And utmost Indian isle, Taprobane,1

Dusk faces with white silken turbans wreathed;
From Gallia, Gades,3 and the British west;
Germans, and Scythians, and Sarmatians, north
Beyond Danubius to the Tauric pool.a

All nations now to Rome obedience

pay,

To Rome's great emperor, whose wide domain
In ample territory, wealth, and power,
Civility of manners, arts, and arms,

And long renown, thou justly mayst prefer
Before the Parthian. These two thrones except,
The rest are barbarous, and scarce worth the sight,
Shared among petty kings too far removed;
These having shown thee, I have shown thee all
The kingdoms of the world, and all their glory."

"Look once more, ere we leave this specular mount,
Westward, much nearer by south-west; behold
Where on the Egean shore a city stands
Built nobly; pure the air, and light the soil;
Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts
And eloquence, native to famous wits

(1) Taprobane-the island of Ceylon.

(2) Dusk faces-a line noted for its picturesqueness. (3) Gades-Cadiz.

(4) Tauric pool-the Palus Mootis, or Sea of Azoff.

(5) "It [the mind's eye] is again carried away to the westward, and the flowery hill of Hymettus offers itself to our notice; and Athens, with its picturesque suburbs, is unfolded with a perspicuity and precision that might challenge the most scrupulous critte to quarrel even with an epithet (so true is Milton to his Grecian masters); while her schools of philosophy, the sects into which they are divided, the dogmas they severally espoused, all pass in rapid review, leaving us confounded at the mental plentitude of this extraordinary man."--Quarterly Review, ubi supra.

(6) Ere we leave, &c.-It is Satan who speaks, after displaying from this "specular mount"-this hill of observation-the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. "It would be impossible," remarks the Rev. A. P. Stanley, "for any one to describe the view from the summit of Hymettus more truly than in the words in which Milton has set forth his conception of Athens, not from ocular inspection, but such as, from the union of deep classical learning with his poetical faculty, he imagined it to have appeared in the vision from the specular mount in the Paradise Regained.'"-Classical Museum, vol. i., p. 57.

(7) Native to, &c.-i.e. a place noted for the famous men who were born there, and ever ready to welcome eminent strangers.

Or hospitable, in her sweet recess,

City or suburban, studious walks and shades;
See there the olive grove of Academe,

Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird1
Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long;
There flowery hill Hymettus, with the sound
Of bees' industrious murmur, oft invites
To studious musing; there Ilissus rolls

His whispering stream: within the walls then view
The schools of ancient sages; his who bred
Great Alexander to subdue the world,
Lyceum3 there, and painted Stoa next:
There shalt thou hear and learn the secret power
Of harmony in tones and numbers hit

By voice or hand, and various-measured verse,
olian charms and Dorian lyric odes;

And his who gave them breath, but higher sung,
Blind Melesigenes, thence Homer7 called,
Whose poem Phoebus challenged for his own.
Thence what the lofty grave tragedians taught
In chorus or iambic, teachers best

Of moral prudence, with delight received
In brief sententious precepts, while they treat
Of fate, and chance, and change in human life;
High actions, and high passions best describing.
Thence to the famous orators repair,

Those ancient, whose resistless eloquence

(1) Attic bird-See note 3, p. 71.

(2) Trills her, &c.-" There never was," says Dr. Newton, "a verse more expressive of the harmony of the nightingale than this."

(3) Lyceum, &c.-The Lyceum was the school of Aristotle, the Stoa that of Zeno. The word Stoa answers to the Latin porticus, or porch. (See note 3, p. 348.)

(4) Eolian charms, &c.-"Eolia carmina," verses such as those of Alcæus and Sappho, who were both of Mitylene, in Lesbos, an island belonging to the Eolians: "Dorian lyric odes,'-such as those of Pindar."-Newton.

(5) And his, &c.-i. e. and his who not only cultivated those species of poetry, but the loftier field of epic.

(6) Melesigenes-i. e. born at or near Meles, a river of Asia Minor.

(7) Thence Homer, &c.—i. e. from his blindness, called aμvpós, blind; this is one of the many conjectures respecting the etymology of the name.

(8) Iambic i. e. the dialogue part of the tragedy, which was chiefly written in iambic measure, as distinguished from the chorus, which consisted of various measures."-Newton.

(9) Ancient-i. e. Pericles, Eschines, Demosthenes, &c.

Wielded at will that fierce democratie,
Shook the arsenal, and fulmined over Greece,
To Macedon and Artaxerxes' throne.
To sage Philosophy next lend thine ear,
From heaven descended to the low-roofed house
Of Socrates; see there his tenement,

Whom, well inspired, the oracle pronounced
Wisest of men; from whose mouth1 issued forth
Mellifluous streams that watered all the schools
Of Academics2 old and new, with those
Surnamed Peripatetics,3 and the sect
Epicurean, and the Stoic severe;

These here resolve, or as thou likest, at home,
Till time mature thee to a kingdom's weight;
These rules will render thee a king complete,
Within thyself; much more with empire joined."

THE THUNDER-STORM IN THE WILDERNESS.5
DARKNESS now rose

As day-light sunk, and brought in lowering Night,
Her shadowy offspring, unsubstantial both,
Privation mere of light and absent day.
Our Saviour, meek, and with untroubled mind
After his aery jaunt, though hurried sore,
Hungry and cold betook him to his rest,
Wherever, under some concourse of shades,
Whose branching arms thick intertwined might shield
From dews and damps of night his sheltered head;
But sheltered, slept in vain, for at his head
The tempter watched, and soon with ugly dreams
Disturbed his sleep; and either tropic now

(1) From whose mouth, &c.—i.e. who was the father and founder of moral philosophy among the Greeks.

(2) Academics, &c.-Plato was at the head of the old Academy, Carneades of

the new.

(3) Peripatetics-from the Greek Tεpí, about, and Tarέw, I walk-the followers of Aristotle, who was accustomed to teach as he walked about with his disciples.

(4) These rules-as no rules have been mentioned, one critic proposes to read "their rules;" while another supposes Milton to refer to the "brief, sententious precepts" mentioned before.

(5) "One of the grandest descriptions in all poetry.”—Sir E. Brydges. (6) After his aery jaunt-after being borne through the air by Satan.

(7) From either tropic, &c.-i. e. from both tropics at once-from North and

South.

'Gan thunder, and both ends1 of heaven; the clouds 2
From many a horrid rift abortive poured
Fierce rain with lightning mixed, water with fire
In ruin3 reconciled; nor slept the winds
Within their stony caves, but rushed abroad
From the four hinges of the world, and fell
On the vexed wilderness, whose tallest pines,
Though rooted deep as high, and sturdiest oaks,
Bowed their stiff necks, loaden with stormy blasts,
Or torn up sheer. Ill wast thou shrouded then,
O patient Son of God, yet only stood'st
Unshaken nor yet staid the terror there;
Infernal ghosts, and hellish furies round

Environed thee; some howled, some yelled, some shrieked ;
Some bent at thee their fiery darts, while thou
Satst unappalled in calm and sinless peace.
Thus passed the night so foul, till morning fair
Came forth with pilgrim steps in amice grey,
Who with her radiant finger stilled the roar
Of thunder, chased the clouds, and laid the winds,
And grisly spectres, which the fiend had raised
To tempt the Son of God with terrors dire.
And now the sun, with more effectual beams,
Had cheered the face of earth, and dried the wet
From drooping plant, or dropping tree; the birds,
Who all things now behold more fresh and green,
After a night of storms so ruinous,

Cleared up their choicest notes in bush and spray,
To gratulate the sweet return of morn.

(1) Both ends, &c.-i. e. East and West. This and the last expression taken together imply, of course, that the thunder rolled all around.

The clouds, &c.-i. e. the clouds from many a dreadful fissure ("rift") or opening in the sky, precipitately and with supernatural vehemence ("abortive") poured down their torrents.

(3) Ruin-used here in the original sense of the Latin ruina, downfall; the sense, therefore, is-water and fire, two incongruous elements, were united in the one object of rushing down upon the earth.

(4) Stony caves-in allusion to the story of Æolus (see "Eneid," book i). (5) Shrouded-sheltered; an ancient use of the word (see p. 258, note 3). (6) Amice-literally, a sacerdotal habiliment used in the Romish Church-here

employed in the general sense of a garment or robe.

(7) Sweet return, &c.-"The preceding description," remarks Dr. Warton, " exhibits some of the finest lines which Milton has written in all his poems."

A A

DRYDEN.

PRINCIPAL EVENTS OF HIS LIFE.-John Dryden, the founder of what is by some called the artificial style of English Poetry, was born in 1631, at Aldwinkle, in Northamptonshire. His father, who was a gentleman of some property, gave his son the benefit of a learned education, by placing him under the famous Dr. Busby, at Westminster School. He thence removed, in 1650, to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he resided three years after taking his degree of Master of Arts. In early life he was a friend and visitor of Milton, and seems to have been generally attached to the party of Cromwell, on whose death he wrote some highly eulogistic stanzas. The versatility, however, of his principles, was clearly evinced by the publication shortly afterwards of courtly strains of fulsome adulation in honour of Charles II. In 1666, he married Lady Elizabeth Howard, an alliance-like that subsequently formed by Addison with a lady of rank and title-which very little promoted the happiness of the poet. For some years before, and long after this epoch, he wrote for the stage. In 1668, he was appointed Poet Laureate, but appears at this time in the ranks of the political adversaries of the king's or high court party. Subsequently, with more ease than honour, he passed directly over to those whom he had previously assailed, and discovered for their benefit his powerful but hitherto unappreciated vein of satire, by writing the famous poem of "Absalom and Achitophel," which was soon succeeded by others of the same character. On the accession of James II., we find Dryden with suspicious, though in his case not remarkable, flexibility, attaching himself to the Roman Catholic Church. the Revolution all his prospects were overclouded, and for the remainder of his life he was compelled to depend upon his literary labours for the means of subsistence. He died on the 1st of May, 1700, at his house in Gerard Street, London, and was buried at Westminster Abbey, between Chaucer and Cowley.

At

PRINCIPAL WORKS.-Dryden's most important miscellaneous poems are Annus Mirabilis,' ," "Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew," and "Alexander's Feast;" of his dramatical works, the only two now considered above mediocrity are Don Sebastian," and "All for Love;" as satires, "Absalom and Achitophel," the Medal," and "Mac-Flecnoe," are best known, and perhaps "Re