"Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
Was everything by starts, and nothing long."
Mac Flecknoe is another satire of almost as great merit, directed against a certain Whig poet by the name of Shadwell. He would have been seldom mentioned in later times, had it not been for two of Dryden's lines:—
"The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense."
All for Love, one of Dryden's greatest plays, shows the delicate keenness of his satire in characterizing the cold-blooded Augustus Caesar, or Octavius, as he is there called. Antony has sent a challenge to Octavius, who replies that he has more ways than one to die. Antony rejoins:—
"He has more ways than one;
But he would choose them all before that one.
Ventidius. He first would choose an ague or a fever.
Antony. No; it must be an ague, not a fever;
He has not warmth enough to die by that."
Dryden could make his satire as direct and blasting as a thunderbolt.
He thus describes his publisher:—
"With leering looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair,
With two left legs, and Judas-colored hair,
And frowsy pores that taint the ambient air."
Argumentative or Didactic Verse.—Dryden is a master in arguing in poetry. He was not a whit hampered by the restrictions of verse. They were rather an advantage to him, for in poetry he could make more telling arguments in briefer compass than in prose. The best two examples of his power of arguing in verse are Religio Laici, written in 1682, to uphold the Episcopal religion, and The Hind and the Panther, composed in 1687, to vindicate the Catholic church. Verse of this order is called didactic, because it endeavors to teach or to explain something. The age of the Restoration delighted in such exercises of the intellect vastly more than in flights of fancy or imagination.
Lyrical Verse.—While most of Dryden's best poetry is either satiric or didactic, he wrote three fine lyrical poems: Alexander's Feast, A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, and An Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew. All are distinguished by remarkable beauty and energy of expression. Alexander's Feast is the most widely read of Dryden's poems. The opening lines of the Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew seem almost Miltonic in their conception, and they show great power in the field of lyrical poetry. Mistress Killigrew was a young lady of rare accomplishments in both poetry and painting, who died at the age of twenty-five. Dryden thus begins her memorial ode:—
"Thou youngest virgin daughter of the skies,
Made in the last promotion of the blest;
Whose palms, new plucked from Paradise,
In spreading branches more sublimely rise,
Rich with immortal green above the rest:
* * * * *
Thou wilt have time enough for hymns divine,
Since Heaven's eternal year is thine."