""Tis all the aid my present power supplies: To him who makes the people's wrongs his own. With chariots, horsemen, and a numerous train; (Two names that always cheat, and always please), After comment upon the political situation, Dryden goes on with sketches of the friends of David. Barzillai, who stands first, was the old Duke of Ormond, in 1681 Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, as he had been before the Civil War in Charles I.'s reign. Now what relief can righteous David bring; There follows a lament for the death of the duke's son skilfully woven into the main theme of the poem; then Zadoc, William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1 Mr. Thomas Thynne, of Longleate Hall. -whom, shunning power and place, His lowly mind advanced to David's grace; and others-Henry Compton, Bishop of London; John Dolben, Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster; John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave; George Savile, Marquis of Halifax; Viscount Hyde. These were the chief, a small but faithful band A numerous faction, with pretended frights, That Absalom, ambitious of the crown, With all these loads of injuries opprest, "Thus long have I, by native mercy swayed, [ If my young Samson will pretend a call Raised up to all the height his frame could bear! 2 The lines between square brackets [ ] were added in the second edition. Whence comes it, that religion and the laws True, they petition me to approve their choice: Must I at length the sword of justice draw? Oh, curst effects of necessary law! How ill my fear they by my mercy scan! Law they require; let Law then show her face. And willing nations knew their lawful lord. So ends the pleading; the speech given to David in the poem being based upon passages in a speech really made by the king at Oxford. CHAPTER XVI. GARTH'S "DISPENSARY," JOHN PHILIPS'S "CYDER," AND POPE'S "RAPE OF THE LOCK." AT the time of the English Revolution, French influence upon English literature was fully established, and the beginning of the reaction of our higher intellect against it, though not slow in coming, was to come. There were some gains to set against loss by the predominance of a new critical influence which submitted past extravagances to a discipline of good sense. This was sound enough in some respects, in other respects unsound, because it was, in most cases, the good sense of men essentially unpoetical. Course of events and change of times produced the new conditions. The genius shown in France by Boileau when he began to wage a war in rhyme on behalf of good sense, and against extravagance of the Italian influence in its decay, was itself only the chief intellectual expression of the movement of thought in his day. But the genius of Boileau bred a host of petty imitators, who applied his principles without discretion, and set up as a servile herd of imitators of the great critical master. Men prosed about rhyme and rhymed about prose; adored Virgil and the Latins of the Augustan age; tried to write, like Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics; followed Horace, or Boileau his follower, with Satires or Arts of Poetry. Boileau had written a mockheroic, "Le Lutrin," therefore it was in the fashion to write mock-heroics. For a time poets cared less to think deeply of the essentials of life than to write wittily upon its accidents. The deeper tone begins to be heard again in the reign of George II.; but in 1699, one of the best poems of its day was Dr. Garth's "Dispensary," and in 1712, or, as reproduced in its present form in 1714, there was nothing so good as the daintiest of mock-heroics, Pope's 'Rape of the Lock." Pope was a greater poet than even Boileau, but he was trained in Boileau's school, and the "Rape of the Lock," as well as the "Dispensary," is one of the small family of poems of which Boileau's "Lutrin" was the father. Samuel First, there is Garth's "Dispensary." Garth was born in the year of the Restoration, when in this country the flowing in of the tide of French influence began. He graduated at Cambridge as a physician, and became, at the age of 33, a Fellow of the College of Physicians. He was then a fashionable London doctor. He was known for a rare union of good-nature with wit. One day, when his carriage was stopped by the crowd gathered about two women fighting in Covent Garden, a poor old woman, taking advantage of the pause, hobbled up to him out of her cellar, and asked him, while he was kept waiting, to see her sick husband. She made bold, she said, because she had heard that he was "a cute doctor and a sweet-tempered gentleman.” He went down into the cellar, saw that hunger was the cause of broken health, and, by way of prescription, wrote an order on his banker for ten pounds. Garth was convivial, too. Once in the Kit Kat Club, of which he was a member, he declared that he must leave, for he had many patients still to visit. Good wine and good company detained him nevertheless; and when Steele reminded him presently of his patients, he took out the list, looked through it, and said, "It's no great matter whether I see them tonight or not. There are fifteen. Nine have such bad constitutions that all the physicians in the world can't cure them, and the other six have such good constitutions that all the physicians in the world can't kill them." The permanent record of Garth's wit is in his poem, "The Dispensary," published in 1699. The College of Physicians had required its members to give unpaid help to the poor. The expense of medicines interfered with the beneficent working of this plan. Therefore the Physicians SAMUEL GARTH. From the Portrait Engraved for his "Dispensary." set up, in 1696, a Dispensary within their College, maintained by a subscription amongst themselves. Here the gratuitous prescriptions were made up at a charge limited to the first cost of the drugs used. This touched the pockets of the Apothecaries, and a lively quarrel over the "Dispensary" between the Physicians and Apothecaries was satired by Garth's poem. Garth's poem was avowedly an imitation of "Le Lutrin," published five-and-twenty years earlier (in 1674) by Boileau as a mock-heroic satire on a dispute