I.
Rhetorical Definition of Poet and Audience

The historical pessimism of Dryden's last works is well known;^[8] it is most clearly expressed in the Dedication of Examen Poeticum : "No Government has been, or ever can be, wherein Time-Servers and Blockheads will not be uppermost. The persons are only chang'd, but the same juglings in State, the same Hypocrisie in Religion, the same Self-Interest, and Mis-management, will remain for ever. Blood and Money will be lavish'd in all Ages, only for the Preferment of new Faces, with old Consciences."^[9] Of course, Dryden did not in 1692 suddenly renounce a progressive view of history for a cyclical or a static one. He had used various views in his earlier work for various rhetorical purposes. Annus Mirabilis concludes with a prophecy of English commercial empire, The Medall

with a hypothetical prediction of a new cycle of civil war followed by restoration. The Dedication of Don Sebastian begins, as we have seen, with a vision of eternally recurring revolutions. In these works, however, Dryden is urging his audience to embrace the good or escape the ill he predicts by adopting a certain political policy—support for Charles or resistance to William. In Examen Poeticum we have neither progress nor hypothetical cycles but permanent stasis about which nothing can be done.

When he comes to praise the political behavior of his patrons, he is careful to place it in a historical context that confirms this view. In the Dedication of the Georgics , he compares Chesterfield to Scipio. The Roman retired when the public "began to grow restiff and ungovernable"; and the Englishman, knowing that "Ingratitude is not confin'd to Commonwealths," never entered public business at all.^[10] The gesture is familiar from the Dedication of King Arthur , where Halifax is praised for retiring like Cicero in troubled times. But whereas in Halifax's case Dryden's language—"the torrent of the people," "the riot of a multitude"—suggests a specific parallel between the Roman Civil Wars and the English Revolution, here the reference includes a general "ingratitude" that afflicts all political systems in all ages. In the Dedication of the Pastorals , Clifford's constancy is compared with that of his ancestors of "the Ancient House of Cumberland " during the War of the Roses: "Your Forefathers have asserted the Party which they chose 'till death, and dy'd for its defence in the Fields of Battel" (p. 872). Again there is no specific parallel: the seventeenth century is similar to the fifteenth only in providing no less exacting trials of political constancy. Even the more conventional heroism of the duke of Ormond is presented in this dreary universal context: his military skills are praiseworthy "since the perverse Tempers of Mankind, since Oppression on one side, and Ambition on the other, are sometimes the unavoidable Occasions of War" (p. 1441).

Political parallel, Dryden's usual instrument for attacking William's government immediately after the Revolution, fades from his work after 1692. If all political systems are equally vicious, there can be no point in drawing specific comparisons between one's own and those of history, myth, or fable. Instead, Dryden favors general statements that suggest the congruence of politics in his own age with the universal condition. In "To My

Honour'd Kinsman," he remarks that private gentlemen take more pleasure in hunting than "Princes" who "once on slipp'ry Thrones were plac'd; / And chasing, sigh to think themselves are chas'd" (ll. 69–70). Levine sees in these lines an "attitude of near-exhaustion" that "cannot brook weighing the possible differences between reigns—all is of a piece, each age will run the same round."^[11] Similarly general remarks are to be found throughout Dryden's late work. As the countess of Abingdon loved her husband and creatures love their god, "So Subjects love just Kings, or so they shou'd."^[12] In the Preface to Fables , having anticipated certain points that he had meant to save for later, Dryden compares himself to "most Kings, who love to be in Debt , are all for present Money, no matter how they pay it afterwards" (p. 1450). There are dozens of such brief innuendos, all of which suggest that the crimes of William and his supporters are only contemporary examples of behavior typical of all kings and subjects. This typicality makes Dryden's opponents not less criminal but more contemptible.

