b- THE SATIEES OF DRYDEN. MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO The Satires of Dryden Absalom and Achitophel The Medal, Mac Flecknoe EDITED WITH MEMOIR, INTRODUCTION, AND NOTES BY John Churton Collins EX LB MACMILLAN AND CO., LI ST. MARTIN'S STREET, 1909 First Edition 1897. Reprinted 1903, 1905, 1909. GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD. PREFACE. A GRATEFUL confession of immense indebtedness to the labours of Sir Walter Scott and Mr. W. D. Christie is, and always must be, incumbent on any Editor of the Satires of Dryden. My own indebtedness to them is too great to be specified in detail, and I must there- fore satisfy myself with this general acknowledgment. But if they did much they have also left much to be done. Those who have made Dryden a subject of special study will see that I have contributed some- thing, in addition to what I have derived from those excellent commentators, towards the elucidation of obscure passages, and something also in the way of new illustrations and parallels. With two or three deviations Mr. Christie's text is adopted throughout, and as this edition is designed rather for students of literature and students of history than for those who are interested in textual criticism, I have not thought it necessary either to discuss or mark various readings. Dryden is not a classic in whose style minutiae of this kind are of importance. The notes on the Second Part of Absalom and curtailed it would Achitophel have been designedly ; vi PREFACE. be absurd to suppose that the rubbish of Tate would find critical readers now, but as Tate's contribution is interesting historically it has been reprinted in its entirety, and the historical references have been explained. To prevent possible misunderstanding I ought per- haps to add, that in the Memoir and General Intro- duction I have incorporated, here and there, a few sentences from an article on Dryden contributed by me some years ago to the Quarterly Review. CONTENTS. PAOE PREFACE, - v MEMOIR OF DRYDEN, ...... ix INTRODUCTION TO ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL, - - - xxxiii - - - - ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL, PART I., 1 - ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL, PART II., - - 34 THE MEDAL, ... 68 MAC FLECKNOE, - - - - 84 NOTES, INDEX TO NOTES, - 134 MEMOIR OF DRYDEN. JOHN DRYDEN, one of the most distinguished among poets of the secondary rank, the founder of an im- portant dynasty of English poets, and the father of English criticism, was born at Aldwincle, a village near Oundle in Northamptonshire, on the 9th of August, 1631. His family, though not noble, was eminently respectable. His paternal grandfather, Sir Erasmus Dryden, was a baronet, and through his mother, Mary Pickering, he was at once the great- grandson of one baronet, Sir Gilbert Pickering, and the first cousin of Sir Gijbert's namesake and immediate successor. In the great revolution of the 17th century both the Drydens and the Pickerings were on the side of the Parliament. And when, many years afterwards, Dryden became the champion of the Court Party and the Roman Catholics, he was reminded, with taunts, that one of his uncles had turned the chancel of the church at Canons Ashbey into a barn, and that his father had served as a Committee man. Of his early youth little is known. If the in- scription on the monument erected by his cousin, Mrs. Creed, in Tichmarsh Church be trustworthy, he received the rudiments of his education some- ix x MEMOIR OF DRYDEN. he where in that village. From Tichmarsh passed to Westminster School, probably about 1642. We have now no means of knowing the exact date of his entering Westminster, nor do we know why this the choice was a particular school was selected. But wise one. Richard Busby had, some three years before, succeeded Osbolston in the headmastership. Under Osbolston the school had greatly declined, but it was now, in Busby's hands, rapidly rising to the first place among English schools of that day, and Dryden had the inestimable advantage of being the pupil of a man who was destined to become the king " of English schoolmasters. I have known great num- " bers of his scholars," writes Steele, and am confident I could discover a stranger who had been such with a very little conversation. Those of great parts who have passed through his instruction have such a peculiar readiness of fancy and delicacy of taste as is seldom found in men educated elsewhere, though of equal talents." Among Busby's pupils were the poets Lee, Prior, King, Rowe, Duke, and the learned Edmund Smith, the philosopher Locke, the theologians South and Atterbury, the most illustrious of English financiers, Charles afterwards Earl of Halifax Montagu, ; the