other members of which are St. Paul, St. John, St. Augustine and Mary Magdalene.

Some of the echoes from Shakespeare and Milton in this poem have been pointed out. Perhaps you can find others. Notice also the many instances of effective alliteration and repetition. Had Dryden's plays been as dramatic as this ode, they would still be acted.

THE CHARACTER OF A GOOD PARSON.

So exacting a critic as Saintsbury calls Dryden's Fables 'the most brilliantly successful of all his poetical experiments.'1 Professor Lounsbury, in an elaborate comparison between Chaucer and Dryden, declares of the latter: His versions of the ancient poet take the first rank in order of merit as well as in order of time.' Of the five 'Translations from Chaucer' in Dryden's book, the one here given is the shortest, and if not the best is certainly inferior to none. You will find it interesting to compare Dryden's treatment with the original, which runs as follows:

A good man was ther of religioun,
And was a povre PERSOUN of a toun;
But riche he was of holy thoght and werk.
He was also a lerned man, a clerk,
That Cristes gospel trewely wolde preche;
His parisshens devoutly wolde he teche.
Benigne he was, and wonder diligent,
And in adversitee ful pacient;

And swich he was y-preved ofte sythes.
Ful looth were him to cursen for his tythes,
But rather wolde he yeven, out of doute,
Un-to his povre parisshens aboute

Of his offring, and eek of his substaunce.

He coude in litel thing han suffisaunce.

Wyd was his parisshe, and houses fer a-sonder,

But he ne lafte nat, for reyn ne thonder,

In siknes nor in meschief, to visyte

The ferreste in his parisshe, muche and lyte,

Up-on his feet, and in his hand a staf.

This noble ensample to his sheep he yaf,

That first he wroghte, and afterward he taughte;

Out of the gospel he tho wordes caughte;

And this figure he added eek ther-to,

That if gold ruste, what shal iren do?

For if a preest be foul, on whom we truste,

No wonder is a lewd man to ruste;

And shame it is, if a preest take keep,

A [dirty] shepherde and a clene sheep.

Wel oghte a preest ensample for to yive,

By his clennesse, how that his sheep shold live.

1 Saintsbury's Dryden, Cap. viii.

2 Studies in Chaucer, vol. iii., pp. 156-179.

He sette nat his benefice to hyre,

And leet his sheep encombred in the myre,
And ran to London, un-to seynt Poules,
To seken him a chaunterye for soules,
Or with a brethe rheed to been withholde;
But dwelte at hoom, and kepte wel his folde,
So that the wolf ne made it nat miscarie;
He was a shepherde and no mercenarie.
And though he holy were, and vertuous,
He was to sinful man nat despitous,
Ne of his speche daungerous ne digne,
But in his teching discreet and benigne.
To drawen folk to heven by fairnesse
By good ensample, was his bisinesse:
But it were any person obstinat,

What-so he were, of heigh or lowe estat,
Him wolde he snibben sharply for the nones.
A bettre preest, I trowe that nowher noon is.
He wayted after no pompe and reverence,
Ne maked him a spyced conscience,

But Christes lore, and his apostles twelve,

He taughte, and first he folwed it him-selve.

In Dryden's versification (and in Pope's) you will notice how the thought is almost invariably completed within the couplet: in Chaucer the thought commonly runs over into the third line, and sometimes continues even further.

I-II. As = as if. lines 10 and II.

too fast; in a good sense, as explained by

his

the

12-24. nothing of severe; a Latinism, ' nihil severi.' action free; 'action' seems to be a metonymy for 'oratory.' golden chain. The idea of a golden chain binding Heaven to Earth seems to have originated in Homer, Iliad viii. 19-27, where Zeus declares: Fasten ye a rope of gold from heaven, and all ye gods lay hold thereof and all goddesses; yet could ye not drag from heaven to earth Zeus, counsellor supreme, not though ye toiled sore. But once I likewise were minded to draw with all my heart, then should I draw you up with very earth and sea withal. Thereafter would I bind the rope about a pinnacle of Olympus, and so should all these things be hung in air. By so much am I beyond gods and beyond men.' Chaucer (following Boethius) in the Knight's Tale (2133−5) says,

with that fair cheyne of love he bond

The fyr, the eyr, the water and the lond
In certeyn boundes, that they may nat flee.

This is rendered by Dryden in his Palamon and Arcite, iii. 1028-9.

Fire, flood and earth and air by this were bound,

And Love, the common link, the new creation crowned.

Compare Jeremy Taylor's

Faith is the golden chain to link the

penitent sinner unto God.'

music [of] the spheres, dates back

to Pythagoras (about 600 B.C.). We have a beautiful expression of this thought in The Merchant of Venice, v. 1.

Look, how the floor of Heaven

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold;

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st

But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim:
Such harmony is in immortal souls;

Lines 21-4 are supposed to refer to Bishop Ken, the Non-Juror, the author of Morning and Evening Hymns. See comment on lines 98-140.

25-41.

exhales

=

'draws forth,' causes to flow,' as in

thy presence that exhales this blood

From cold and empty veins.

Rich. iii. I. 2, 58-9.

The imagery in lines 34-7 is evidently from the old Æsop's Fable, The Sun, The Wind and The Traveler.

For 38-41 see I. Kings, xix. 9-13.

harbinger. This beautiful

Old English word is seldom met with today in prose, but has been preserved for us by the poets. It originally designated a king's officer who, when the Court travelled, went one day ahead to provide lodging and entertainment.

