XXXVII.

His ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest;

His name a great example stands, to show, How strangely high endeavours may be blessed, Where piety and valour jointly go.

* This prophecy, like that announcing the final close of civil broils, in the preceding stanza, was not doomed to be accomplished. The contending factions resumed their struggles in a month after the Protector's death; his body was dragged from the burial-place of princes to be exposed on the gibbet; and his head placed on the end of Westminster Hall. There is, however, an unauthenticated story, that Cromwell, foreseeing the Restoration, had commanded his remains to be interred secretly, and by night, in the field of Naseby, as near as possible to the spot where his prowess had gained that bloody day; and that, by a piece of refined and ingenious malice, his friends caused the body of Charles to be deposited in the empty coffin, which had received the funeral honours rendered to the Protector; thus turning the disgrace, which the Royalists intended for the body of Cromwell, upon that of the royal martyr. The story may be found in the Harleian Miscellany, vol. ii. p. 269. But it is unworthy of credit, and seems to have been grounded upon the circumstance that Cromwell's body, being in a very corrupted state, was buried privately before the grand procession. The restoration of the house of Stuart seemed then to be an event much out of the reach of calculation, even to persons less sanguine than Cromwell.

ASTREA REDUX.

A POEM.

ASTRÆA REDUX.

А РОЕМ.

AFTER SO many years of civil war and domestic tyranny, the Restoration, an almost hopeless event, established the crown upon the head of the lawful successor, and the government upon its original footing. Dryden, among the numerous, I had almost said innumerable, bards,* who celebrated, or attempted to celebrate, this surprising event, distinguished himself by the following poem, to which he has given the apt name of Astræa Redux, from the hopes of justice and liberty returning with the lawful king.

The tone of praise which Dryden has adopted exhibits his usual felicity. There do not here occur any of these rants about the antiquity of the royal line,† and the indefeasible right of the lawful successor, which are the common topics of the herd, who offered poetical congratulation to the restored monarch. Dryden rejoices with the chastised triumph of one that had not forgot what it was to mourn.

* There are all shapes and forms of poetical addresses upon this occasion, by clergymen, and scholars, and persons of honour Among them, the verses by Waller are most celebrated, though inferior to those which he composed on the Protector's death. When Charles made this remark, the bard, with great felicity, reminded his Majesty that poets always excel in fiction. Among other topics, he enlarges on the "tried virtue, and the sacred word," of the witty monarch. It is singular, that, of the three distinguished poets who solemnised by elegy the death of the Protector, Dryden and Waller should have hailed the restoration of the Stuart line, and Sprat have favoured their most arbitrary aggressions upon liberty.

+ In "A Poem to His Most Excellent Majesty, Charles the Second, Ego beneficio tuo (Caesar) quos ante audiebam hodie vidi Deos: Nec feliciorem ullum vitæ meæ aut optavi aut sensi Diem, by H. Buston, Winton; together with another, by Hen. Bold, olim Winton," the royal genealogy is thus deduced from the primitive father of mankind

On which side shall we trace your stock? beyond

The loins of Egbert, or of Pharamond;

Now sunk in Adam's entrails it is found,

And thence shoots through the world to you all crowned

Vain boldness of the age (age of deceits),

Knew this, and therefore coined Præ-Adamites.

He looks back, as well as forwards; and it is upon the past sufferings of the people, and of the monarch, that he grounds the hope and expectation of their future happiness. The poet was perhaps sensible that the claim of loyal merit was rather new in his family and person, and ought not therefore to be expressed with the extravagant colouring of the Cavaliers. He ventures indeed upon prophecy, although past experience might have taught him it was dangerous ground. One prediction, however, has been (magno licet intervallo) accomplished to its fullest extent in our age

Your much-loved fleet shall with a wide command,
Besiege the petty monarchs of the land.

The poem exhibits the taste which belongs to the earlier class of Dryden's compositions, bearing the same marks of attachment to the style of Waller and Davenant. Some of the similes are brought out with singular ingenuity. Nothing can be more elegant than the turn he gives to the slow, gentle, and almost imperceptible manner in which the great change which he celebrates was accomplished—

While we

The effect did feel, but scarce the manner see.
Frosts, that constrain the ground, and birth deny
To flowers that in its womb expecting lie,
Do seldom their usurping power withdraw,

But raging floods pursue their hasty thaw;
Our thaw was mild, the frost not chased away,
But kindly lost in heat of lengthened day.

On the other hand, it is surely unnecessary to point out to the reader the confusion of metaphor, where virtue is said to dress the wounds of Charles with laurels ;* the impertinent antithesis of finding "light alone in dark afflictions ;" and the extravagance of representing the winds that wafted Charles as out of breath with joy. These, and other outrageous flights of wit, have been noticed and blamed by Johnson. I am not certain whether that great critic is equally just in severely censuring the passage in which there is a short allusion to Heathen mythology. † Where the tender, the passionate, or the sublime ought to prevail, an allusion to classical fiction seldom fails to interrupt the tone of feeling

His wounds he took, like Romans, on his breast,
Which by his virtue were with laurels drest.
With alga, who the sacred altar strews?
To all the sea-gods Charles an offering owes;

A bull to thee, Portunus, shall be slain;
A lamb to you, ye tempests of the main.