Ishbosheth, but says nothing against the deceased giant Saul. It is clear, too, that at first his desertion of the Cromwell party was a loss to the poet. He lost the chance of their favour, in case a reaction should come, his situation as secretary, and the shelter of Pickering's princely mansion. As might have been expected, his ancient friends were indignant at the change, and not less so at the alteration he thought proper at the same time to make in the spelling of his name—from Driden to Dryden.

He went to reside in the obscure house of one Herringman, a bookseller, in the New Exchange, and became for life a professional author. His enemies afterwards reproached him bitterly for his mean circumstances at this period of his life, and asserted that he was a mere drudge to Herringman. He, at all events, did little in his own proper poetic calling for two years. A poem on the Coronation of Charles, well fitted to wipe away the stain of Cromwellism, and to attract upon the poet the eye of that Rising-Sun, whose glory he sang with more zeal than truth; a panegyric on the Lord Chancellor; and a satire on the Dutch; were all, and are all short, and all savour of a vein somewhat hide-bound. He planned, indeed, too, and partly wrote, one or more plays, and was considered of consequence enough to be elected a member of the Royal Society in 1662. Previous to this he had been introduced, through Herringman, to Sir Robert Howard, son of the first Earl of Berkshire, and a relation of Edward Howard, the author of "British Princes," and the object of the witty wrath of Butler. Sir Robert, too, had a poetical propensity, and Dryden and he became and continued intimate for a number of years, the poet assisting the knight in his literary compositions, particularly in a play entitled "The Indian Queen;" and the latter inviting the former to the family seat at Charlton, where Dryden met in an unlucky hour his future wife, Lady Elizabeth Howard, the sister of Sir Robert. It was on the 1st of December 1663, in St Swithin's, London, and with the consent of the Earl, who settled about £60 a-year on his daughter, that this unhappy union took place. The lady seems to have had absolutely none of the qualities which tend either to command a husband's respect or to conciliate his regard, but is described as a woman of violent temper and weak understanding. Much of the bitterness of Dryden's satire, some of the coarse licentiousness of his plays, and all the sarcasms at matrimony which he has scattered in multitudes, throughout his works, may be traced to his domestic unhappiness.

Otherwise, the match had some advantages. It broke up, for a time at least, some licentious connexions he had formed, particularly, after a time, one with Mrs Reeves the actress, with whom, having laid aside his Norwich drugget, he used to eat tarts at the Mulberry Gardens, "with a sword and a Chadreux wig." It secured to him, including his own property, an income of about £100 a-year—a sum equal to £300 now—and which, on the death of his mother, three years later, was increased by £20 more, or £60 at the present value of money. He was thus protected for life against the meaner and more miserable necessities of the literary man, under which many of his unfortunate rivals were crushed; and if he could not always command luxuries, he was always sure of bread.

To improve his circumstances, however, and to enable him to keep up a style of living in unison with his lady's rank, he must write, and the question arose, what mode of composition was likely to be the most lucrative? Were he to continue to indite panegyrical verses, like those to Clarendon, he stood a chance of having a few guineas tossed to him now and then by a patron, like a crust to an unfortunate cur. Were he to translate, or write prefaces for the booksellers, he might pay his bill for salt, if diligent enough. For Satires as yet there was little demand. The follies of the more fanatical of the Puritans were too recent, although they were beginning to ripen for the hand of Butler; and the far grosser absurdities of the Cavaliers were yet in blossom. There remained nothing for an aspiring author but the stage, which during the previous regime had been abolished. While the French Revolution was in progress, ay, even in the depths of the reign of terror, the theatres were all open, and all crowded; but when Cromwell was enacting his solemn and solitary part, before God, angels, and men, the petty potentates—the gods and goddesses of the stage—vanished into thin air. At his tremendous stamp their cue had been "Exeunt omnes" and if the spirit of Shakspeare himself had witnessed the departure, he would have added his Amen. And had he watched in their stead the gigantic actor treading his trembling stage alone, with all the world looking on, he might have remembered and re-applied his own magnificent words—

  "O for a muse of fire, that would ascend
  The brightest heaven of invention!
  A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
  And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
  Then should the warlike Cromwell like himself
  Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
  Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire
  Crouch for employment."

No sooner had this great man passed away, and an earnest age with him, and Charles mounted the throne, than from the darkest recesses of the stews and the taverns, from the depths within depths of Alsatia or Paris, the whole tribe of dancers, fiddlers, drabs, mimes, stage-players, and playwrights, knowing that their enemy was dead, and their hour of harvest had come, emerged in swarming multitudes—multitudes swelled by the vast tribe of play-goers, who had been counting the hours since a Falstaff had made them laugh, an Ophelia made them weep, and a Lear made them tremble. And had this only issued in the revival of the drama of Shakspeare and Johnson, few could have had much to say in objection; for that, in general, was as pure as it was powerful. But, alas, besides them there had been a Beaumont, a Fletcher, and a Massinger, with their unutterable abominations. Nay, the king and courtiers had imported from France a taste which required for its gratification a licentiousness still more abandoned, and to be cast, besides, into forms and shapes, as stiff, stately, and elaborate as the material was vile, and were not contented with pollution unless served up in a new, piquant, and unnatural manner. Our poet understood this movement of his time right well, and determined to conform to it. He knew that he could, better than any man living, pander to the popular appetite for the melodramatic, for the grandiloquent, and for the obscene. He knew the taste of Charles, and that he, above all cooks, could dress up a ragout of that putrid perfection which his king relished. And he set himself with his whole might so to do, and for thirty years and more continued his degradation of genius—a degradation unexampled, whether we consider the powers of the writer, the coarseness, quantity, and elaboration of the pollutions he perpetrated, or the length of time in which he was employed, in thus "profaning the God-given strength and marring the lofty line."

His other biographers—Dr Johnson, alone, with brevity and seeming reluctance—have enumerated and characterised all Dryden's plays. We have decided only to speak of them very generally, and that for the following reasons:—1st, We are reprinting none of them; 2dly, From what we have read of them, we are certain that, even as works of art, they are utterly unworthy of their author, and that in morals they are, as a whole, a disgrace to human nature. We are not the least lenient or indulgent of critics. We have every wish to pity the errors, and to bear with the frequent escapades and aberrations of genius. But when we see, as in Dryden's case, what we are forced to consider either a deliberate and systematic