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The very titles of his chapters "Astraea Redux," "Windbags," "Broglie the War God" do violence to our conception of history, and are more suggestive of Carlyle's individualism than of French history. He is here the preacher rather than the historian; his text is the eternal justice; and his message is that all wrongdoing is inevitably followed by vengeance. His method is intensely dramatic.
Again and again, at the command of Nakaeia, he had surrounded houses in the dead of night, cut down the mosquito bars and butchered families. Here was the hand of iron; here was Nakaeia redux.
"Phineas Finn" is an excellent example of a parliamentary novel. That work and its companions, "Phineas Redux," "The Prime Minister," and "The Duke's Children," keep up our acquaintance with the family and connections of Plantagenet Palliser, Duke of Omnium, than which few groups of fictitious characters are more continuously interesting. Mr.
Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, and The Prime Minister consecutively, in order that they may understand the characters of the Duke of Omnium, of Plantagenet Palliser, and of Lady Glencora? Who will ever know that they should be so read?
He had expiated his Cromwellian backslidings by the "Astraea Redux," and the "Annus Mirabilis." He had risen to high favor with the king. His tragedies in rhyming couplets were all the vogue. Already his fellow-playwrights deemed their success as fearfully uncertain, unless they had secured, price three guineas, a prologue or epilogue from the Laureate.
I had written what was much better, as, for instance, Phineas Finn and Nina Balatka; but that is by no means the same thing. I also left behind, in a strong box, the manuscript of Phineas Redux, a novel of which I have already spoken, and which I subsequently sold to the proprietors of the Graphic newspaper.
Dryden had at this time no fixed principles, either in religion or politics, is abundantly evident, from his heroic stanzas on Oliver Cromwel, written after his funeral 1658; and immediately upon the restoration he published Astræa Redux, a poem on the happy restoration of Charles the IId; and the same year, his Panegyric to the king on his coronation: In the former of these pieces, a remarkable distich has expos'd our poet to the ridicule of the wits.
He wrote a poem in honor of the memory of Cromwell, and a little later another poem, Astraea Redux, welcoming Charles II. He argued in stirring verse in favor of the Episcopal religion when that was the faith of the court; but after the accession of James II., who was a Catholic, Dryden wrote another poem to prove the Catholic Church the only true one.
His cottage in the Isle of Wight, with its Doric column to the manes of Churchill, with its shrine to Fortuna Redux, was his idea of the ancient city of Tusculum. His tastes and pleasures were the tastes and pleasures of a man of letters. He affected a curious kind of scholarship.
But he soon raised up his head, and taking off his gold chain, whereon dangled his own effigy, he hung it round my child's neck with these words: "Hocce tuce pulchritudim! et si favente Deo redux fuero victor, promissum carmen et praeterea duo oscula exspecto." Hereupon the Sheriff with his three men again came forward and bowed down to the ground before his Majesty.
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