and the royal

all which we read over and over, always with an ambitious vocalism which the language invites, but, I think, with not much hearty unction.

And yet, notwithstanding the little that we recall of this man’s work, he did write an enormous amount of verse, in all metres, and of all lengths. All the poems that Milton ever published would hardly fill the space necessary for a full synopsis of what John Dryden wrote. But let us begin at the beginning.

This poet, and important man of letters, was born only a year or two later than John Bunyan, and in the same range of country—a little to the northward, in an old rectory of Aldwinckle (Northamptonshire), upon the banks of the river Nen. And this river flows thence northerly, in great loops, where sedges grow, past the tall spire of Oundle—past the grassy ruins of Fotheringay; and thence easterly, in other great loops, through flat lands, under the huge towers of Peterborough Cathedral. But the river singing among the sedges does not come into Dryden’s verse; nor does Fotheringay, with its tragic memories; nor do the noble woods of Lilford Park, or of that Rockingham Forest which, in the days of Dryden’s boyhood, must in many places have brought its spurs of oak timber and its haunts of the red-deer close down to the Nen banks. Indeed, Wordsworth says, with a little exaggeration, it is true, “there is not a single image from nature in the whole body of his [Dryden’s] works.”

He was a well-born boy, with titled kinsfolk, and had money at command for good courses in books. He was at Westminster School under Dr. Busby; was at Cambridge, where he fell one time into difficulties, which somehow angered him in a way that made him somewhat irreverent of his old college in after life. There are pretty traditions that in extreme youth he addressed some very earnest amatory verses to a certain Helen Driden, daughter of his baronet uncle at Canons-Ashby;[90] and there are hints dropped by some biographers of a rebuff to him; which, if it came about, did not pluck away the cheerfulness and self-approval that lay in him. It was in London, however, where he went after his father’s death, and when he was twenty-seven, that the first verse was written by him which made the literary world prick up its ears at sound of a new voice.

’Tis in eulogy of Cromwell, dying just then, and this is a bit of it:

A short two years after, you will remember, and Charles II. came to his own and was crowned; and how does this eulogist of Cromwell treat his coronation? In a way that is worth our listening to; for, I think, a comparison of the Cromwellian verses with the Carolan eulogy gives us a key to John Dryden’s character:

No wonder that he came ultimately to have the place of Poet-laureate, and thereafter an extra £100 a year with it! No wonder that, with all his cleverness—and it was prodigious—he never did, and never could, win an unsullied reputation for sterling integrity and straightforward purpose.

I know that his latest biographer and advocate, Mr. Saintsbury, whose work you will be very apt to encounter in the little series edited by John Morley, sees poems like those I have cited with other eyes, and fashions out of them an agreeable poetic consistency very honorable to Dryden; but I cannot twist myself so as to view the matter in his way. I think rather of a conscienceless thrifty newspaper, setting forth the average every-day drift of opinion, with a good deal more than every-day skill.

Meantime John Dryden has married, and has married the daughter of an earl; of just how this came about we have not very full record; but there were a great many who wondered why she should marry him; and a good many more, as it appeared, who persisted in wondering why he should marry her. Such wonderments of wondering people overtake a good many matches. It is quite certain that it was not a marriage which went to make a domestic man of him; and I think you will search vainly through his poems for any indication of those home instincts which, like the “melting strains” he flung about King Charles,

The only positive worldly good which seemed to come of this marriage was an occasional home at Charlton, in Wiltshire—an estate of the Earl of Berkshire, his father-in-law—where Dryden wrote, shortly after his marriage, his Annus Mirabilis, in which he gave to all the notable events of the year 1666 a fillip with his pen; and the odd conceits that lie in a single one of his stanzas keep yet alive a story of the capture by the British of a fleet of Dutch India ships:—

There are three hundred other stanzas in the poem, of the same make and rhythm, telling of fire, of plague, and of battles. I am not sure if anybody reads it nowadays; but if you do—and it is not fatiguing—you will find wonderful word-craft in it, which repeats the din and crash of battle, and paints the smouldering rage and the blazing power of the Great Fire of London in a way which certain boys, I well remember in old school days, thought represented the grand climacteric of poetic diction.