Even the more extended passages of historical analysis in Dryden's prose have the same generalizing and belittling effect. His account in the Dedication of the Aeneis of the civil conflicts that led to the destruction of the Roman commonwealth and the rule of Augustus has, as Steven Zwicker has shown, a clear reference to similar conflicts between rebels and royalists, Whigs and Tories, which for Dryden led to the destruction of the English constitution and the usurpation of William.^[13] It does not, however, form a political parallel. The civil wars begin when "Marius and Cinna , like Captains of the Mobb, under the specious Pretence of Publick Good, and of doing Justice on the Oppressours of their Liberty, reveng'd themselves, without Form of Law, on their private Enemies" (p. 1012); and Sylla, when he opposed them in the cause of the nobles, also "had nothing but Liberty and Reformation in his Mouth" and similarly "Sacrific'd the Lives, and took the Estates of all his Enemies, to gratifie those who brought him to Power" (p. 1012). Both sides bear some likeness to the rebels of the 1640s, the Whigs of the 1680s, and the Williamites of the 1690s, all of whom, for Dryden, pursued private ends under the pretence of public reforms. But since both sides are equally criminal, it is impossible to associate them with those recent conflicts in which Dryden had eagerly supported what he considered the better side.

He places specific topical allusions within a generalizing frame. After the wars, Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar "found the Sweets of Arbitrary Power" and ruled as "Patriots for their own Interest," until Caesar overthrew Pompey and "became a Providential Monarch" (p. 1013). The operative phrases here, "arbitrary power" and "providential monarch," apply equally to Cromwell and to William, since obedience to both was justified as concurrence in the will of heaven; but the series of events that led to Caesar's dictatorship lack any clear application. Dryden had often enough displayed his talent for adapting the details of history to the present: his failure to do so here is, I think, intentional. His purpose is not to trace correspondences between specific causes and results in the manner of Don Sebastian ; it is rather to suggest that political systems inevitably rise and fall by the operation of the same human passions, are explained and excused by the same shifts and pretences, and so occupy a level far beneath that to which Dryden as a poet wishes to lay claim.

Perhaps the clearest indication of a change in Dryden's rhetorical concerns after 1692 is his last play, Love Triumphant , performed in 1694. Unlike Don Sebastian, King Arthur , and Cleomenes , the action involves no contested throne: Veramond, the cruel king of Arragon, seems to have a successive title. There is a competition between two princes for Veramond's daughter, but unlike the competition between Jupiter and Amphitryon for Alcmena, it is not given political meaning. The unworthy candidate, Garcia, is a relatively minor figure, and the worthy one, Alphonso, is blocked first by the supposition that the woman in question is his sister, then by Veramond's disapproval. Yet a number of passages contrasting the behavior of Veramond and Alphonso do have topical meaning. Veramond and Ramirez, king of Castile, went to war without good reason, and Ramirez has grown contrite:

A trivial accident begot this war;
Some paltry bounds of ill-distinguished earth,
A clod that lay betwixt us unascertained,
And royal pride, on both sides, drew our swords:
Thus monarchs quarrel, and their subjects bleed.^[14]

The lesson accords with opposition protest against the war between France and the allies, but it is generalized to include all

monarchs and subjects. Alphonso, who has captured Ramirez in battle, pleads with Veramond for his release:

Think on the slippery state of human things,
The strange vicissitudes, and sudden turns
Of war, and fate recoiling on the proud,
To crush a merciless and cruel victor.
(P. 385)

Veramond is inexorable. He retains over Ramirez

The right of conquest; for, when kings make war,
No laws betwixt two sovereigns can decide,
But that of arms, where fortune is the judge,
Soldiers the lawyers, and the bar the field.
(P. 386)

Alphonso has allowed Ramirez to keep his sword as a "mark of sovereign justice" that should never "be wanting to a monarch"; Veramond again appeals to raw force: "Then, when he lost the power, he lost the claim, and marks of sovereign right."

The good Alphonso acts on a principle exactly opposite to this. When, later in the play, Ramirez advises him to make war on Veramond, he refuses, thus exposing himself to capture and execution:

You've set an image of so vast destruction
Before my sight, that reason shuns the approach,
And dares not view the fearful precipice.
. . . . . . . . . .
What have the people done, the sheep of princes,
That they should perish for the shepherd's fault?
They bring their yearly wool, to clothe their owners;
And yet, when bare themselves, are culled for slaughter.
Should I do this, what could the wolf do more
Than what the master did?
(P. 446)

Many of William's crimes are involved in this contrast: his reliance on force over justice, his prosecution of an expensive, bloody, and unnecessary war; but they are presented within a universal context of kings and people, sovereigns, princes, soldiers, and subjects, the terms of political conflict in all ages.

So far this seems near enough to personal meditation: it may be argued that Dryden could not hope to inspire political opposition to William through a few incidental reflections on kings and subjects. It has, however, a public, rhetorical purpose: its effect is to excuse Dryden's apparently inconsistent political behavior, since sub species aeternitatis politics has little meaning, and more importantly to degrade politics in general and to elevate poetry, to portray the poet Dryden as one who sees all things, including current politics, clearly and completely from on high. Since 1687 Dryden had had to create an audience to replace what he had lost by his conversion and James's misdeeds. In The Hind and the Panther, Don Sebastian , and Amphitryon he writes in the fading hope that his principles will be vindicated by history; he warns the Williamites that their triumph will be brief and contrasts their inconstancy with his own firm adherence to the principles that preserved the nation and the monarchy during the exclusion crisis. In King Arthur and Cleomenes he attempts to regain a place in the national debate without compromising his politics or his religion. After Cleomenes he seems to have realized that as a political writer he was irreparably discredited, and to have abandoned the struggle. As a poet, however, he could still claim his audience's respect and attention; and therefore it is exclusively as a poet that he presents himself after 1692, even in such politically committed works as "To My Honour'd Kinsman." In the Postscript of the Aeneis he appeals directly to those who "without considering the Man, have been Bountiful to the Poet" (p. 1425); the same appeal runs through the whole of his late work. Repeatedly he suggests that his poetic achievement only is permanent and important: in his personal circumstances and political behavior he merely recapitulates patterns inherent in the human condition—as do also William III, his supporters, and his opponents. His pointed references to the crimes of the government are carefully placed within the universal vision that only a poet might claim.

In an interesting series of articles Thomas H. Fujimura has claimed that in his late works Dryden grew "strongly personal, and often private" and that he expressed his "personal anguish" in a "generalized and universalized" form because of his commitment to "neoclassical" literary strategies.^[15] Fujimura's sense of Dryden's presentation of personal circumstances in a universalized form is, I think, quite accurate; but the purpose of this self-presentation is

not expressive but rhetorical. Dryden avoids the confessional and invokes the universal not out of some neoclassical reflex, but as part of a deliberate rhetorical strategy. He assumes in his readers a knowledge of his personal circumstances and beliefs and encourages them to place that knowledge in the transcendent context he provides them, in the hope that they will consider the poet rather than the man. All of Dryden's postrevolutionary works are filled with references to his advanced age and broken health, his quixotic loyalty to James, his poverty and his sufferings; but in the works after 1692, these references are placed in a context that aligns all poets in all ages, and so deflects interest from the private man to the public poet. He offers to his patron Clifford "the wretched remainder of a sickly Age, worn out with Study, and oppress'd by Fortune: without other support than the Constancy and Patience of a Christian" (Dedication of Virgil's Pastorals , p. 869). This may seem mere personal complaint; it is, however, prefaced by an elaborate metaphor in which Charles II appears as Augustus, Clifford's father as Pollio, and Dryden as Virgil; and it is followed by a sort of inverted comparison of Dryden's career with Virgil's; Virgil wrote the Pastorals in youth, Dryden translates them at an age more advanced than that at which Virgil died. He places his relations with Clifford in a similarly broad context: among the Romans "Patronage and Clientship always descended from the Fathers to the Sons; and . . . the same Plebeian Houses, had recourse to the same Patrician Line, which had formerly protected them: and follow'd their Principles and Fortunes to the last. So that I am your Lordship's by descent, and part of your Inheritance" (p. 872). In the Dedication of the Georgics , Dryden again mentions his age; then describes the effects of Horace's and Virgil's age on their abilities; then the effects of age on the abilities of mankind in northern climates; and he concludes by applying this observation to Chesterfield, also an old man. These "confessional" passages are aggressively impersonal. Their effect is to correct any tendency in the reader toward considering Dryden as an individual with a particular past and a potentially objectionable set of beliefs: we are to see his life within a pattern that necessarily orders the lives of all poets and all men.

