Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 353, March 1845

And Satan is the self-chosen missionary of the religion of Hell. In Dryden Asmoday suggests the enterprise, and

"Moloch. This glorious enterprise – (rising up.)
Lucifer. Rash angel, stay. (Rising, and laying his sceptre on Moloch's head.)
That palm is mine, which none shall take away.
Hot braves like thee may fight, but know not well
To manage this, the last great stake of hell."

The council comes to a close – and Lucifer promises to be with them again,

"Before yon brimstone lake thrice ebb and flow."

Tides in the Mediterranean! a touch beyond Milton.

"Here, while the chiefs sit in the palace, may be expressed the sports of the devils, as flights and dancing in grotesque figures; and a song, expressing the change of their condition, what they enjoyed before, and how they fell bravely in battle, having deserved victory by their valour, and what they would have done if they had conquered."

What had Dryden purposed to achieve? Out of two books of a great epic, to edify one act of an opera. To invention of situation, character, or passion, he aspires not; all he had to do – since he must needs meddle – was to select, compress, and abridge, with some judgment and feeling, and to give the result – unhappy at the best – in his own vigorous verse and dearly-beloved rhyme. But beneath the majesty and imagination of Milton, his genius, strong as it was, broke down, and absolutely sunk beneath the level of that of common men. Yet not in awe, nor in reverence of a superior power; for there is no trepidation of spirit; on the contrary, with cool self-assurance he rants his way through the fiery gloom of hell. By his hands shorn of their beams, the fallen angels are, one and all, poor devils indeed. The Son of the Morning is seedy, and has lost all authority over the swell mob, which he vainly essays to recover by cracking Moloch's organ with his sceptre. Yet Sir Walter, blinded by his generous admiration of Dryden's great endowments, scruples not to say that "the scene of the consultation in Pandemonium, and of the soliloquy of Satan (not Satan, it seems, but Lucifer) on his arrival in the newly-created universe, would possess great merit did they not unfortunately remind us of the majestic simplicity of Milton." Oh, heavens and earth! the veritable Satan's soliloquy on Niphate's top!

"O thou, that with surpassing glory crown'd,
Look'st from thy sole dominion like the God
Of this new world; at whose sight all the stars
Hide their diminish'd heads, to thee I call,
But with no friendly voice, and add thy name,
O Sun! to tell thee how I hate thy beams,
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere,
Till pride and worse ambition threw me down,
Warring in heaven against heaven's matchless king!"

And so on for nearly a hundred lines, in many a changeful strain, arch-angelical all, of heaven-remembering passion, while ever, as thus he spoke,

"Each passion dimm'd his face,
Thrice changed with pale, ire, envy, and despair;
Which marr'd his borrow'd visage, and betray'd
Him counterfeit, if any eye beheld;
For heavenly minds, from such distempers foul
Are ever clear."

The soliloquy of Dryden's Lucifer consists of twenty lines, taken almost at hap-hazard from that of Milton's, jumbled together without consideration, and mangled from the most multitudinous blank verse ever written, into rhymes much beneath the average merit of one who, at times, could indeed command "the long-majestic march and energy divine."

Adam and Eve fare little better than the angels under his reforming fingers. Milton, you remember, makes Adam tell Raphael the story of his birth, in language charmful to affable arch-angel's ear, albeit tuned to harmonies in heaven. Dryden burlesques that revelation into the following soliloquy, supposed to have been the first words spoken by human lips. Adam at once opens his mouth in the style of the age of refinement. After the fall, how degenerate kept growing on our father tongue, till it reached its acme in the barbarous lingo of Shakspeare! And how suited, here, the thought to the speech! How natural the natural theology of both! He anticipates Descartes.

"Adam. What am I? or from whence? For that I am (rising)
I know, because I think; but whence I come,
Or how this frame of mine began to be,
What other being can disclose to me?
I move, and see, and speak, discourse, and know;
Though now I am, I was not always so.
Then that from which I was, must be before,
Whom, as my spring of being, I adore.
How full of ornament is all I view,
In all its parts! and seems as beautiful as new:
O goodly order'd earth! O Power Divine!
Of thee I am, and what I am is thine."

A day or two after, "a cloud descends with six angels in it, and when it is near the ground breaks, and, on each side, discovers six more." Raphael and Gabriel, sent to admonish and warn, discourse with Adam, the ten others standing at a distance. The conversation instantly assumes, and throughout sustains, an intensely controversial character, and Raphael and Gabriel, though two to one, and moreover angel versus man, are hard put to it on predestination and free-will. Adam is equipped with all the weapons of the schools, and uses them defensively, and most offensively, with all the dexterity of a veteran gladiator. But our disgust soon ceases, along with our deception; and we but see and hear John Dryden puzzling a brace of would-be wits at Wills's. The whole reads like a so-so bit of the Religio Laici. It ends thus: —

"Adam. Hard state of life! since heaven foreknows my will,
Why am I not tied up from doing ill?
Why am I trusted with myself at large,
When he's more able to sustain the charge?
Since angels fell, whose strength was more than mine,
'Twould then more grace my frailty to confine.
Foreknowing the success, to leave me free,
Excuses him, and yet supports not me!"

This from Adam yet sinless in Paradise!

The loves of Adam and Eve are not perhaps absolutely coarse – at least not so for Dryden – but they are of the earth earthy, and the earth is not of the mould of Eden. Aiblins – not coarse, but verily coquettish, and something more, is Eve. And she is too silly.

"From each tree
The feather'd kinds peep down to look on me;
And beasts with upcast eyes forsake their shade,
And gaze as if I were to be obey'd.
Sure I am somewhat which they wish to be,
And cannot. I myself am proud of me."

A day or two after their marriage, Eve gives Adam a long description of her first emotions experienced in the nuptial bower. More warmly coloured than in her simplicity she seems to be aware of; and Adam, pleased with her innocent flattery, treats her with an Epithalamium.

"When to my arms thou brought'st thy virgin love,
Fair angels sang our bridal hymn above:
The Eternal, nodding, shook the firmament!
And conscious nature gave her glad consent.
Roses unbid, and every fragrant flower
Flew from their stalks to strew thy nuptial bower:
The furr'd and feather'd kinds the triumph did pursue,
And fishes leap'd above the streams the passing pomp to view."

Hats off – bravo – bravo – hurra – hurra! – Of such stuff is made, in the "State of Innocence," Dryden's implicit criticism on the Paradise Lost of Milton.

Peace be with his shade! and its forgiveness with us. It is dangerous to unite the functions of judge and executioner. The imperturbable bosom of the seated judge calmly gives forth the award of everlasting Justice, and the mandate for the punishment that must expiate or appease her violated majesty. But the judge who is obliged to turn lictor, and must step down from the tribunal to take his criminal farther in hand, undoubtedly runs a risk, when he feels his hand in, of being carried too far by his excited zeal. After all, we have stayed ours. And now, having discharged a principal part of our office, what remains, but that we turn round, heal with our right hand what our left has inflicted, and lift up Glorious John to the skies? And lift him up we will; and with good reason; for we are far indeed from being done with this first era of deliberate and formal criticism in English literature. Extol him to the clouds and to the stars we will, but not now; for lo! where another great name beckons!

The close of the seventeenth century for ever shut the eyes of John Dryden upon the clouded and fluctuating daylight of our sublunary world. It may have been, in the same year, that a solitary boy, then twelve years old, wrote five stanzas which any man might have been glad to have written – and which you have by heart – an "Ode to Solitude" – conspicuous in the annals of English poetry as the dawn-gleam of a new sun that was presently to arise, and to fill the region that Dryden had left.

A feeble frame has dedicated many a student. This, with other causes about this time, took the boy, Alexander Pope, from schools where he learned little, to commit him, under the guardian more than guiding love of indulgent parents, to his own management of his own studies. And study he did – instinctively, eagerly, ramblingly through books of sundry kinds – helping himself as he could to their languages – devouring more than he digested – wedding himself to the high and gracious muses – seeking for, and finding, his own extraordinary powers – and diminishing the small quantity of delicate health which nature had put in his keeping. He resigned himself to die, and was dying, when a strong interposition, among other sanatary measures, transferred him from the back of Pegasus to that of an earth-born horse.

Pope had a gentleness of spirit, which showed itself in his filial offices to his father and mother – to her the most, ill the prolonged wearing out of a beloved life. It appears in kindly relations to his friends, in charities, in the scheme of his life – contentedness in a bounded, quiet existence, a seclusion among books, and trees, and flowers. His life flowed on peaceably and gently, like the noble river upon which his modest dwelling looked. Ill health, as we said, often dedicates a student. The constitutional feebleness from which he suffered, might doubly favour his mind; as often the more delicate frame harbours the greater spirit; and as inaptitude for active and rough sports, throws the solitary boy upon the companionship of books, and upon the energies, avocations, and pleasures of his own intelligence and fancy. The little poem of his boyhood, and the first of his manhood, prophesy his tenor of life, and his literary career.

A commanding power, a predominant star in English literature – you might say that the last century belonged to him. Dryden reigned over his contemporaries. Pope, succeeding, took dominion over his own time and the following. The pupil of Dryden, and gratefully proud to proclaim the greatness of his master, and to own all obligations, he moulded himself nevertheless upon a type in his own mind. In the school of Dryden he is an original master. Dryden is, properly speaking, without imitators. His manner proceeds from his own genius, and baffles transcribers. But Pope completed an art which could be learned, and he left a world full of copyists.