The London of Dryden.

But let us not forget where we are in our English story; it is London that has been all aflame in that dreadful year of 1666. Thirteen thousand houses have been destroyed, eighty odd churches, and some four hundred acres of ground in the central part of the city have been burned over. The fire had followed swiftly upon the devastating plague of the previous year, which Dryden had gone into Wiltshire to avoid. It is doubtful, indeed, if he came back soon enough to see the great blaze with his own eyes; “chemical fire,” the poet calls it, and it licked up the poison of the plague; but it did not lick up the leprosy of Charles’ court. There was a demand for plays, and for plays of a bad sort; and Dryden met the demand. Never was there an author more apt to divine what the public did want, and more full of literary contrivances to meet it. Dryden knew all the purveyors of this sort of intellectual repast, and all their methods, and soon became a king among them; and to be a king among the playwrights was to have a very large sovereignty in that time. Everybody talked of the plays; all of Royalist faith went to the plays, if they had money; and money was becoming more and more plentiful. There had been the set-back, it is true, of the Great Fire; but English commerce was making enormous strides in these days. There was a pathetic folding of the hands and dreary forecastings directly after the disaster, as after all such calamities. But straight upon this the city grew, with wider streets and taller houses, and in only a very few years the waste ground was covered again, and the new temple of St. Paul’s rising, under the guidance of Sir Christopher Wren, into those grand proportions of cupola and dome, which, in their smoked and sooty majesty, dominate the city of London to-day.

Houses of nobles and of rich merchants which stood near to Cornhill and Lombard Street, and private gardens which had occupied areas thereabout—now representing millions of pounds in value—were crowded away westward by the new demands of commerce. In Dryden’s day there were ducal houses looking upon Lincoln’s Inn Fields; and others, with pleasure grounds about them, close upon Covent Garden Square. Americans go to that neighborhood now, in early morning, to catch sight of the immense stores of fruit and vegetables which are on show there upon market-days; and they are well repaid for such visit; yet the houses are dingy, and a welter of straw and mud and market débris stretches to the doors; but the stranger, picking his way through this, and through Russell Street to the corner of Bow Street, will find, close by, the site of that famous Will’s Coffee-house, where Dryden lorded it so many years, and whose figure there—in the chimney-corner, with his pipe, laying down the law between the whiffs, and conferring honors by offering a pinch from his snuff-box—Scott has made familiar to the whole world.

It was an earlier sort of club-house, where the news in the Gazette was talked of, and the last battle—if there were a recent one—and the last play, and the last scandal of the court. Its discussions and potations made away with a good many nights, and a good many pipes and bottles, and was not largely provocative of domesticity. But it does not appear that the Lady Elizabeth—Dryden’s wife—ever made remonstrances on this score; indeed, Mr. Green, the historian, would intimate that my lady had distractions of her own, not altogether wise or worthy; but we prefer to believe the best we can of her.

To this gathering-place at Covent Garden Etherege and Wycherley found their way—all writing men, in fact; even the great Buckingham perhaps—before his quarrel; and Dorset, fellow-member with Dryden, of the Royal Society; maybe Butler too, when he found himself in London; and poor Otway,[91] hoping to meet some one generous enough to pay his score for him; and the young Congreve, proud in his earlier days to get a nod from the great Dryden; and, prouder yet, when, at a later time, he was honored by that tender and pathetic epistle from the Laureate:

I said that he wrote plays; wrote them by the couple—by the dozen—by the score possibly.

You do not know them; and I hope you never will know them to love them. They have fallen away from literature—never acted, and rarely read. He could not plot a story, and he had not the dramatic gift. One wonders how a theatreful could have listened to their pomposity and inflation and exaggerations. But they did, and they filled Dryden’s pockets. There were scenic splendors, indeed, about many of them which delighted the pit, and which the poet loved as accompaniments to the roll of his sonorous verse; there were, too, fragments here and there, with epithet and characterization that showed his mastership; and sometimes the most graceful of lyrics budded out from the coarse groundwork of the play, as fair in sound as they were foul in thought.