over the position of a pulpit in the Sainte Chapelle at Paris. Dr. Samuel Garth was not knighted until the accession of George I. He died in 1719. THE DISPENSARY is in six cantos. The First Canto opens with Invocation, and a picture of the College of Physicians in Warwick Lane as a place which the God of Sloth had chosen for his home. Then comes unwonted activity, when the Dispensary is being formed within the College. As at full length the pampered monarch lay A spiteful noise his downy chains unties, Hastes forward, and increases as it flies. First, some to cleave the stubborn flint engage, Till urged by blows, it sparkles into rage, Some temper lute, some spacious vessels move; These furnaces erect, and those approve. Here phials in nice discipline are set; There gallipots are ranged in alphabet. In this place, magazines of pills you spy; In that, like forage, herbs in bundles lie. While lifted pestles brandished in the air Descend in peals, and civil wars declare. Loud strokes, with pounding spice, the fabric rend, And aromatic clouds in spires ascend. So when the Cyclops o'er their anvils sweat, And swelling sinews echoing blows repeat; From the volcanoes gross eruptions rise, And curling sheets of smoke obscure the skies. The slumbering god amazed at this new din, Thrice strove to rise, and thrice sunk down again. Listless he stretched, and gaping rubbed his eyes, Then faltered thus betwixt half words and sighs: "How impotent a deity am I! With god-head born, but cursed, that cannot die! And my divinity's adored in Spain. I swains to sylvan solitudes convey, Where stretched on mossy beds, they waste away, In gentle joys the night, in vows the day. No learned debates molest their downy trance, And leave to tattered crape the drudgery of prayer." After more satire, to which the character of the speaker gives occasion, the God of Sloth summons his darling phantom to seek Envy out (with some satirical suggestion of the places in which Envy is most likely to be found). "Tell the bleak Fury what new projects reign CANTO II. Soon as the evening veiled the mountain heads, Envy's haunt is described. She is banished to it, because England is under happy rule, but she accepts the invitation brought to her. "Since by no arts I therefore can defeat The happy enterprises of the great, I'll calmly stoop to more inferior things; And try if my loved snakes have teeth or stings." She said; and straight shrill Colon's person took, In morals loose, but most precise in look. The patient's ears remorseless he assails, The Fury thus assuming Colon's grace, Then follows a lively sketch of the visit to a famous astrological apothecary and dealer in charms and philtres. To him Envy speaks in the voice and person of Colon: "Forbear, forbear, thy vain amusements cease, Such zeal in that affair thou didst express, Nought could be equal but the great success. Be what thou shouldst, by thinking what thou wast. If not to storm, at least to undermine : Their gates each day ten thousand night-caps crowd, And none, in complaisance to us, would die. To equal our fraternity in fame ? Then let crabs' eyes with pearl for virtue try, Our manufactures now they meanly sell, That health, than crowns more valued, costs not much. At this famed Horoscope turned pale, and straight In silence tumbled from his chair of state. The crowd in great confusion sought the door, And left the Magus fainting on the floor. Whilst in his breast the Fury breathed a storm, Then sought her cell, and reassumed her form. Thus from the sore although the insect flies, It leaves a brood of maggots in disguise. Horoscope is revived by his shopman Squirt, and in the Third Canto spends the night in restless thought. The canto follows, in satire, the course of his night's thoughts. In the morning he bids Squirt swiftly bid the Beadle summon all the Company of the Apothecaries to their Hall. Then, left alone, the Magus, with mystic incantations, burns drugs on an altar raised to Disease, propitious power, "to us your vassals only kind.” "If, in return, all diligence we pay To fix your empire, and confirm your sway, Far as the weekly bills can reach around, From Kent Street end to famed St. Giles's Pound; Behold this poor libation with a smile, And let auspicious light break through the pile." He spoke; and on the pyramid he laid Bay leaves and vipers' hearts, and thus he said; "As these consume in this mysterious fire, So let the cursed Dispensary expire; And as those crackle in the flames, and die, So let its vessels burst, and glasses fly." But a sinister cricket straight was heard, The altar fell, the offering disappeared. As the famed wight the omen did regret, Squirt brought the news the Company was met. Nigh where Fleet Ditch descends in sable streams, To wash his sooty Naiads in the Thames; ""Tis with concern, my friends, I meet you here; No grievance you can know, but I must share. 'Tis plain my interest you've advanced so long, Each fee, though I was mute, would find a tongue. And in return, though I have strove to rend Such arts are trifles to a generous mind, Oxford and all her passing bells can tell, I oft dispatched the patient in a day : With pen in hand I pushed to that degree, I scarce had left a wretch to give a fee. Some fell by laudanum, and some by steel, What though the art of healing we pretend, He said; and sealed the engagement with a kiss, Which was returned by Younger Ascaris; Who thus advanced: "Each word, sir, you impart, Has something killing in it, like your art. How much we to your boundless friendship owe, Our files can speak, and your prescriptions show. came from her home in the Essex marshes, and delivered a short lecture on the graces of the modern poets of that day. Did Garth really attribute to Disease the taste of his day for criticism? If so, perhaps he was not altogether in the wrong. If not-and I think not-this odd way of intruding literary criticism may be taken as symptom of an ailment that weakened literature in his time. At the close of the lecture, which ended with praise of the "rich vein of Montague," The Fury paused, till with a frightful sound A rising whirlwind burst the unhallowed ground. Though distant, rules and influences all, |