42-49. tithes, literally tenths;' the tenth part of the produce of the land, paid to the clergy. bell and book. See Brewer, article Cursing by Bell, Book, and Candle.' In Barham's Jackdaw of Rheims we have a curse of this kind given in picturesque detail:

50-59.

The Cardinal rose with a dignified look,

He called for his candle, his bell, and his book!

In holy anger and pious grief

He solemnly cursed that rascally thief!

He cursed him at board, he cursed him in bed;
From the sole of his foot to the crown of his head;
He cursed him in sleeping, that every night
He should dream of the devil, and wake in a fright;
He cursed him in eating, he cursed him in drinking,
He cursed him in coughing, in sneezing, in winking;
He cursed him in sitting, in standing, in lying;
He cursed him in walking, in riding, in flying;

He cursed him in living, he cursed him in dying!
Never was heard such a terrible curse !

For the sentiment of these beautiful lines compare Hugo's Les Miserables, ii. 3, 'The Bishop, who was sitting near him [the

convict], gently touched his hand. ".. This is not my house; it is the house of Jesus Christ. This door does not demand of him who enters whether he has a name, but whether he has a grief. You suffer, you are hungry and thirsty; you are welcome. And do not thank me; do not say that I receive you in my house. No one is at home here except the man that needs a refuge. I say to you who are passing by, that you are much more at home here than I myself. Everything here is yours.'

60-74. Paul's, means St. Paul's Cathedral and Churchyard in London. In Chaucer we are told that the Parson did not run to St.

Paul's to seek him a chantry for souls. In Dryden the application of the term Paul's is wider, and contains an allusion to the traffic carried on in the churchyard of the Cathedral. Streets and shops have gradually encroached upon this yard, and bookstores here do largely congregate. This is the explanation of the Published by St. Paul's Churchyard,' which you see on the title pages of some English books.

See Mat

75-97. For line 90, see John xix. 36; for line 94, John xix. 2; for line 95, Matthew xxvii. 28. thew xx. 20-28; iv. 20-21.

sons

Zebedee.

Dryden in

There is nothing in Chaucer to correspond with lines 98-140. serted this passage to express his admiration for the Non-Jurors - some three hundred or four hundred Church of England clergymen who had refused to take the oaths of supremacy and allegiance to William and Mary, and who were therefore deprived of their benefices (1690). The most illustrious of these was Ken. An elaborate account of this movement will be found in Macaulay's History, Chapter xiv. The reference in Dryden is thinly disguised by throwing back the scene to the last year but one of Chaucer's lifeRichard II. was deposed by Henry IV. 98-105. Reflecting, Moses-like. line 105 see Genesis ii. 3.

- the year 1399, when

See Exodus xxxiv, 29-35. For

106-122. The tempter; Job i. 9-12; ii. 4-6.

was.

Near though he

William of Orange was the nephew of the deposed James II.;

Henry of Bolingbroke was the cousin of Richard II.

The next

of blood to James II. was his infant son James Edward, afterwards known as the Old Pretender; the next of blood to Richard II. was Edmund, Earl of March. For the political events referred to in lines 115-122, consult a History of England under the years 1688-9. 123-140. The rest in orders. When a man becomes a clergyman in the Church of England he is said to take orders.'

The rest

in orders, then, are the clergy who consented to take the oaths of supremacy and allegiance. Notice the clever inuendo [innuendo] in these lines. For the metaphor in the Alexandrine that ends

the song, see note on ‘foil' in Lycidas, 79.

ALEXANDER POPE.

ALEXANDER POPE, 'the most brilliant of all wits who have at any period applied themselves to the poetic treatment of human manners,' 1 was born in 1688- -the year of the Revolution. Being a Roman Catholic, he was excluded by his religion from the benefits of a University training. Though an omnivorous reader, his education in the classics was desultory and superficial. The result of this is painfully apparent in his Paraphrase (sometimes called a Translation) of Homer, whereof Bentley said with equal truth and wit, 'Very pretty poetry, Mr. Pope, but pray don't call it Homer.' The first volume of this appeared in 1715, when Pope was only twenty-seven; chiefly through the disinterested exertions of Swift, the list of subscribers grew to such dimensions that Pope was assured of a modest competency for life. The Rape of the Lock (completed in 1714) stands to-day as the best mock-heroic poem in English, while the Eloisa to Abelard (1717) shows that Pope is not deficient in the third requirement of the Miltonic canon- Passion. Immortal lines are to be found scattered through Pope's attempts at literary criticism (Essay on Criticism) and at philosophy (Essay on Man), nor can we deny to the former the merit of having done much to develope sound critical principles in England. The work of his maturer years is to be found in the Epistles and Satires; when you have studied the specimens given in this book, you will have at least some data upon which you can form an independent judgment that may or may not agree with that of De Quincey, quoted at the beginning of this article. To the deformity of Pope's body may be attributed some of the irascibility of his temper. He was engaged in perpetual quarrels; sometimes with men of character and ability who would have been his best friends; oftener with denizens of Grub Street quite beneath his notice. His nature seemed to crave the excitement of a continual literary hawking-party; among the larger game at whom he flew his birds were George II. (see the Epistle to Augustus), the Duchess of Marlborough, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Cibber, Defoe, Tickell, Addison and Bentley. He was not perfectly sincere with even his most intimate friends, Bolingbroke and Swift: to the latter, this melancholy revelation was spared; to the former it was disclosed only after Pope's death in 1744.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

LIFE AND TIMES. For the advanced student and the teacher, all former editions of Pope have been superseded by that of Elwin and Courthope in ten volumes (London, 1871-89). (To this edition the editor of this book is under

1 De Quincey.