700, and he was buried with much pomp in Westminster Abbey, by the side of Chaucer and Cowley. JOHN LOCKE. DRYDEN has been called the founder and inaugurator of an age of prose and reason, but the philosopher Locke may justly share the honour with him. His philosophy has often been denounced as bare and inadequate, but at least it is intelligible: it is the philosophy of common sense, and its influence has been very great. The future philosopher was born in 1632, at a pleasant village in Somersetshire. His father brought him up with much care, keeping him in much awe, and at a distance when he was a boy, but relaxing still by degrees of that severity, as he grew up to be a man till, he being become capable of it, he lived perfectly with him as a friend. And I remember he has told me that his father after he was a man, solemnly asked his pardon for having struck him once in a passion when he was a boy. In 1646 he went to Westminster School, and was a fellow pupil with Dryden under Dr. Busby. From thence he went to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1652, and eight years later he was chosen Greek Lecturer for his college. In 1665 he went as secretary to an embassy to Brandenburg, and in his letters he gives some amusing descriptions of the German universities. The next year he was back again in Oxford, and by accident he became acquainted with the Earl of Shaftesbury, at that time Lord Ashley, and a friendship ensued which ended only with the death of the earl. In 1667 he took up his residence with Lord Ashley in London, and from that time he was with my Lord Ashley as a man at home, and lived in that family much esteemed, not only by my lord, but by all the friends of the family. 6 Locke was tutor to Lord Ashley's only son--a sickly youth of seventeen, the one whom Dryden described in the Absalom and Achitophel' as 'that unfeathered, two-legged thing a son, born a shapeless lump like anarchy.' Locke was commissioned to find a suitable wife for this youth, and he managed the business well. The third Earl of Shaftesbury became a brilliant man of letters, and he tells us: My father was too young and inexperienced to choose a wife for himself, and my grandfather too much in business to choose one for him. All was thrown upon Mr. Locke, who being already so good a judge of men, my grandfather doubted not of his equal judgment in women. He departed from him entrusted and sworn, as Abraham's head servant that ruled over all that he had' and went into a far country to seek for his son a wife, whom he successfully found. · The children of this marriage were all carefully trained and educated by Locke, and the third earl speaks of him with reverence and gratitude. In 1682 Shaftesbury fled to Amsterdam, and died there next year, and soon afterwards Locke also thought it prudent to take shelter in Holland. By the king's command his name was struck off the roll of Christ Church in 1684, and in 1685 his surrender was demanded by the English Government, and he had to go for a little while into hiding. About this time he was introduced to the Prince and Princess of Orange, and the acquaintance gradually grew into a friendship, and Locke returned to England in 1689 in the train of the princess. His great work, the Essay on the Human Understanding,' had been completed while he was resting in Holland, and in 1690 it was published in a fine folio, and Locke received 301. for the copyright. In the Epistle to the Reader' Locke gives us what he calls the history of this essay': Five or six friends meeting at my chamber and discoursing on a subject very remote from this, found themselves quickly at a stand, by the difficulties that rose on every side. After we had awhile puzzled ourselves, without coming any nearer a resolution of those doubts which perplexed us, it came into my thoughts, that we took a wrong course; and that before we set ourselves upon enquiries of that nature, it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see what objects our understandings were or were not fitted to deal with. This fairly describes the scope of the essay, as an inquiry into the nature of the intellect and into the extent of its powers, and one or two extracts may be given in illustration. Many philosophers had believed and maintained that our elementary notions or ideas, of number and space, of right and wrong, and of the existence of God, were innate or born with us, and that the child's experience only developed and strengthened the already existing ideas. But Locke maintained that no ideas, not even those of the existence of God, were innate |