But say, what is't that binds your hands? does fear
From such a glorious action you deter?
Or is't religion? But you sure disclaim
That frivolous pretence, that empty name;
Mere bugbear word, devis'd by us to scare
The senseless rout to slavishness and fear,
Ne'er known to awe the brave, and those that dare.
Such weak and feeble things may serve for checks
To rein and curb base-mettled heretics, ...
Such whom fond in-bred honesty befools,
Or that old musty piece, the Bible, gulls.
(John Oldham: Satires upon the Jesuits, Sat. i. 1679.)
"Oldham was the first," says Mr. Gosse, "to liberate himself, in the use of the distich, from this under-current of a stanza, and to write heroic verse straight on, couplet by couplet, ascending by steady strides and not by irregular leaps. (Any one who will venture to read Oldham's disagreeable Satire upon the Jesuits, written in 1679, will see the truth of this remark, and note the effect that its versification had upon that series of Dryden's satires which immediately followed it.) In Pope's best satires we see this art carried to its final perfection; after his time the connecting link between couplet and couplet became lost, and at last in the decline poems became, as some one has said, mere cases of lancets lying side by side. But in Dryden's day the connection was still only too obvious, and it strikes me that it may have been from a consciousness of this defect, that Dryden adopted that triplet, with a final alexandrine, which he is so fond of introducing." (From Shakespeare to Pope, p. 201.)
Of these the false Achitophel was first,
A name to all succeeding ages curst:
For close designs and crooked counsels fit,
Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit,
Restless, unfixed in principles and place,
In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace;
A fiery soul, which, working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy body to decay,
And o'er-informed the tenement of clay.
A daring pilot in extremity,
Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high,
He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit,
Would steer too nigh the sands, to boast his wit.
Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide;
Else, why should he, with wealth and honor blest,
Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?
Punish a body which he could not please,
Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease?...
In friendship false, implacable in hate,
Resolved to ruin or to rule the state;
To compass this the triple bond he broke,
The pillars of the public safety shook,
And fitted Israel for a foreign yoke;
Then, seized with fear, yet still affecting fame,
Usurped a patriot's all-atoning name.
(Dryden: Absalom and Achitophel, part I. ll. 150-179. 1681.)
Dryden was the first great English poet after Chaucer to make the heroic couplet his chief vehicle of expression, and he put far more variety and vigor into it than had been achieved by his nearer predecessors. As Pope said:
"Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full resounding line,
The long majestic march, the energy divine."
(Epistle ii., 267.)
And Gray, some years later, symbolized Dryden's couplet in these fine lines of the Progress of Poesy: