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points out several errors, as he regards them, in the system of education which the candidates for holy orders pass through, and in particular, objects to the undue proportion of time and attention required to be bestowed on what is called classical literature. "You shall have lads," says he, "that are arch knaves at the nominative case, and that have a notable quick eye at spying out the verb, who, for want of reading common and familiar books, shall understand no more of what is plain and easy, than a well-educated dog or horse. Or suppose they were taught as they might much easier be than what is commonly offered to them-the principles of arithmetic, geometry, and such alluring parts of learning, as these things undoubtedly would be much more useful, so much more delightful to them, than to be tormented with a tedious story, how Phaeton broke his neck, or how many nuts and apples Tityrus had for his supper." In this lively manner Eachard exposes the absurdity of making a purely classical education, as it is called, the object of the student's exclusive attention, and of supposing that a knowledge of two dead languages is sufficient to equip a man for the due discharge of the practical and active duties of life. Eachard's book made a considerable noise at the time of its appearance, and called forth a number of answerers, "whose memory," says Swift, "if he had not kept alive by replies, it would now be utterly unknown that he was ever answered at all."

In 1671, Eachard published a work entitled 'Mr Hobbes' State of Nature considered,' in which the philosopher is handled with a mixture of rudeness and pleasantry which singularly contrasts with his own "starched mathematical method."

In 1675, Eachard succeeded Dr John Lightfoot in the mastership of Catharine-hall, and in the year following was created D. D. by royal mandate. He died in July, 1697. His collected works were published by Davies, in 1774, in three volumes, 12mo.

John Wallis.

BORN A. D. 1616.-DIED A. D. 1703.

DR WALLIS, Savillian professor of Geometry in the university of Oxford, was the son of the Rev. John Wallis, rector of Ashford in Kent. In 1632 he was sent to Emanuel college, Cambridge, after having gone through the ordinary routine of school discipline at Tenterden, in his native county, and afterwards at Felsted, in Essex. His tutor at Cambridge was Anthony Burgess. In 1637, he proceeded B. A.; and in 1640, he took the degree of M. A.

Having taken orders, he lived about a year as chaplain in the house of Sir Richard Darby ; but we find him soon afterwards holding a fellowship of Queen's college, Cambridge, which he must have renounced on his marriage in 1644. He was appointed one of the secretaries to the Westminster assembly; and at this period he supplied a church in Ironmonger-lane, London. Shortly after the breaking out of the civil war, Wallis obtained a high reputation for his skill in interpreting secret cyphers. "About the beginning," says he, "of our civil wars, a chaplain of Sir William Waller showed me, as a curiosity, an intercepted

letter written in cypher, (and it was indeed the first thing I had ever seen of the kind;) and asked me, between jest and earnest, if I could make any thing of it? and was surprised, when I told him, perhaps I might. It was about ten o'clock when we rose from supper; and I withdrew to my chamber to consider of it. By the number of different characters in it, I judged it could be no more than a new alphabet; and before I went to bed I found it out; which was my first attempt upon decyphering: and I was soon pressed to attempt one of a different character, consisting of numerical figures, extending to four or five hundred numbers, with other characters intermixed, which was a letter from secretary Windebank, (then in France,) to his son in England; and was a cypher hard enough, not unbecoming a secretary of state. And when, upon importunity, I had taken a great deal of pains with it without success, I threw it by; but after some time I resumed it again, and had the good hap to master it. Being encouraged by this success beyond expectation, I have ventured upon many others, and seldom failed of any that I have attempted for many years; though of late the French methods of cyphers are grown so extremely intricate, that I have been obliged to quit many of them, without having patience to go through with them." Wallis's fame as a decypherer promised him ample employment from the government, even after the Revolution; but he laboured for thankless and forgetful masters. In a letter to the earl of Nottingham, who was at that time secretary to William III. dated August 4th, 1689, he says: "From the time your lordship's servant brought me the letter yesterday morning, I spent the whole day upon it, (scarce giving myself time to eat,) and most part of the night; and was at it again early this morning, that I might not make your messenger wait too long." In another: "I wrote to his lordship the next day, on account of the difficulty I at first apprehended, the papers being written in a hard cypher, and in a language of which I am not thoroughly master; but sitting close to it in good earnest, I have (notwithstanding that disadvantage) met with better success, and with more speed, than I expected. I have therefore returned to his lordship the papers which were sent me, with an intelligible account of what was there in cypher." Being hard pressed by the earl of Nottingham, to decipher some documents, he thus writes at the conclusion of one of his letters: "But, my lord, it is hard service, and I am quite weary. If your honour were sensible how much pains and study it cost me, you would pity me; and there is a proverb of not riding a free horse too hard." The doctor's hint was thrown away for this time: he was a little more plain in his next, wherein he says, "However I am neglected, I am not willing to neglect their majesties' service; and have therefore re-assumed the letters which I had laid by, and which I here send decyphered perhaps it may be thought worth little, after I have bestowed a great deal of pains upon them, and be valued accordingly; but it is not the first time that the like pains have been taken to as little purpose, by my lord," &c.—In another appears the following postscript, dated August 15, 1691: "But, my lord, I do a little wonder to receive so many fresh letters from your lordship without taking any notice of what I wrote in my last, which I thought would have been too plain to need a decypherer; certainly your other clerks are better paid, or else they would not serve you.' King William, however, became at last

John Dryden.

BORN A. D. 1631.-DIED A. D. 1700.

JOHN DRYDEN was born at the parsonage house of Aldwinkle, All Saints, in the county of Northampton, on or near the 9th of August, 1631. His family originally came from Cumberland, in which county, and in the adjoining districts, the name is frequently to be met with at the present day. His great-grandfather, we are told by Anthony Wood, was honoured with the friendship of Erasmus, and conferred the name of that illustrious scholar on his son, Erasmus Driden, (so the name was then spelt,) who was afterwards created a knight-baronet by James I. Of the poet's father, Erasmus Driden, the third son of this Sir Erasmus, little more is known than that he was a man of great probity, and acted as a justice-of-the-peace during the reign of Cromwell. It is worthy of note, that the religious creed of Dryden's family was puritanic. Even in the reign of Elizabeth, one of his ancestors had been noted for his puritanic notions, and from him they had descended unadulterated to the poet's father, while his mother was daughter to that zealous puritan, Sir Gilbert Pickering, whose name will be remembered by readers of history in conjunction with the gunpowder plot. We have thus to add another eminent name to the long catalogue of illustrious men, including Cudworth, Milton, Bolingbroke, and Locke, who received their education among the despised fanatics whose enmity to literature has formed so copious a theme for declamation with the bigots and sciolists of another party. John Dryden was the oldest of a large family. He received the rudiments of his education at Tichmarsh, near his father's residence, whence he was subsequently admitted a king's scholar at Westminster, then governed by the celebrated Dr Busby. The skill with which he executed the poetical translations prescribed at Westminster, gave some promise of future excellence, but on the whole it can scarcely be said that his youth afforded any strong indications of future greatness. Having obtained a Westminster scholarship, he removed to Trinity-college, Cambridge, in 1650. His tutor was the Rev. John Templer, an author of some learning and ability, though now forgotten. At college he earned little or no distinction, and although he took the degree of B. A., he neither proceeded M. A. nor obtained a fellowship. Whether he was a frequent votary of the muse during his academic career cannot now be known. Very little of what he wrote while at college has descended to our times, and that little is too outrageous an imitation of the metaphysical poetry then in vogue, to make us regret its scantiness.

He left the university in 1657, and went up to London, where he became secretary to his cousin, Sir Gilbert Pickering. His father was already dead, and had left him in possession of an estate which yielded him £60 a year, but small as this income was, his prospects in life were excellent. His kinsman and patron, Pickering, had been one of the judges of King Charles, and was at that time a member of Cromwell's privy council and lord-chamberlain of the protector's household. His uncle, Sir John Dryden, was also a zealous puritan, and in good odour

at Whitehall. In such circumstances it would have been easier to predict Dryden's rapid progress through the gradations of office, and his gradual rise to importance as a strenuous commonwealth's man and a zealous supporter of the covenant, than to foresee his becoming, under a different dynasty, the poet of princes and the prince of poets-the most subtle apologist of arbitrary power, and the most profligate wit of a licentious age. His first appearance as an author was in an elegy on the death of Oliver Cromwell, a production long afterwards remembered to his extreme mortification, though in point of sentiment and style it afforded a promise of regeneration from the false taste which had hitherto governed him, and was inferior to none of the publications in which that memorable event was lamented, save Waller's well known lines. The restoration overturned all his political prospects, but it was probably hailed by him with sincere joy as affording a release from the trammels of a party whose rigid morality must have been galling to one of his temperament. Be that as it may, he produced a gratulatory ode on the occasion, under the title of Astræa Redux,' and the coronation which followed again called forth the tribute of his incense. The best excuse that can be given for Dryden's sudden change of principle is, that he now found himself compelled to live by his wits, and such adventurers, like pirates, deem every thing fair game. He has not been the last instance of a poet starting in life as a rank republican, and ending by becoming the laurelled panegyrist of tyranny. His circumstances at this time must have been narrow, but his talents were rapidly introducing him to the notice of the court, and his election as a member of the Royal Society soon after its formation, is a proof of the reputation he had already acquired. Not to break the chain of our narrative, we may here mention, that the Victory over the Dutch,' and the 'Annus Mirabilis,' together with one or two short pieces, were the only purely poetical productions of Dryden's muse for a considerable time after the restoration. The Annus Mirabilis,' published in 1667, was the longest poem he had written, and in many respects the best, though exhibiting some of that fondness for metaphysical turns of thought and expression which characterised his earlier effusions. It is in the elegiac stanza, which his admiration of Davenant's Gondibert had made a favourite with him; and though sometimes ludicrous from the marriage of lofty epithets and extravagant similes to technical phraseology and ordinary events, it displays a command of language, and a magnificent profusion of illustration not altogether unworthy of its author's future fame.

Mere poetry, however excellent, was little better than a drug at this period. The drama was the only species of literature to which a fostering hand was given. We had indeed already in our language dramatic compositions to which the best writers of Greece and Rome had produced no equal, but our great masters in the art were distasteful to Charles and his dissolute courtiers, whose judgment led them to reject the exquisite poetry of the Elizabethan age, tainted as it no doubt was by an inexcusable coarseness, for the more polite, though in reality the more licentious, productions of the foreign stage. To them ribaldry was humour,―rant, sublimity,—and indelicacy, wit. In compliance with this prevailing taste, every writer who aimed at popular favour was compelled to lay aside all respect for our elder dramatists, and to imitate, to the best of his ability, French tragedy and Spanish comedy.

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Among the rest, Dryden, who, as a necessary consequence of his resolution to live by literature, betook himself to the stage, went with the stream. His first play, 'The Wild Gallant,' was acted in 1663, but with little success. In the same year was acted his next production, The Rival Ladies,' a tragi-comedy, of which the tragic parts were written in rhyme and the comic in blank verse. In a dedication to the earl of Orrery prefixed to The Rival Ladies' on its publication, Dryden strenuously defends this employment of rhyme, and, if we may judge from the success which attended his subsequent efforts in this style, the public assented to his arguments. It would be overstepping our province to define or describe the heroic play, of which The Rival Ladies' is a specimen, and to the cultivation of which Dryden now devoted himself. Let it suffice to say, that its essence consisted in the portraying of overstrained and unnatural passion, and that it resembled in many respects the old romances of chivalry. However contemptible the prize, a man of commanding talents must generally succeed in distancing his competitors, and we find accordingly, that of all the writers of heroic plays, Dryden was the most successful. His tyrants outranted all others, and his lovers were consumed by a flame ten times more devouring than any on record, even in fiction. In conjunction with his friend, Sir Robert Howard, he wrote at this time The Indian Queen,' a drama in the pure unsophisticated heroic style, the success of which was so remarkable, as to induce him to follow it up by another on a similar plan, entitled, 'The Indian Emperor,' in which were introduced the ghosts of several of the characters who had figured in The Indian Queen.' Though this play is deformed by many extravagances, it had an amazing run, and established its author in a superiority to his competitors which he maintained to his dying day.

Up to this period Dryden's dress and style of living had been such as suited the cast-off retainer of a defeated party, but with increasing fame he abandoned the "plain uniform suit of Norwich drugget," in which he is described as dressed, for more fashionable apparel, and, as his person and manners were engaging, he met with marked success in the intrigues which were reckoned essential to the character of a man of wit and fashion in those times. To these, however, an end was put by his marriage, in 1665, to the Lady Elizabeth Howard, the sister of his friend Sir Robert Howard, and daughter of the earl of Berkshire. His wife's family, though afterwards reconciled to the match, were at first strongly opposed to it, and it would have been well for Dryden's happiness if their opposition had been successful. He acquired no fame or fortune by the alliance, and found in his consort a woman whose weak mind and uncurbed passions embittered his future life.

In 1668 he published his essay on Dramatic Poesy, in which the use of rhyme and the superiority of the contemporary drama to that of all past times are stoutly defended. In point of ingenuity, apt illustration, and, occasionally, just criticism, this is one of his happiest etforts; and though it involved him in a disagreeable controversy with Sir Robert Howard, who took up arms in defence of blank verse, it had the effect of increasing his reputation with the public. It was at this time that he entered into his well-known engagement with the king's company of players, for whom he undertook to write three plays every year, on consideration of receiving one share and a quarter of the pro

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