In private intercourse Dryden is represented to have been a man of courteous speech, never low and ribald—as were many of the royal favorites; and when he undertook playwriting to order, to meet the profligate tastes of the court, he could not, like some lesser playwrights, disguise double-meanings and vulgarities under a flimsy veil of courtliness; but by his very sincerity he made all his lewdness rank, and all his indelicacies brutal. This will, and should, I think, keep his plays away from our reading-desks.

Dryden’s satires, written later, show a better and far stronger side of his literary quality; and Buckingham, long after his lineaments shall have faded from a mob of histories, will stand preserved as Zimri, in the strong pickle of Dryden’s verse; you will have met the picture, perhaps without knowing it, for the magnificent courtier, who wrote “The Rehearsal:”

A man who writes in that way about a peer of England was liable to write of lesser men in a manner that would stir hot blood; and he did. Once upon a time this great king at “Will’s” was waylaid and sorrily cudgelled; which is an experience that—however it may come about—is not elevating in its effects, nor does it increase our sense of a man’s dignity; for it is an almost universal fact that the men most worthy of respect, in almost any society, are the men who never do get quietly cudgelled.

Later Poems and Purpose.

Far on in 1682, when our Dryden was waxing oldish, and when he had given over play-going for somewhat more of church-going, he wrote, in the same verse with his satires, and with the same ringing couplets of sound, a defence of the moderate liberal churchmanship that does not yield to ecclesiastic fetters, and that thinks widely. A little later, in 1687, he writes in a more assured vein, assuming bold defence of Romanism—as it existed in that day in England—to which faith he had become a convert. This last is a curiously designed poem, showing how little he had the arts of construction in hand; it is a long argument between a Hind and a Panther, in the shades of a forest. Was ever ecclesiasticism so recommended before? Yet there are brave and unforgetable lines in it: instance the noble rhythm, and the noble burden of that passage beginning—like a trumpet note—

And again the fine tribute to “the Church:”

I think Bishop Heber had a reverent and a stealthy look upon these lines when he wrote a certain stanza of his “Greenland’s icy mountains.”

The enemies of Dryden did not fail to observe that between the dates of the two professions of faith named, Charles II. had died, summoning a Papist priest, at the very last, to give him a chance—and, it is feared, a small one—of reconcilement with Heaven; furthermore, these enemies remembered that the bigot James II. had come to the throne, full of Papist zeal and of a poor hope to bring all England to a great somerset of faith. Did Dryden undergo an innocent change? Maybe; may not be. Certainly neither Lord Macaulay, nor Elkanah Settle, nor Saintsbury, nor you, nor I, have the right to go behind the veil of privacy which in such matters is every man’s privilege.

How odd it seems that this Papist convert of James II.’s time, and author of so many plays that outranked Etherege in rankness, should have put the Veni, Creator, of Charlemagne (if it be his) into such reverent and trenchant English as carries it into so many of our hymnals.

Nor was this all of Dryden’s translating work. He roamed high and low among all the treasures of the ancients. Theocritus gave his tangle of sweet sounds to him, and Homer his hexameters; Juvenal and Horace and Ovid were turned into his verse; and Dryden’s Virgil is the only Virgil of thousands of readers. He sought motive, too, in Boccaccio and Chaucer; and within times the oldest of us can remember his “Flower and Leaf” and his “Palamon and Arcite” were more read and known than the poems of like name attributed to Chaucer. But in the newer and more popular renderings and printings of the old English poet, Chaucer has come to his own again, and rings out his tales with a lark-like melody that outgoes in richness and charm all the happy paraphrases of Dryden.

