verse, would, by the mere compulsion of literary history, follow in the same path. For the characters drawn by Dryden are not to be confused with the ordinary caricatures of satirical versifiers. That of Zimri, for example, is carefully kept free from malicious exaggeration; and that of Achitophel is hardly more severe than that of a historian of to-day. It is no small matter to have started or revived—a kind of writing which has had so numerous and admirable a progeny; and here Dryden is not only the first, but the best of the kind. Closely allied with this is the catholicity of taste which enabled Dryden to welcome and to praise many writers of a style and talent widely different from his own. The famous saying about Milton-"This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too "-may or may not be genuine ; but his opinion of Chaucer is certain, and is recorded in the immortal Preface to the Fables; while his opinion of Shakspere is expressed everywhere. And such was the receptiveness of his nature that when he admired a writer he imitated him. Directly and openly he imitated Milton in the State of Innocence, Chaucer in Palamon and Arcite, and Shakspere in All for Love: but the imitations are not confined to these acknowledged borrowings; they are to be found at intervals throughout his works. And, though they are of course often hardly to be distinguished from parodies, they yet served the purpose of keeping before Dryden's readers an ideal and a manner that might otherwise have been forgotten for the time. Palamon and Arcite, for instance, is not Chaucer, but it brought Chaucer's name and writings to the notice of many who might otherwise have neglected him: and every now and then it is Chaucer despite Dryden. Thus Dryden's works, while often exemplifying the worst points of the new style, provided something of an antidote; it might almost be said of them that while preaching the things of a lower region they actually "allured to brighter worlds, and led the way." Again, Dryden's writings, if rarely "of ethereal race," are in the main sound specimens of the uninspired. And herein lies their special value to-day. It is not granted to many to be true and high poets; the vision and the faculty divine are rare and capricious gifts of Providence or fortune; and those who have them do not always keep them. But clearness of thinking, sureness of touch, correctness of versification, accuracy in the presentation of the thought these are gifts within the powers of many men of no lofty genius, and are too valuable to be squandered and lost in the search after the unattainable. We have to-day many who would do well to limit their aims to an attempt after the homelier virtues of Dryden, while leaving the useless struggle after a Miltonic sublimity; we have, in fact, too many socalled poets who show the contortions of the Sibyl without her inspiration. To such we would recommend a study of the works of Dryden, whose failures are a sign-post warning us off from the faults of bombast, and whose many successes show what can be done by knowing one's own strength and keeping within it. I XII The Literary Detective T will always, one may imagine, be pleasant to discover, or fancy one has discovered, the source of some idea or phrase in the work of a great poet. At any rate, people never seem to tire of tracing the germs of passages in such authors as Virgil, Dante, and Tennyson, or of marking how the tiny seed grew in the mind of the poet until it took the form familiar to us. It is a harmless pastime, "immeasurably," as Macaulay might have said, "more humane than cockfighting"; and, if it has its pleasures, has also its ennobling pains. Few things are more annoying than, after spending perhaps months, however lamely, in running down an allusion, to find that another has stepped down before you. The present writer has had his share both of the joys and of the sorrows that beset the path of the literary detective. Of the disappointments he feels it more manly to say nothing; but he well remembers the happy start with which he found the true original of the first stanza of Gray's Elegy in the Argonautica of Apollonius; and he recalls how pleased he felt when he saw that Pope had been to the Nosce Teipsum of Sir John Davies for one of the best known couplets in the Essay on Man. The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine! Feels at each thread, and lives along the line, says Pope. Davies, as might be expected, is less concise: Much like a subtill spider, which doth sit In middle of her web, which spreadeth wide; No poet provides more opportunities for excitements of this kind than Milton, whose range of reading was so wide, and whose love of allusion was so keen, that the greatest scholar can never be sure he has exhausted the suggestiveness of the simplest of his paragraphs, while his originality was so strong that his countenance, "like richest alchemy," transmuted even borrowed lead to gold. He did not steal: he annexed and assimilated. No commentator can track him everywhere; and it is probable that the last scholiast will leave something undetected. The very first lines of Paradise Lost are an example of Milton's royal rapacity. There can be no doubt that, while the idea of these lines can be found everywhere, the wording was suggested by Donne's Divine Sonnets (No. 9; Chambers's edition, 1. 162): That tree Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us. We read a little further, and we learn that Satan fell with his crew "nine times the space that measures day and night." Here we have Milton blending heathen with Christian mythology in quite medieval fashion. It is true that according to Caedmon, Lucifer was three days in falling-one of many indications that Milton had not read the Genesis. But in Piers the Plowman we are told that these who "lopen out with Lucifer in lotheliche forme" Fellen out in fendes liknesse nyne dayes togideres, Til god of his goodnesse gan stable and stynte: and we know that in the Norse tales Hell was nine days from Asgard. "That is to say of Hermod," says Snorri in the story of Balder, "that he rode nine nights through dark vales and deep, so that he saw not until he came to the river Gjoll." Doubtless Milton was here mingling monkish authorities (who themselves derived from heathen tradition) with reminiscences of Homer and Hesiod, who also speak of nine days in this connection. When we are told (line 73), that Hell is "as far removed from God and light of heaven as from the centre thrice to the utmost pole," we turn for elucidation to a curious passage in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (Prose Works, III. 224), where Milton, speaking of the heathen philosophers, says: "To banish for ever into a local hell, whether in the air or in the centre, or in that uttermost and bottomless gulf of chaos, deeper from holy bliss than the earth's diameter multiplied, they thought not a punishing so proper and proportionate for God to inflict, as to punish sin with sin." We discover therefore, first, that Milton derived his measurements of the Universe from medieval tradition, and secondly, that his precision is no more to be taken literally than that of Dante. The real hell of Satan is to be found in that gradual deterioration |