poet- the most diplomatist, George Stepney ; accomplished of John Friend the wits physicians, ; and scholars, Robert Friend and Anthony Alsop; the distinguished classical scholar, Mattaire ; while he could boast that eight of his pupils had been raised to the bench, and that no less than sixteen had become bishops. Busby's influence on Dryden was undoubtedly great. He saw and encouraged his peculiar bent. He appears to have MEMOIR OF DRYDEN. x i allowed him to substitute composition in English for composition in Latin and Greek, and he encouraged him to turn portions of Persius and other Roman poets into English verse. Despairing, probably, of ever making him an exact verbal scholar, he was satisfied with enabling him to read Latin, if not Greek, r with accuracy and facility. Dr} den never forgot his obligations to Busby. Thirty years afterwards, when the Westminster boy had become the first poet and the first critic of his age, he dedicated, with exquisite propriety, to his old schoolmaster his translation of the Satire in which Persius records his reverence and grati- tude to Cornutus. From Westminster he proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge. He was entered on the 18th of May, 1650; he matriculated in the following July, and on the 2nd of October in the same year he was elected a scholar on the Westminster foundation. Of his life at Cambridge very little is known. Like Milton before him, and like Gray, Wordsworth, and Coleridge after him, he appears to have had no respect for his teachers, and to have taken his edu- cation into his own hands. From independence to rebellion is an easy step, and an entry may still be read in the Conclusion-book at Trinity, which charges him with disobedience to the Vice-Master and with contumacy in taking the punishment inflicted on him. It would seem also from an allusion in a satire of Shadwell's that he got into some scrape for libelling a young nobleman, which, had he not anticipated con- demnation by flight, would have ended in his expulsion from the University. But as this is without corrobora- tion of any kind and rests only on the authority of xii MEMOIR OF DRYDEN. Shadwell, it is now impossible to disengage the little which is probably true in the story from the greater part which is plainly fictitious. How long Dryden remained at Cambridge is uncertain. He took the degree of B.A. in January, 1654. In June of the same year his father died, and on his father's death he succeeded to a small property. Of his movements during the next three years nothing certain is known. It seems clear that he did not return, as Malone and the biographers who have followed Malone have sup- posed, to Cambridge. By the middle of 1657 he had in all probability settled in London. Cromwell was then, though harassed with accumulat- ing difficulties, in the zenith of his power, and Dryden's cousin, Sir Gilbert Pickering, stood high in the Protec- tor's favour. As young Dryden was on friendly terms with Sir Gilbert, who appears to have received him with much kindness, he had good reason for supposing that an opening would soon be found for him. His social and political prospects were indeed far more promising than his prospects as a poet. He was now in his twenty- seventh year. At an age when Aristophanes, Catullus, Lucan, Persius, Milton, Tasso, Shelley, Keats, and in- numerable others, had won immortal fame, he had evinced no symptom of poetic genius; he had proved, on the contrary, that he was ignorant of the very rudiments of his art, that he had still to acquire what all other poets instinctively possess. A few lines to his cousin, Honor, " so middling bad were better," an execrable elegy on Lord Basting's death, and a commendatory poem on his friend Hoddesden's Epigrams immeasurably inferior to what Pope and Kirke White produced at twelve, showed MEMOIR OF DRYDEN. xiii that he had no ear for verse, no command of poetic diction, no sense of poetic taste. The transformation of the author of these poems into the author of Absalom and Achitophel, the Religio Laici, and the Hind and Panther, is one of the most remarkable in the history of literature. Sir Gilbert was not able to do much for his young relative. In September, 1658, Cromwell died, and at the beginning of the following year Dryden published a copy of verses to deplore the event. The Heroic Stanzas on the Death of the Lord Protector inaugurate his this poetical career. His biography from point may be conveniently divided into four epochs. The first ex- tends to the publication of the Essay of Dramatic Poesy in 1668, the second to the appearance of the Spanish Friar in the autumn of 1681, the third to the publica- tion of the Britannia Rediviva in June, 1688, and the fourth to his death in 1700.