A still more dangerous task our poet undertook in the days of his dramatic work. I have in my library some half dozen of Dryden’s plays—yellowed and tattered, and of the imprint of 1710 or thereabout—and among them is one bearing this title, The Tempest, originally written by William Shakespeare, and altered and improved by John Dryden; and the story of Antony and Cleopatra underwent the same sort of improvement—dangerous work for Dryden; dangerous for any of us. And yet this latter, under name of “All for Love,” was one of Dryden’s greatest successes, and reckoned by many dramatic critics of that day far superior to Shakespeare.

One more extract from this voluminous poet and we shall leave him; it was written when he was well toward sixty, and when his dramatic experiences were virtually ended; it is from an ode in memory of Mistress Killigrew, a friend and a poetess. In the course of it he makes honest bewailment, into which it would seem his whole heart entered:

And again, a verselet that is full of all his most characteristic manner:

We have given much space to our talk about Dryden. Is it because we like him so well? By no means. It is because he was the greatest master among the literary craftsmen of his day; it is because he wrought in so many and various forms, and always with a steady, unflinching capacity for toil, which knew no shake or pause; it is because he had a marvellously keen sense for all the symphonies of heroic language, and could always cheat and charm the ear with his reverberant thunders; it is because he spanned a great interval of English letters, covering it with various accomplishment; criticising keenly, and accepted as a critic; judging fairly, and accepted as a judge in the great court of language; teaching, by his example, of uses and fashions of use, which were heeded by his contemporaries, and which put younger men upon the track of better and worthier achievement.

Again, it is because he, more than any other of his epoch, represented in himself and in what he wrought, the drift and bent and actualities of the time. There were changes of dynasties, and he put into language, for all England, the lamentation over the old and the glorification of the new; there were plagues and conflagrations and upbuildings of desolated cities—and the fumes and the flames and the din of all these get speech of him, and such color as put them in undying record upon the roll of history; there were changes of faith, and vague out-reaches for some sure ground of religious establishment—and his poems tell of the struggle, and in his own personality represent the stress of a whole nation’s doubts; there are battles raging round the coasts—and the echo of them, in some shape of trumpet blare or shrill military resonance, seems never to go out of his poems; dissoluteness rules in the court and in the city, infecting all—and Dryden wallows with them through a score of his uncanny dramas.

Put his poems together in the order of their composition, and without any other historic data whatever, they would show the changes and quavers and sudden enthusiasms and bestialities and doubts and growth of the National Life. But they would most rarely show the noble impulses that kindle hope and foretoken better things to come—rarely the elevating purpose that commands our reverence.

No fictitious character of his is a live one to-day; you can hardly recall one if you try.[92] No couplet or verselet of his is so freighted with a serene or hopeful philosophy as to make our march the blither by reason of it down the corridors of time. No blast of all his fanfaron of trumpets sounds the opening of the gates upon any Delectable Mountains. A great, clever, literary worker! I think that is all we can say of him. And when you or I pass under his monument in the corner of Westminster Abbey, we will stand bowed respectfully, but not with any such veneration, I think, as we expect to carry to the tomb of Milton or of Chaucer; and if one falls on Pope—what then? I think we might pause—waver; more polish here—more power there—the humanities not radiant in either; and so we might safely sidle away to warm ourselves before the cenotaph of Goldsmith.

John Locke.

Another man who grew up in these times in England, and who from his study-window at Oxford (where he had been Lecturer on Rhetoric) saw the Great Fire of London in the shape of a vast, yellow, sulphurous-looking cloud, of portentous aspect, rolling toward the zenith, and covering half the sky, was Mr. John Locke.[93]

We are too apt, I think, to dismiss this author from our thoughts as a man full only of dreary metaphysic subtleties; and support the belief with the story that our Jonathan Edwards read his treatise on the Human Understanding with great delight at the age of fourteen. Yet Locke, although a man of the keenest and rarest intellect—which almost etherialized his looks—was possessed of a wonderful deal of what he would have called “hard, round-about sense;” indeed it would be quite possible to fill a whole calendar with bits of his printed talk that would be as pitpat and common-sensical as anything in Poor Richard’s Almanac. Moreover, he could, on occasions, tell a neat and droll story, which would set the “table in a roar.”

Some facts in the life of this great thinker and writer are worth our remembering, not only by reason of the fame of his books, but because in all those years whose turbulent rush and corrupting influences have shown themselves in our pages, John Locke lived an upright, manly, self-respecting life, though brought into intimate relations with many most prominent at court. He was born in Western England, north of the Mendip Hills; and after fourteen years of quiet country life, and kind parental training, among the orchard slopes of Somersetshire, went to Westminster School; was many years thereafter at Oxford; studied medicine; met Lord Ashley (afterward the great Shaftesbury—first party-leader in English parliamentary history), who was so taken by the pale, intellectual face of the young Doctor that he carried him off to London, and domiciled him in his great house upon the Strand. There Locke directed the studies of Ashley’s son; and presently—such was my Lord’s confidence in him—was solicited to find a wife for the young gentleman;[94] which he did, to the great acceptance of all parties, by taking him off into Rutlandshire, and introducing him to a pretty daughter of the Earl of Rutland. Fancy the author of an Essay Concerning the Human Understanding setting off in a coach, with six long-tailed Flemish horses, for a four days’ journey into the north of England—with a young scion of the Ashleys—upon such an errand as that! Our doctors in metaphysics do not, I believe, engage in similar service; yet I suppose nice observation would disclose great and curious mental activities in the evolution of such schemes.

The philosopher must have known Dryden, both being early members of the Royal Society; but I have a fancy that Locke was a man who did not—save on rarest occasions—take a pipe and a mug at such a place as Will’s Coffee-house. His tastes led him more to banquets at Exeter House. There was foreign travel, also, in which he accomplished himself in continental languages and socialities; he had offers of diplomatic preferment, but his doubtful health (always making him what over-well people call a fussy man) forbade acceptance; else we might have had in him another Sir William Temple. Shaftesbury interested him in his scheme of new planting the Carolina colony in America; and John Locke drew up rules for its political guidance. Some of these sound very drolly now. Thus—no man was to be a freeman of Carolina unless he acknowledged a God, and agreed that he was to be publicly and solemnly worshipped. The members of one church were not to molest or persecute those of another. Again, “no one shall be permitted to plead before a court of justice for money or reward.” What a howling desert this would make of most of our courts!

Again, he writes with great zest upon the subject of Education, and almost with the warmth of that old Roger Ascham, whose maxims I cited in one of our earlier talks:

And again:

By which I am more than ever convinced that Locke did not sup often with Dryden at “Will’s,” and that you will find no pleasant verselets—look as hard as you may—on a single page of his discourse on the Human Understanding.

When Charles grew suspicious of Shaftesbury, and the Earl was shorn of his power, no little of the odium fell upon his protégé; and for a time there was an enforced—or at least a very prudent—exile for Locke, at one time in France and at another in Holland. It was on these absences that his pen was busiest. In 1689 he returned to England in the trail of William III.; came to new honors under that monarch; published his great work, which had been simmering in his brain for ten years or more; made a great fame at home and abroad, and wrote wisely on many topics. Meanwhile his old enemy, the asthma, was afflicting him sorely. London smoke was a torture to him; but when he went only so little distance away (twenty miles northward) as the country home of his friends Sir Francis and Lady Masham, a delightful calm came to him. He was given his own apartment there; never did hosts more enjoy a guest; and never a guest enjoyed more the immunities and kindnesses which Sir Francis and Lady bestowed upon him. Twelve or fourteen years of idyllic life for the philosopher followed, in the wooded alleys and upon the charming lawns of the old manor-house of Oates, in the county of Essex; there were leisurely, coy journeys to London; there were welcoming visits from old friends; there was music indoors, and music—of the birds—without. Bachelors rarely come to those quietudes and joys of a home-life which befell the old age of Locke, and equipped all his latter days with such serenities as were a foretaste of heaven.