In the remarks on the inevitability of political corruption quoted above from the Dedication of Examen Poeticum , Dryden's main purpose is again to invite us to see him rather as a poet than

a political agent. "Why am I grown Old," he asks, "in seeking so barren a Reward as Fame? The same Parts and Application, which have made me a Poet, might have rais'd me to any Honours of the Gown, which are often given to Men of as little Learning and less Honesty than my self." Dryden then launches his attack on government, and comments,

These Considerations, have given me a kind of Contempt for those who have risen by unworthy ways. I am not asham'd to be Little, when I see them so Infamously Great. Neither, do I know, why the Name of Poet should be Dishonourable to me; if I am truly one, as I hope I am; for I will never do any thing, that shall dishonour it. The Notions of Morality are known to all Men: None can pretend Ignorance of those Idea's which are In-born in Mankind: and if I see one thing, and practise the contrary, I must be Disingenuous, not to acknowledge a clear Truth, and Base to Act against the light of my own Conscience. For the Reputation of my Honesty, no Man can question it, who has any of his own: For that of my Poetry, it shall either stand by its own Merit; or fall for want of it. Ill Writers are usually the sharpest Censors.
(Pp. 363–364)

He proceeds with a lengthy attack on bad critics, who are described as rebels against and usurpers of poetic merit. Dryden suggests that he should be judged not by political standards, but by moral and poetic ones. His renunciation of politics is made to date not from the Revolution, but from his youth, when he chose the poetic vocation over the clerical.

But Dryden's presentation of himself as a poet does more than deflect our interest from his disastrous political career. It serves also to suggest the clarity of his vision and the permanent value of his ideals. His tendency in his earlier postrevolutionary work to claim as a poet a position outside and above the contemporary becomes even more pronounced after 1692. In the Dedication of Eleanora , for example, he presents himself as a sort of Homeric bard. He is one of the "Priests of Apollo" who "must wait till the God comes rushing on us, and invades us with a fury, which we are not able to resist: which gives us double strength while the Fit continues, and leaves us languishing and spent at its departure."^[16] In Eleanora he claims to have "prophecy'd beyond my natural power"; he has been "transported by the multitude and variety of my Similitudes" and ignored the restraint of judgment, like "the

inimitable Pindar , who stretches on these Pinnions out of sight, and is carried upward, as it were, into another World" (pp. 231–). This forthrightly vatic persona is, I think, unprecedented in Dryden's prose and very unlike his usual assumption of gentlemanly diffidence and ease. The same sense of elevation pervades the poem itself.^[17] To describe something as apparently prosaic as Eleanora's "prudent Management" of her income, Dryden reaches toward the ultralunary:

Thus Heav'n, though All-sufficient, shows a thrift
In his Oeconomy, and bounds his gift:
Creating for our Day, one single Light;
And his Reflection too supplies the Night:
Perhaps a thousand other Worlds, that Iye
Remote from us, and latent in the Sky
Are lighten'd by his Beams, and kindly nurst;
Of which our Earthly Dunghil is the worst.
(ll. 75–82)

The countess of Abingdon's domestic economy is forgotten in this grand vision of transcendence. Indeed the poem gives us no clear idea of Eleanora's personality; the emphasis throughout is on the distance between the earthly and the celestial. Even when Dryden commands his muse to restrict itself to earth, it soon reascends:

Muse, down again precipitate thy flight;
For how can Mortal Eyes sustain Immortal Light!
But as the Sun in Water we can bear,
Yet not the Sun, but his Reflection there,
So let us view her here, in what she was;
And take her Image, in this watry Glass:
Yet look not ev'ry Lineament to see;
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
For where such various Vertues we recite,
'Tis like the Milky-Way, all over bright,
But sown so thick with Stars, 'tis undistinguish'd Light.
(ll. 134–145)

Though he later complains that "Distance and Altitude" conceal from him Eleanora's place in heaven (l. 269), the poetic vocation he describes in the Dedication allows him at least to define that altitude, and by it to measure the world's true littleness.

In the penultimate verse paragraph, Dryden comes down to earth with something of a jolt:

Let this suffice: Nor thou, great Saint, refuse
This humble Tribute of no vulgar Muse:
Who, not by Cares, or Wants, or Age deprest,
Stems a wild Deluge with a dauntless brest:
And dares to sing thy Praises, in a Clime
Where Vice triumphs, and Vertue is a Crime:
Where ev'n to draw the Picture of thy Mind,
Is Satyr on the most of Humane Kind:
Take it, while yet 'tis Praise; before my rage
Unsafely just, break loose on this bad Age;
So bad, that thou thy self had'st no defence,
From Vice, but barely by departing hence.
(ll. 359–370)

But despite the violence of attack here, Dryden is careful to preserve his purely literary persona. His diction—"muse," "sing thy praises," "draw the picture of thy mind"—reminds us that this is art rather than polemic; and the tone and subject of the passage are derived, as Miner tells us, from Juvenal's Satire I , and from Donne, whom Dryden cites as the precedent for the form of his poem in his Dedication .^[18] Dryden carefully labels this passage in the margin with a piece of literary jargon: it is the "Epiphonema: or close of the Poem ." In Dryden's last works, even the most direct indignation is carefully folded within several layers of literary tradition.

If the poet is privileged to soar into the celestial sphere, he is capable also of looking back on humanity from the timeless perspective of the gods. In the Preface to Fables Dryden claims such an ability for Chaucer. In his Canterbury Tales he provides us with "God's plenty":

We have our Fore-fathers and Great Grand-dames all before us, as they were in Chaucer 's Days; their general Characters are still remaining in Mankind, and even in England , though they are call'd by other Names than those of Moncks , and Fryars , and Chanons , and Lady Abesses , and Nuns : For Mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of Nature, though every thing is alter'd.
(P. 1455)

The poet, Dryden suggests, sees through the particular habits and customs to the unchanging truth that lies beneath; from his perspective, distinctions between Catholic and Protestant, Whig and Tory, simply do not matter. Further, the poet who sees the eternal beneath the ephemeral is himself eternal: Chaucer has lived to Dryden's time despite changes in language and customs, and Dryden expects the same for himself. He concludes "To My Honour'd Kinsman," the most topical poem of his last years, with an invocation of poetic immortality:

Praise-worthy Actions are by thee embrac'd;
And 'tis my Praise, to make thy Praises last.
For ev'n when Death dissolves our Humane Frame
The Soul returns to Heav'n, from whence it came;
Earth keeps the Body, Verse preserves the Fame.
(ll. 205–209)

One of the most striking features of Dryden's late works is their extreme allusiveness and digressiveness.^[19] Dryden had never written systematic prose criticism, but in his last years his tendency to spontaneous effusions on matters unrelated to his ostensible subject becomes far more pronounced. The long prose treatises are put together seemingly at random, and most of the original poems are so loosely structured as to admit of considerable rearrangement without apparent loss of meaning. Even in the translations, where he must follow the structures of his authors, Dryden introduces his modifications and additions without system; and his arrangement of translated works in the miscellanies and Fables seems arbitrary and unplanned. Dryden himself frequently calls attention to this discursiveness and finds various means of explaining it. In the Discourse of Satire he asks that it be excused as "the tattling Quality of Age, which . . . is always Narrative";^[20] and in the Preface to Fables he attributes it to the associative habits of the human mind as described by Hobbes (p. 1446). In the Dedication of the Aeneis he professes to write "in a loose Epistolary way . . . after the Example of Horace, in his First Epistle of the Second Book to Augustus Caesar , and of that to the Piso's , which we call his Art of Poetry . In both of which he observes no Method that I can trace" (p. 1009); and in the Preface to Fables he cites another precedent: "the Nature of a Preface is rambling; never wholly out

of the Way, nor in it. This I have learn'd from the Practice of honest Montaign " (p. 1450). These explanations, however, do more to establish Dryden's presentation of himself (as typical of all men, or of men in old age) and his work (as part of a general literary tradition) than to account for his style.

In fact this style is an important part of Dryden's rhetorical strategy in these years. We are never allowed to forget that we are in the presence of a poet. His ability to wander effortlessly among the literary and historical monuments of all ages suggests the magisterial expertise of a mind enriched by years of literary study. He describes this expertise directly in the Preface to Fables :

What Judgment I had, increases rather than diminishes; and Thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only Difficulty is to chuse or to reject; to run them into Verse, or to give them the other Harmony of Prose. I have so long studied and practis'd both, that they are grown into a Habit, and become familiar to me.
(Pp. 1446–1447)

Repeatedly in his late work he describes himself as carried away by an inundation of poetic material. In Eleanora he "was transported, by the multitude and variety of my Similitudes; which are generally the product of a luxuriant Fancy; and the wantonness of Wit" (p. 232); in the Dedication of the Aeneis , he must stop himself from falling into a lengthy consideration of the unity of time in drama: "here, my Lord, I must contract also, for, before I was aware, I was almost running into a long digression" (p. 1005); in describing Chaucer's pilgrims in the Preface to Fables he complains of "such a Variety of Game springing up before me, that I am distracted in my Choice, and know not which to follow" (p. 1455). The "practiced ease" that Miner finds in the late poetry is deliberately constructed by Dryden himself.^[21]

Further, Dryden invites us to suppose that his mind has been so long and so thoroughly cultivated that his random musings are more pregnant with interest than the comprehensive but plodding systems of scholarly commentators. In his criticism and translations he uses his acknowledged expertise as a poet to differentiate himself from those mere pedants who, while they have knowledge, lack judgment and inspiration. Thus in the Dedication of Examen Poeticum he claims to "have given my Author's Sense, for the most part truly: for to mistake sometimes, is incident to all Men: And

not to follow the Dutch Commentatours alwaies, may be forgiven to a Man, who thinks them, in general, heavy gross-witted Fellows; fit only to gloss on their own dull Poets" (p. 371). Similarly, in comparing Juvenal, Horace, and Persius in the Discourse of Satire , Dryden adjudicates the claims of their scholarly champions:

It had been much fairer, if the Modern Critiques, who have imbark'd in the Quarrels of their favourite Authors, had rather given to each his proper due; without taking from another's heap, to raise their own. There is Praise enough for each of them in particular, without encroaching on his Fellows, and detracting from them, or Enriching themselves with the Spoils of others.
(P. 50)

He implicitly contrasts his own fairness and objectivity with the blind fondness of "Critiques, who, having first taken a liking to one of these Poets, proceed to Comment on him, and to Illustrate him; after which they fall in love with their own Labours . . . they defend and exalt their Author, not so much for his sake as for their own" (p. 49). Similarly, in the Preface to Fables he contrasts his own "common Sense" to the deluded favoritism of Chaucer's latest editor, who "would make us believe . . . that there were really Ten Syllables in a Verse where we find but Nine" (p. 1453).

In the Dedication of the Aeneis Dryden structures his attack on plodding commentators so as to take account of his known political principles. There is a hint of anti-Williamite patriotism in his mention of "Dutch commentators" in the Dedication of Examen Poeticum ; and this hint is fully developed in the Dedication of the Aeneis : "I shall," he says, "continue still to speak my Thoughts like a free-born Subject as I am; though such things, perhaps, as no Dutch Commentator cou'd, and I am sure no French -man durst" (p. 1016). Later he contrasts his discursive manner with the style of the French critic Segrais: "his Preface is a perfect piece of Criticism, full and clear, and digested into an exact Method; mine is loose, and, as I intended it, Epistolary. Yet I dwell on many things which he durst not touch: For 'tis dangerous to offend an Arbitrary Master" (p. 1020). By following no one's plan and changing subjects at will, Dryden may assert—in contradistinction to the slavish compatriots of both William and Louis—the freedom from prejudice and restraint which he insists upon as the birthright of an Englishman and the prerogative of a poet.

If the digressiveness and allusiveness of the late work imply the mastery of the poet, they assume the same mastery in the readers who must follow him. In a single paragraph on epic poetry in the Discourse of Satire , he assumes in his readers a detailed knowledge of Homer, Virgil, Statius, Lucan, Ariosto, Tasso, Boiardo, Martial, Owen, Spenser, Fleckno, Waller, the Greek Anthology, LeMoyne, Chapelain, and Scudéry. He need only mention Lucan's "Heat, and Affectation," Ariosto's luxuriousness of style, Tasso's "Episodes of Sophronia, Erminia , and Armida "; his readers, he implies, will draw upon their own experience of these works to confirm Dryden's insights (pp. 13–14). Similarly, the reader of Fables is assumed to have some knowledge of Ovid, Homer, Virgil, and Boccaccio: Dryden's Preface purports not to introduce and explain them to the neophyte, but rather to compare them by alluding to characteristics with which the reader is already familiar. Thus he claims that "the Figures of Chaucer are much more lively [than Ovid's], and set in a better Light: Which though I have not time to prove, yet I appeal to the Reader, and am sure he will clear me from Partiality" (p. 1451). Throughout his late criticism Dryden implies that he and his reader share fluency in five languages and a thorough knowledge of the literature and history of Greece, Rome, Italy, France, and England, which may be brought to the surface by a few brief reminders. By his digressiveness he suggests that we have outgrown the need for systematic treatises and can follow him easily in his explorations of the whole of literary culture. By the subtlest of rhetoric, Dryden flatters us into sharing his implicit view of the irrelevance of his diastrous political affiliations and into recognizing the importance of his literary achievement.

Indeed, in his last works Dryden is no less interested in defining his audience than in defining himself. He had always sought to create for his more rhetorical works an audience capable of being convinced by them—the "more moderate sort," for example, in "To the Reader" of Absalom and Achitophel .^[22] But in his last works he creates for his purely literary persona a purely literary audience, one whose learning and tastes place it above the ignorance, prejudice, and pedantry of Dryden's enemies. Despite his abstract critical purposes in the Discourse of Satire and the Dedication of the Aeneis , Dryden is always aware of their status as epistles, and frequently interrupts his criticism to compliment his

fellow poets Dorset and Mulgrave on the insight and expertise that make them peculiarly well qualified to understand him. Less literary patrons also are praised for the breadth of their reading and the depth of their appreciation. Chesterfield enjoys "a foundation of good Sense, and a cultivation of Learning" (p. 917); Clifford has read Virgil "with pleasure, and I dare say, with admiration in the Latine, of which you are a Master. You have added to your Natural Endowments, which without flattery are Eminent, the superstructures of Study, and the knowledge of good Authors" (p. 872). Radcliffe is "a Critick of the Genuine sort, who [has] Read the best Authours, in their own Languages, who perfectly distinguish[es] of their several Merits" (p. 367).

Dryden is not, however, unaware of the potential market for his translations among the less deeply learned; he defines these readers against those plodding and pedantic commentators whose favoritism, ill nature, and subservience contrast with his own benign objectivity and patriotic freedom. Whereas the dully literal Barten Holiday translated Juvenal for scholars,

We write only for the Pleasure and Entertainment, of those Gentlemen and Ladies, who tho they are not Scholars are not Ignorant: Persons of Understanding and good Sense; who not having been conversant in the Original, or at least not having made Latine Verse so much their business, as to be Critiques in it, wou'd be glad to find, if the Wit of our Two great Authors, be answerable to their Fame.
(P. 87)

Similarly, he contrasts the readers of Fables to those "old Saxon Friends" whose superstitious "Veneration for Antiquity" may lead them to dislike his version of Chaucer: "Let them neglect my Version, because they have no need of it. I made it for their sakes who understand Sense and Poetry, as well as they; when that Poetry and Sense is put into Words which they understand" (p. 1459).

Dryden's insistence on the purely literary nature of his audience is not, however, the only rhetorical strategy through which he attempts to avert the potential interference of politics with a proper appreciation of his work. He associates learning and taste with transcendence of political faction, ignorance and pedantry with fanatical devotion to the worst aspects of William and the Revolution. We are familiar with the first of these strategies from the dedications of Don Sebastian, Amphitryon , and King Arthur ,

each of which is addressed to a prominent Williamite who is willing to ignore political differences where they interfere with literary merit. After 1692, this strategy is given added power by a new emphasis on social as well as literary transcendence. Dryden repeatedly associates the noble lineage of his dedicatees with their ability to recognize his merit. Abingdon "may stand aside" from the bad age "with the small Remainders of the English Nobility, truly such, and unhurt your selves, behold the mad Combat" (p. 234). Clifford is descended from "the Ancient House of Cumberland ," Ormond from the Plantagenets, and both have inherited Dryden with their titles and estates (Georgics , p. 872, Fables , p. 1439). In admiring Dryden's work, the less noble reader falls in with "the most Ancient, most Conspicuous, and most Deserving Families in Europe " (Fables , p. 1439).

The literary, the social, and the political are all involved in the threefold division of readers of poetry adapted from Segrais in the Dedication of the Aeneis . The lowest class of readers

like nothing but the Husk and Rhind of Wit; preferr a Quibble, a Conceit, an Epigram, before solid Sense, and Elegant Expression: These are Mobb-Readers: If Virgil and Martial stood for Parliament-Men, we know already who wou'd carry it. But though they make the greatest appearance in the Field, and cry the loudest, the best on 't is, they are but a sort of French Huguenots , or Dutch Boors , brought over in Herds, but not Naturaliz'd: who have not land of two Pounds per Annum in Parnassus , and therefore are not priviledg'd to Poll.
(P. 1052)

William was widely resented for favoring Dutchmen and Huguenots as advisors and generals. In the Preface to Fables , Blackmore's poetic incompetence is associated with his social and political background. He is a "City Bard, or Knight Physician" with "Fanatique Patrons," and so unworthy of serious attention. In the Dedication of Examen Poeticum Dryden's pedantic critics are given a no less damning social and political position. Modern critics (Dryden has Rymer in mind) have "become Rebels of Slaves, and Usurpers of Subjects" (p. 364). Julius Scaliger, a type for Dryden of the pedant, "wou'd needs turn down Homer , and Abdicate him, after the possession of Three Thousand Years" (p. 365). Some critics, by their veneration of the Elizabethan dramatists,

"wou'd thrust out their Lawful Issue, and Govern us themselves, under a specious pretence of Reformation" (p. 366).

Though Dryden's enemies resemble James's in their methods and origin, they differ in their success. In the Dedication of Examen Poeticum they evaporate before the judgment of the noble Radcliffe; and in the Dedication of the Aeneis the highest class of readers eventually defeats the mob by quietly attracting a majority: judicious readers "are few in number, but whoever is so happy as to gain their approbation, can never lose it, because they never give it blindly. Then they have a certain Magnetism in their Judgment, which attracts others to their Sense. Every day they gain some new Proselyte, and in time become the Church" (p. 1053). The literal and figurative levels of this social metaphor blur together as Dryden goes on to apply it to himself and his patron Mulgrave: "Such a sort of Reputation is my aim, though in a far inferiour degree . . . and therefore I appeal to the Highest Court of Judicature, like that of the Peers, of which your Lordship is so great an Ornament" (p. 1053). The common reader who rejects Dryden's poetic claims finds himself outclassed by the likes of Radcliffe and Dorset, and cast into a wilderness of foreigners and pedants, city bards, and party hacks.

Dryden does not in his last works abandon his interest in contemporary politics for abstract speculation on poetry and human nature. His insistence on generality and detachment is itself a rhetorical gesture designed to place him and his audience in a universal and therefore authoritative context that explains and justifies his beliefs and behavior and allows him to reenter politics as a poet. In the Postscript of the Aeneis —his last chance to court those readers upon whose approval the success of over three years of labor depends—Dryden reenacts in summary form the series of gestures that define his public persona throughout the mid- and late nineties. He complains of having undertaken the work in his "Declining Years: strugling with Wants, oppress'd with Sickness, curb'd in my Genius, lyable to be misconstrued in all I write; and my Judges, if they are not very equitable, already prejudic'd against me, by the Lying Character which has been given them of my Morals." Yet he has completed the work "steady to my Principles, and not dispirited with my Afflictions." He claims that he has added something to English literature "in the choice of my

Words , and Harmony of Numbers"; then delivers a brief attack on bad poets, which he quickly interrupts: "Here is a Field of Satire open'd to me: But since the Revolution, I have wholly renounc'd that Talent. For who wou'd give Physick to the Great when he is uncall'd?" (p. 1424). This is an odd transition from literary criticism to political satire, but it allows him to introduce the topic of his political quietism ("'Tis enough for me, if the Government will let me pass unquestion'd") and to define himself again in purely literary terms. There follows a list of prominent Williamites who have been "Bountiful to the Poet" without "considering the Man": "The Earls of Darby and of Peterborough "; "Sir William Trumball , one of the Principal Secretaries of State"; "Gilbert Dolben Esq, the worthy Son of the late Arch-Bishop of York "; and so forth (p. 1425). There is a complex mixture here of bold self-assertion and quiet apology; but it exactly suits Dryden's position in the 1690s, when his enemies were equally willing to attack him as a dangerous subversive if he condemned the government and as an unprincipled opportunist if he did not.