Untitled

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4562, 20 April 1942, Page 3

revival was beginning to produce indirect but practical effects. The king developed a sudden enthusiasm for scientific research, and granted a charter to the Royal Society. The Greenwich Observatory was established; Halley made his famous discoveries in relation to the fluctuations of the tides; Hooke revealed to men the amazing possibilities of the microscope; Boyle inaugurated a new era in experimental chemistry; Wilkins revolutionised the study of philosophy; Sydenham changed the entire tone of medical research; Willis startled men by his investigations concerning the structure of the brain; Woodward founded the craft of mineralogy; John Ray raised zoology to the' rank of a science; and modern botany sprang into existence. “ But/’ as Green puts it in his colourful sketch of this sensational age, “ great as such names undoubtedly are, they are lost in the lustre of the name of Isaac Newton.”- He is the incarnation and personification of the spirit of the period. Dryden was at the heart and centre of these interlacing developments. May not this circumstance account, in some measure at least, for the extraordinary change which, at just about this time, marked his temper and outlook ? TARDY RECOGNITION

It is a thousand pities that nobody in chronicling the alluring details of that dramatic and eventful age, thought it worth his while to concentrate on Dryden. Among the countless scribblers of that prolific time no Boswell arose to lionise, idolise, or immortalise him. He had, of course, his admirers; but they were of sluggish blood and languid enthusiasm. When, in 1700, he died, all sorts of nice things were said about him; but nobody felt a sufficient regard for his memory to erect a monument in his honour. For twenty years it was talked about, but that was as far as it went.

At last Tope’s stinging jibe about Dryden’s “ rude and nameless stone ” awoke the conscience of the Duke of Buckingham, who removed the reproach of the years by presenting to the Abbey an extremely modest and extremely inexpensive memorial. But eleven years later the Duke's widow, ashamed of her husband’s paltry gift, had it removed, and, moved rather by solicitude for the honour of her own family than by any particular admiration for the poet, she erected the much more worthy monument that now adorns the tomb.

What, it is often asked, is Dryden’s place in literature ? fielding introduced into one of his novels an old lady who was the proud mother of twelve children. Between the birth of the sixth and that of the seventh there was, however, a gap of several years. The interval had the effect of dividing the family into two sections, a circumstance that led the good woman habitually to refer to the seventh child as “the biggest of the littleuns.” That is precisely Dryden’s place in the republic of English letters. He is the most considerable of our second-rate poets. Yet, in his later years he revealed such splendour of conception, such beauty of style, and such grace of diction that it is only fair to him to say that the zone that intervenes between him and the min of the front rank is a very Slender border indeed.