He does not lie in Westminster Abbey: I think he would have rebelled among the poets: he sleeps more quietly in the pretty church-yard of High-Lavor, a little way off, northward, from the New Park of Epping Forest.

End of the King and Others.

The lives of these two men—Dryden and Locke—have brought us past the whole reach of Charles II.’s reign. That ignoble monarch has met his fate courageously; some days before the immediate end he knew it was coming, and had kind words for those about him.

He died on a Friday,[95] and on the Sunday before had held great revel in the famous gallery of Whitehall; next day came the warnings, and then the blow—paralytic, or other such—which shrivelled his showy powers, and brought his swarthy face to a whiteness and a death-like pallor that shocked those gay people who belonged in the palace. Then came the scourging with hot iron, and the administration of I know not what foul drugs that belonged to the blind medication of that day—all in vain; there were suspicions of poison; but the poison he died of was of his own making, and he had been taking it ever since boyhood.

A Catholic priest came to him stealthily and made the last promises to him he was ever to hear. To a courtier, who came again and again, he apologized—showing his courtesy to the last. “I’m an awful time in dying,” he said; and to somebody else—his brother, perhaps—“don’t let poor Nell Gwynne starve;” and so died.

James, the successor, was not loved—scarce by anyone; bigoted, obstinate, selfish, he ran quickly through the short race of which the histories will tell you. Only three years of it, or thereabout, and then—presto! like the changing of the scenes at Drury Lane Theatre in one of the splendid spectacles of the day—James scuds away, and Cousin William (with his wife Mary, both of the blood royal of England) comes in, and sets up a fashion of rule, and an assured Protestant succession of regal names which is not ended yet.

And now, in closing this talk, I will summon into presence once again some of the notable personages who have given intellectual flavor to the years we have gone over, and will call the roll of a few new names among those actors who are to take in swift succession the places of those who disappear. At the date where we now are—1688—the date of the last English Revolution (who, pray, can predict the next?), the date of John Bunyan’s death, the date of Alexander Pope’s birth—excellent remembrancers, these!—at this epoch, I say, of the incoming of William and Mary, all those dramatic writers—of whom we made mention as having put a little tangled fringe of splendor about the great broidery of Shakespeare’s work—were gone. So was Herrick, with his sweet poems, and his pigs and tankards; and Howell, and Wotton, and the saintly George Herbert, and dear, good, old Izaak Walton—all comfortably dead and buried. So were Andrew Marvell, and the author of Hudibras. Archbishop Laud was gone long since to the scaffold, with the fullest acquiescence of all New Englanders; Jeremy Taylor gone—if ever man had right of way there—to heaven; Milton dead; Cowley dead; Waller dead.

Old, ear-cropped Prynne, of the Histriomastix, was still living—close upon seventy—grim and gray, and as pugnacious as a bull-terrier. Among others lingering upon the downhill side of life were Robert Boyle and that John Evelyn, whose love of the fields and gardens and trees had put long life in his blood and brain. Sir William Temple, too, had still some years of elegant distinction to coquet with; our old friend of the Pepysian journal was yet alert—his political ambitions active, his eye-sight failing—never thinking, we may be sure, that his pot-luck of a Diary would keep him more savory with us to-day than all his wigs and his coaches, and his fine acquaintance, and his great store of bric-à-brac.

Isaac Newton was not fifty yet, but had somehow lost that elasticity and searchingness of brain which had untwisted the sunbeams, and solved the riddle of gravitation. Bishop Burnet, and that William Penn whose name ought to hold place on any American file of England’s worthies, were in the full vigor of middle age. Daniel De Foe was some eight and twenty, and known only as a sharp trader, who had written a few pamphlets, and who was enrolled in those soldier ranks which went to greet William III. on his arrival at Torbay.

Matthew Prior was still younger, and had made no show of those graces and that art which gave him later an ambassador’s place, and a tomb and monument in the “Poet’s Corner” of the Abbey. Jonathan Swift, then scarce twenty-one, is unheard of as yet, and is nursing quietly the power and the bitterness with which, through two succeeding reigns, he is to write and rave and rage.

