Conclusion

Political oratory requires not only an audience, but also a constituency. The orator speaks for others, voicing the convictions and aspirations of a nation, as Dryden had done in the 1660's, or of a party, as other poets were doing with increasing vigor toward the end of the seventeenth century. Immobilized by his past political commitments and isolated by his religion, Dryden has no constituency after 1688. Nor does he attempt to create one from the remnants of that "small but faithful Band" catalogued in Absalom and Achitophel . In the poems of the 1690's Dryden does not address the nation or the king, nor does he speak for a party. His most characteristic poems of this final period are not orations at all, but rather epistles to private individuals, usually other artists like Southerne, Congreve, Kneller, Motteux, and Granville. Although these poems have a delicate rhetoric of their own, the poet's voice is that of a private man, or more accurately, that of a public man now resigned to a private role. The immediate audience in each of these epistles is a private individual, who is elevated by achievement above Dryden's former—and now forsaken—audience, the nation as a whole.

Although he abandons the traditional oratorical functions of panegyric, advising the prince and pacifying

the people, Dryden continues until his death to draw on the store of topics provided by this genre. The conventions of panegyric are now absorbed into the metaphoric structure of his complimentary poems and used not to persuade but primarily to embellish. The transition from a functional to a purely formal kind of panegyric is already evident in Britannia Rediviva . Here Dryden, addressing at various times people, prince, and God, takes up convention after convention only to discard each one as politically useless. But in the same poem he also addresses Mary of Modena, and in this passage he experiments with less political versions of the familiar topics.

        But you, Propitious Queen, translated here,
From your mild Heav'n, to rule our rugged Sphere,
Beyond the Sunny walks, and circling Year:
You , who your Native Clymate have bereft
Of all the Virtues, and the Vices left,
Whom Piety, and Beauty make their boast  . . .^[49]

The occasion for celebration, the "Triumphant Day" (515) of the prince's birth, recalls the "triumphant Day" celebrated in Astraea Redux but also looks forward to the "Triumphant Day" of the Duchess of Ormonde's return to Ireland, celebrated in Dryden's poem from the preface to the Fables.^[50] On the one hand, Dryden praises Mary in terms very similar to those he had used to praise Charles II in the panegyrics of the 1660's. "Virtues unknown to these rough Northern climes / From milder heav'ns you bring, without their crimes . . ."^[51] On the

[49] Britannia Rediviva, 304–309.

[50] The similarity between this passage of Britannia Rediviva and the later poem addressed to the Duchess of Ormonde has been noted by Miner in the California Dryden, III, 481.

[51] To His Sacred Majesty, 89–90, Poems, I, 27.

other hand, Dryden forecasts the complimentary poetry of the 1690's by expressing the union of divine and human as a reconciliation, not of power and piety, but rather of beauty and piety. In the later panegyrics political concerns are subordinated to esthetic ones, as beauty takes the place of power. "Vouchsafe, Illustrious Ormond, to behold / What Pow'r the Charms of Beauty had of old . . ."^[52] No longer able to believe in the political union of actual and ideal, Dryden re-creates the conventions of panegyric to express this union esthetically.

To Her Grace The Dutchess Of Ormond completes the preface and dedication of Fables Ancient and Modern to the Duke of Ormonde and specifically introduces the first fable of the collection, "Palamon and Arcite, from Chaucer." Yet the metaphoric occasion establishes this poem as a descendant of the "return poems" that had been so popular earlier in the century.

    Now in this Interval, which Fate has cast
Betwixt Your Future Glories, and Your Past,
This Pause of Pow'r, 'tis  Irelands Hour to mourn;
While  England  celebrates  Your safe Return,
By which You seem the Seasons to command,
And bring our Summers back to their forsaken Land.
   The Vanquish'd Isle our Leisure must attend,
Till the Fair Blessing we vouchsafe to send;
Nor can we spare You long, though often we may lend.
The Dove was twice employ'd abroad, before
The World was dry'd; and she return'd no more . (90–100)

The seasonal imagery and the allusion to the flood recall Dryden's panegyrics of the 1660's, To His Sacred Majesty

[52] To Her Grace The Dutchess Of Ormond, With the following Poem of Palamon and Arcite, from Chaucer, lines 7–8, Poems, IV, 1463.

in particular. Moreover, this occasion is placed in the special context of a previous occasion when the Duchess had returned from England to Ireland; in his description of this analogous event Dryden develops the theme of restoration in significant detail. He begins by adapting a couplet from Astraea Redux . "The Land, if not restrain'd, had met Your Way, / Projected out a Neck, and jutted to the Sea."^[53] This revised version of the earlier "approaching cliffes of Albion" leads to a recollection of the evils of civil war.

    The Waste of Civil Wars, their Towns destroy'd,
Pales unhonour'd,  Ceres  unemploy'd,
Were all forgot; and one Triumphant Day
Wip'd all the Tears of three Campaigns away.
Blood, Rapines, Massacres, were cheaply bought,
So mighty Recompence Your Beauty brought.
   As when the Dove returning, bore the Mark
Of Earth restor'd to the long-lab'ring Ark,
The Relicks of Mankind, secure of Rest,
Op'd ev'ry Window to receive the Guest,
And the fair Bearer of the Message bless'd;
So, when You came, with loud repeated Cries,
The Nation took an Omen from your Eyes,
And God advanc'd his Rainbow in the Skies,
To sign inviolable Peace restor'd;
The Saints with solemn Shouts proclaim'd the new accord .
                                                                                (64–79)

The processional topos, introduced in the traditional context of a contrast between past and present, focuses the ideals of reconciliation and peace. Ireland is miraculously restored, but the human focus of the event is neither a

[53] To Her Grace The Dutchess Of Ormond, 51–52. The parallel has been noted by Kinsley, IV, 2065.

king nor a hero, but instead a beautiful woman. It is now beauty that brings redemption.

The challenge to the power of beauty in the poem takes the same form as it had in Dryden's very first published poem, the Hastings elegy.

    Now past the Danger, let the Learn'd begin
Th' Enquiry, where Disease could enter in;
How those malignant Atoms forc'd their Way,
What in the faultless Frame they found to make their Prey?
Where ev'ry Element was weigh'd so well,
That Heav'n alone, who mix'd the Mass, could tell
Which of the Four Ingredients could rebel;
And where, imprison'd in so sweet a Cage,
A Soul might well be pleas'd to pass an Age.
And yet the fine Materials made it weak;
Porcelain by being Pure, is apt to break:
Ev'n to Your Breast the Sickness durst aspire;
And forc'd from that fair Temple to retire,
Profanely set the Holy Place on Tire.
In vain Your Lord like Young  Vespasian mourn'd,
When the fierce Flames the Sanctuary burn'd:
And I prepar'd to pay in Verses rude
A most detested Act of Gratitude:
Ev'n this had been Your Elegy, which now
Is offer'd for Your Health, the Table of my Vow . (111–130)

This episode of illness, metaphorically defined as rebellion, adds a final dimension to the poem's demonstrative theme of restoration and introduces the deliberative theme that brings the poem to a close, putting the ideal in touch with the actual.

    The soft Recesses of Your Hours improve
The Three fair Pledges of Your Happy Love:
 other Parts of Pious Duty done,

you owe Your  Ormond nothing but a Son:
To fill in future Times his Father's Place,
And wear the Garter of his Mother's Race . (165–168)

Beauty is qualified by piety, as Dryden invokes the traditional virtue of the consort in panegyric, fecundity. The "Pious Duty" of the Duchess, the only obligation of her power, is to produce a male heir. As in earlier panegyrics by Claudian, More, Daniel, and in Dryden's own To His Sacred Majesty, present ideals are here extended into the future by allusion to the responsibilities of marriage and parentage. The difference is that the anticipated birth of this son, however significant for the Ormonde family, will have no symbolic significance for the nation as a whole. Having excluded that larger audience from his concern, Dryden preserves the traditional form of panegyric but relinquishes its traditional function.

This does not mean, however, that Dryden has relinquished his political principles. Although he abandons public oratory in favor of addresses to private individuals, Dryden nevertheless clings to the essential values of traditional panegyric, reconciliation and peace. These ideals, defined in the metaphors of To Her Grace The Dutchess Of Ormond, are recorded more directly, for one final time, in To my Honour'd Kinsman, John Driden . The unifying idea of the poem is concord, expressed by the life of Dryden's cousin, who has studied "Peace" and shunned "Civil Rage."^[54] Although the vocabulary of the poem reflects the conditions of William's reign, the normative values are fundamentally the same as those expressed four decades earlier.

[54] To my Honour'd Kinsman, John Driden, Of Chesterton In The County Of Huntingdon, Esquire, 3, Poems, IV, 1529.

A Patriot, both the King and Country serves;
Prerogative, and Privilege preserves:
Of Each, our Laws the certain Limit show;
One must not ebb, nor t' other overflow:
Betwixt the Prince and Parliament we stand;
The Barriers of the State on either Hand:
May neither overflow, for then they drown the Land.
When both are full, they feed our bless'd Abode;
Like those, that water'd once, the Paradise of God . (171–179)

Here "we"—Dryden the poet and Driden the MP—stand "Betwixt the Prince and Parliament," defining the limits of royal and popular power. It is this position between the people and the prince that Dryden had occupied from 1660 to 1688 and that he now describes as the stance of a "Patriot."

When Dryden stepped down, without invective, from his position as poet-orator, he left the way clear for a host of younger poets ready and willing to celebrate the accession of the new Dutch king. The significance of Dryden's achievement as a panegyrist can be measured by considering briefly the panegyrics of his successors. The best examples for comparison are Swift's Ode to the King on his Irish Expedition and Addison's To the King . Swift, like Dryden, was influenced by the Pindaric model for panegyric; Addison, also like Dryden, was influenced by the epic concept of the genre. The successors of Dryden are, in truth, the descendants of Cowley and Waller.

Swift's ode is patently modeled on Cowley's Ode Upon His Majesties Restoration and Return . It has been recognized in particular that Swift's famous celebration of Louis XIV's fistula in ano is a reductive version of Cowley's treatment of Cromwell. Cowley, it may be recalled, had written of Cromwell in astronomical metaphors.

       Wher's now that  Ignis Fatuus  which e're while
          Mis-lead our  wandring Isle?
           Wher's the  Imposter Cromwel gon?
       Where's now that  Falling-star his  Son?
      Where's the  large Comet  now whose raging flame
     So fatal to our  Monarchy became?
     Which o're our heads in such proud horror stood,
     Insatiate with our  Ruine and our  Blood?
      The  fiery Tail  did to vast length extend;
     And twice for want of  Fuel did expire,
     And twice renew'd the dismal  Fire;
Though long the  Tayl  we saw at last its end .^[55]

In Swift this becomes:

That  Restless Tyrant, who of late
Is grown so impudently Great,
     That Tennis-Ball of Fate;
This Gilded Meteor which flyes
As if it meant to touch the Skies;
    For all its boasted height,
For all its Plagiary Light,
  Took its first Growth and Birth
From the worst Excrements of Earth;
Stay but a little while and down again 'twill come,
And end as it began, in Vapour, Stink, and Scum.
    Or has he like some fearful Star appear'd?
Long dreaded for his  Bloody Tail and  Fiery Beard,
     Transcending Nature's ordinary Laws,
        Sent by just Heaven to threaten Earth
        With War, and Pestilence, and Dearth,
Of which it is at once the Prophet and the Cause .^[56]

[55] Cowley, Ode Upon His Majesties Restoration and Return, 207–218.

[56] Jonathan Swift, Ode to the King on His Irish Expedition, lines 119–135, Swift's Poems, ed. Harold Williams, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1937),I, 10.

Louis XIV here assumes the characteristic attributes of the villain in panegyric. He is a "Restless Tyrant" who considers himself above the "Laws," the prophet of a "Cause" that brings to earth the evils of plague and war. In contrast Swift celebrates William as the poem's hero, who combines "Valour" and "Virtue."

     This made the Ancient Romans to afford
    To  Valour  and to  Virtue the  same Word:
To shew the Paths of both must be together trod,
    Before the  Hero can commence  a God. (27–30)

William thus emerges as the Herculean hero, whom Swift praises, however, far more for his valor than for his virtue.

          For strait I saw the Field maintain'd,
    And what I us'd to laugh at in  Romance,
     And thought too great ev'n for effects of Chance.c
The Battel almost by   Great William's  single Valour gain'd  . . .
                                                                                          (61–64)

Comparing him to Tamburlaine as well as Hercules, Swift celebrates William as a military hero of titanic proportions. "He trampled on this Haughty Bajazet, / Made him his Footstool in the War, / And a Grim Slave to wait on his Triumphal Car" (42–44). Leaving the traditional conjunction of valor and virtue far behind, Swift expands the heroic dimension of Pindaric panegyric beyond anything dreamed of by Cowley.

Addison does the same for Waller's conception of heroic narrative. Although he begins by describing William as the "auspicious Prince," Addison defines William's duty in distinctly imperialist terms: "To bind the

Tyrants of the Earth with laws, / And fight in ev'ry Injur'd nation's cause . . ."^[57] To develop the narrative Addison borrows his topics directly from Waller.

      Where-e'er the Waves in restless errors rowle,
The Sea lies open now to either Pole:
Now may we safely use the  Northern gales,
And in the  Polar Circle  spread our sails;
Or deep in  Southern  climes, Secure from wars,
New Lands explore, and sail by Other stars;
Fetch Uncontroll'd each labour of the Sun,
And make the product of the World our own .^[58]

This passage, for example, is an elaboration of a quatrain from A Panegyric To My Lord Protector : "The taste of hot Arabia's spice we know, / Free from the scorching sun that makes it grow; / Without the worm, in Persian silks we shine; / And, without planting, drink of every vine."^[59] Against this background, Addison portrays William as a hero more active than any of Waller's.

     Thus when the forming Muse wou'd copy forth
A perfect Pattern of Heroick worth,
She sets a Man Triumphant in the field,
O'er Giants cloven down, and Monsters kill'd,
Reeking in blood, and smeer'd with dust and sweat,
Whilst Angry Gods conspire to make him Great . (91–96)

William now appears as the contemporary hero of an epic poem.

Both Swift and Addison thus cut themselves free from

[57] Joseph Addison, To the King, lines 57–58, The Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Addison, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 2 vols. (London, 1914), I, 42.

[58] Addison, To the King, 115–122.

[59] Waller, A Panegyric To My Lord Protector, 57–60.

the tradition that had anchored Dryden. In both of these poems the original, oratorical function of panegyric is obscured by its novel form. Whereas Dryden had adapted the transformations of Cowley and Waller in order to emphasize the themes of restoration and limitation, his successors adopt these innovations for their own sake. Verse oratory thus gives way to the rising popularity of the Pindaric ode and the heroic narrative, both of which endure well beyond Swift and Addison. Shadwell, in his later bursts of laureate verse, chose the form of the ode, and in this choice he was followed by a long and inglorious line of successors. Indeed, by the mid-eighteenth century the genre is treated with so little seriousness that Colley Cibber had to pretend his birthday odes were written in jest.^[60] Although the heroic narrative never became so popular or infamous as the ode, it too was taken as an especially appropriate form for panegyric. Thus Elijah Fenton in his eighteenth-century edition of Waller observes that the heroic narrative of Charles I's escape at Santander can be taken as a model "panegyric." "This Poem may serve as a model for those who intend to succeed in Panegyric; in which our Author illustrates a plain historical fact with all the graces of poetical fiction."^[61] The seventeenth-century transformation has thus become the eighteenth-century tradition.

To see how this formal shift toward Pindaric ode and

[60] This, at least, was Johnson's opinion. See James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1934), I, 402.

[61] Elijah Fenton, ed. The Works of Edmund Waller, Esq. in Verse and Prose (London, 1729), p. iii. This passage is cited by Ruth Nevo, The Dial of Virtue, p. 21.

heroic narrative signifies a basic shift in the function of panegyric as well, we can compare Fenton's prescription for panegyric with Dryden's." [On] all occasions of praise, if we take the Ancients for our patterns, we are bound by prescription to employ the magnificence of words, and the force of figures, to adorn the sublimity of thoughts. Isocrates amongst the Grecian orators, and Cicero, and the younger Pliny, amongst the Romans, have left us their precedents for our security."^[62] Dryden adorns "the sublimity of thoughts," whereas his successors illustrate "a plain historical fact." Traditionally the panegyrist's concern is for the nation's future. Although Dryden uses the past as a source of contrast, illustration, analogy, or warning, his panegyrics are designed to ensure the future stability and harmony of the nation. His is a poetry of ideals. The panegyrists who succeed him are concerned instead with the immediate past. Although Swift and Addison dress up contemporary history in the mirror of Cowley and Waller, theirs is essentially a poetry of facts. Clearly, moreover, it was Fenton's rather than Dryden's conception of this genre that Johnson had in mind when he objected to Restoration panegyric. "Charles had yet only the merit of struggling without success, and suffering without despair. A life of escapes and indigence could supply poetry with no splendid images."^[63] Originally a kind of oratory, panegyric has become a kind of journalism.

It is this eighteenth-century conception of panegyric,

[62] "Dedicatory letter prefixed to Eleonora," Essays, II, 61.

