Come, visit every humble mind;
Come, pour thy joys on humankind;
From sin and sorrow set us free,
And make thy temples worthy thee.”
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:
“O gracious God! how far have we
Profaned thy heavenly gift of Poesy?
Made prostitute and profligate the muse,