Still more youthful are those two promising lads, Addison and Steele, listening with their sharp young ears to the fine verses of Mr. Dryden, and watching and waiting for the day when they, too, shall say somewhat to be of record for ages after them. And so, with these bright young fellows at the front, and the excellent gray-heads I have named at the rear, we ring down the curtain upon our present entertainment with an “Exeunt omnes!”

CHAPTER VII.

I have a fear that my readers were not overmuch interested in what I had to say of that witty Dr. Thomas Fuller who wrote about the Worthies of England, and who pressed his stalwart figure (for he was of the bigness of our own Phillips Brooks—corporeal and mental) through many a London crowd that came to his preachments. Yet his worthiness is something larger than that which comes from his story of the Worthies.

Sir William Temple, too, is a name that can hardly have provoked much enthusiasm, unless among those who love gardens, and who recall with rural unction his horticultural experiences at Sheen, and at Moor Park in Surrey. But that kindly, handsome, meditative, eccentric doctor of Norwich—Sir Thomas Browne—was of a different and more lovable quality, the memory of which I hope may find lodgement in the reader’s heart. His Religio Medici, if not his Hydriotaphia, should surely find place in every well-appointed library.

As for John Dryden—do what you like with his books; but do not forget that he left behind him writings that show all the colors and reflect all the follies and faiths of the days in which he lived—plays with a portentous pomp of language—lyrics that were most melodious and most unsavory—satire that flashed and cut like a sword, and odes that had the roll and swell of martial music in them.

John Locke if less known, was worthier; and we have reason, which I tried to show, for thinking of him as a pure-hearted, level-headed, high-minded man—an abiding honor to his race.

Kings Charles, James, and William.

It may help the reader to keep in memory the sequence of these English sovereigns if I tell him somewhat of their relationship. James II.—previously and longer known as that Duke of York, in honor of whom our metropolitan city (in those days conquered from the Dutch) was called New York—we know as only brother to Charles II., who died without legitimate children. This James was as bigoted and obstinate as Charles was profligate and suave. We think of him as having lost his throne in that revolution of 1688, by reason of his popish tendencies; but it is doubtful if Protestantism would have saved him, or made a better man of him. He had married—and it was a marriage he tried hard to abjure and escape from—a daughter of that Earl of Clarendon whose History of the Rebellion I named to you. There were two daughters by this marriage, Mary and Anne; both of them, through the influence of their Clarendon grandfather, brought up as Protestants. The elder of these, Mary, was a fine woman, tall, dignified, graceful, cultivated—as times went—whose greatest foible was a love for cards, at which she played for heavy stakes, and—often. Her sister Anne shared the same foible, and gave it cherishment all her life; but was not reckoned the equal of her elder sister; had none of her grace; was short, dumpy, overfond of good dinners, and with such limited culture as made her notelets (even when she came to be Queen) full of blunders that would put a school-mistress of our day into spasms. We shall meet her, and more pleasantly, again.

But Mary—heir next after James to the throne—had married William of Orange, who was a fighting Dutch general; keen, cool, selfish, brave, calculating, with an excellent head for business; cruel at times, unscrupulous, too, but a good Protestant. He was great-grandson to that famous William the Silent, whose story everyone has read, or should read, in the pages of Motley.

But how came he, a Dutchman, and speaking English brokenly, to share the British throne with Mary? There were two very excellent reasons: First, he was own cousin to Mary, his mother having been a daughter of Charles I.; and next, he had kingly notions of husbandship, and refused to go to England on any throne-seeking errand, which might involve hard fighting, without sharing to the full the sovereignty of his wife Mary.