[63] Samuel Johnson, The Life of Waller, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1905), I, 272.

"plain historical fact" embellished with "poetical fiction," that invites satiric inversion. If panegyric must now depend on the actual deeds of monarchs and statesmen, it is clear that the genre cannot always be taken seriously, and cannot often be taken seriously in the Georgian age. By exposing the discrepancies between "fiction" and "fact," political satirists like Pope and Byron destroy panegyric once and probably for all. The comic-satiric effect of Pope's epistle "to Augustus" depends heavily on the actual facts of George II's rule. Whereas Jonson, Drummond, Waller, and Dryden had all compared the various rulers of the seventeenth century to Caesar Augustus, thus defining an ideal of successful government, Pope suggests that such "Praise undeserv'd is scandal in disguise."^[64] Likewise in Byron's The Vision of Judgment, the fate of George III at the gates of Heaven depends on his "deeds" as king. "He is what you behold him, and his doom / Depends upon his deeds . . ."^[65] Whereas the panegyrist attempts to unite actual and ideal, the individual man with the optimus princeps, the satirist subverts the genre by reveling in the gulf between traditional fiction and contemporary fact.

Both Pope and Byron extend their ridicule to include the authors as well as the subjects of panegyric. Toward

[64] Alexander Pope, The first Epistle of The Second Book of Horace Imitated, line 413, Imitations of Horace, ed. John Butt (New Haven and London, 1939), in the Twickenham Edition of Pope's Poetical Works, TV, 229.

[65] George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Vision of Judgment, stanza 69, lines 1–2, The Works of Lord Byron: Poetry, ed. E. H. Coleridge, 7 vols. (London, 1898–1904), IV, 509.

the end of his epistle, Pope steps from behind his ironic mask to belittle those poets who had written in praise of kings.

And when I flatter, let my dirty leaves
(Like Journals, Odes, and such forgotten things
As Eusden, Philips, Settle, writ of Kings)
Cloath spice, line trunks, or flutt'ring in a row,
Befringe the rails of Bedlam and Sohoe . (415–419)

The "multo-scribbling Southey" is given even harsher treatment by Byron, who allows George to slip into heaven during the confusion caused by the recitation of the laureate's eulogy. We now have two "parties" of poets: the "court" poets like Eusden and Southey, and the "country" poets like Pope and Byron. The shift from an oratorical to a journalistic mode is thus accompanied by a movement toward polemic, toward strictly party verse. Moreover, it is quite evident that if facts are the issue, then the rhetorical advantage rests entirely with the opposition. Factually, it is far more difficult to prove that the present is a golden age than to prove that it is not.

Although party verse was often ferocious during Dryden's lifetime, Dryden himself cannot be considered a political polemicist. He persistently, and sometimes against great odds, attempts to speak for and to the whole nation, not for any faction or extreme. Behind this effort is the heritage of panegyric and its traditional purpose, national reconciliation. Even Dryden's political satires are typically conciliatory. His ironic versions of panegyric do not, like those of Pope and Byron, emphasize the gap between actual and ideal. Rather they expose the

danger of perverting the traditional ideals to serve factional goals.

As the seventeenth century comes to an end, however, and the national orator is supplanted by the party polemicist, Dryden's inherited conception of the public poet's responsibility to the whole nation becomes an anachronism. In place of traditional panegyric the eighteenth century offers a kind of public poetry that is at once factual and partisan. The post-Revolution verse of writers like Halifax and Prior even inspired William Courthope to devote a chapter in A History of English Poetry to "The Whig Victory: Panegyrical Poetry."^[66] But Courthope's concept of "whig panegyric," however familiar it may have been to Pope, would surely have seemed a contradiction in terms to Dryden. For Dryden "panegyric" continues to mean what it had meant to writers like Pliny and Erasmus, More and Jonson, a kind of literature that attempts to unite all (pan ) the people (gyris ) behind an ideal monarch. The political poets who succeed Dryden have much more realistic, and therefore much more limited ambitions.

[66] W. J. Courthope, A History of English Poetry, 6 vols. (London, 1905), V, 20–43. Courthope's study has since been extended much later into the eighteenth century by Cecil A. Moore, "Whig Panegyric Verse: A Phase of Sentimentalism," in Moore, Backgrounds of English Literature, 1700–1760 (Minneapolis, 1953). For further consideration of "panegyric" in the eighteenth century, see Kenneth Hopkins, The Poets Laureate (London, 1954).