THE LAUREATE POETS.
BY THE REVEREND A. E. WINSHIP.
CHAPTER III.
Royal favors skip from small to great and back again by no law of ethics or æsthetics, and if we flatter ourselves that we can account for the choice of some candidates for the poet’s pension we shall certainly find our wits tested in search of a philosophy to apply to Charles II., who, with equal felicity, placed the crown on the geniusless Davenant and the immortal Dryden.
John Dryden, with all his faults of verse and purpose, was the genius of his age, and remains one of the five names that star the diadem of English song. In circumstances that tended to enervate rhyme, at a time when the rebound from Puritanism paid a premium on license and licentiousness, when no element in national life had the electrical currents to stimulate literary, least of all poetic genius, John Dryden had the skill to attune the age in which he lived to a melodious key that harmonizes with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspere and Milton.
In character and record he is inexplicable. Born in the erratic days of Cromwell he is the most heartily English of all her “men of letters;” of strictest Puritan training, he died a devout Romanist; of cleanly life and chaste conversation, his verses are morally reckless; educated at Cambridge, where he remained for a seven years’ post-graduate course, he was noted for disloyalty to his Alma Mater; never wrote a line in praise of it, but went out of his way to endorse its rival—Oxford—to whom he owed nothing.
It was his unanticipated loyalty to royalty that led Charles II. to appoint him laureate to succeed Davenant, at the same time creating a post of literary honor and financial profit—historiographer—receiving £100 for each position. His honors cost him dearly in public favor. It was currently believed that he renounced the cause of the people for court favors, and Puritanism for self-advancement, and for a score of years he lost in popularity all that he won of financial ease and royal distinction.
His greatness consisted in the sublime tact with which he used the opportunity that disfavor brought him to immortalize himself in verse.