So he did go as conqueror and king; there being most easy march to London; the political scene changing like the turn of a kaleidoscope; but there came fighting in Ireland, as at Londonderry and the battle of the Boyne; and a brooding unrest in Scotland, of which, whenever you come to read or study, you should mate your reading with that charming story of Old Mortality—one of the best of Scott’s. Its scene reaches over from the days of Charles II. to the early years of the Dutch King William, and sets before one more vividly than any history all those elements of unrest with which the new sovereign had to contend on his northern borders—the crazy fanaticism of fierce Cameronians—the sturdy, cantankerous zeal of Presbyterians—the workings of the old, hot, obstinate leaven of Prelacy, and the romantic, lingering loyalty to a Stuart king.

But William ended by having all his kingdom well in hand, and all his household too. There was strong affection between William and Mary; he relishing her discretion, her reserves, and her culture; and she loving enough to forget the harsh gauntleted hand which he put upon those who were nearest and dearest to him. He was more military than diplomatic, and I think believed in no Scripture more devoutly than in that which sets forth the mandate, “Wives, obey your husbands.”

The King was not a strong man physically, though a capital soldier; he was short, awkward, halting in movement, appearing best in the saddle and with battle flaming in his front; he had asthma, too, fearfully; was irritable—full of coughs and colds—building a new palace upon the flank of Hampton Court, to get outside of London smoke and fogs; setting out trees there, and digging ponds in Dutch style, which you may see now; building Kensington, too, which was then out of town, and planting and digging there—of which you may see results over the mouldy brick wall that still hems in that old abode of royalty. He carried his asthma, and dyspepsia, and smoking Dutch dragoons to both places. People thought surely that the Queen, so well made and blessed with wonderful appetite, would outlive him, and so give to the history of England a Mary II.; but she did not. An attack of small-pox, not combated in those days by vaccination, or even inoculation, carried her off on a short illness.

He grieved, as people thought so stern a master could not grieve; but rallied and built to the Queen’s memory that most magnificent of monuments, Greenwich Hospital, which shows its domes and its royal façade stretching along the river bank, to the myriad of strangers who every year sail up or down the Thames.

He made friends, too, with Princess Anne, the sister of the dead Queen, and now heir to the throne. This Princess Anne (afterward Queen Anne) was married to a prince of Denmark, only notable for doing nothing excellently well; and was mother of a young lad, called Duke of Gloucester, whom all England looked upon as their future king. And this little Duke, after Queen Mary’s death, came to be presented at court in a blue velvet costume, blazing all over with diamonds, of which one may get a good notion from Sir Godfrey Kneller’s painting of him, now in Hampton Court. But the velvet and the diamonds and best of care could not save the weakly, blue-eyed, fair-cheeked, precocious lad; his precocity was a fatal one, due to a big hydrocephalic head that bent him down and carried him to the grave while William was yet King.

The Princess mother was in despair; was herself feeble, too; small, heavy, dropsical, from all which she rallied, however, and at the death of William, which occurred by a fall from his horse in 1702, came to be that Queen Anne, who through no special virtues of her own, gave a name to a great epoch in English history, and in these latter days has given a name to very much architecture and furniture and crockery, which have as little to do with her as they have with our King Benjamin of Washington.

I may have more to say of her when we shall have brought the literary current of our story more nearly abreast of her times.

There was not much of literary patronage flowing out from King William. I think there was never a time when he would not have counted a good dictionary the best of books, not excepting the Bible; and I suspect that he had about the same contempt for “literary fellers” which belongs to our average Congressman. Yet there were shoals of poets in his time who would have delighted to burn incense under the nostrils of the asthmatic King.

Some Literary Fellows.

There was Prior,[96] for instance, who, from having been the son of a taverner at Whitehall, came to be a polished wit, and at last an ambassador, through the influence of strong friends about the court. In his university days he had ventured to ridicule, in rattling verse, the utterances of the great Dryden. You will know of him best, perhaps, if you know him at all, by a paraphrase he made of that tender ballad of the “Nut-brown Maid,” in which the charming naturalness of the old verse is stuck over with the black patches of Prior’s pretty rhetoric. But I am tempted to give you a fairer and a more characteristic specimen of his vivacity and grace. Here it is: