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Nothing, however, which can be said concerning these vast unexplored areas of tropical mountain and forest so forcibly impresses us with the idea of the unknown riches contained in them as the story of the Loddigesia mirabilis.

On his return he pub. his first poem of real power, Annus Mirabilis, of which the subjects were the great fire, and the Dutch War. In 1668 appeared his Essay on Dramatic Poetry in the form of a dialogue, fine alike as criticism and as prose. Two years later he became Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal with a pension of £300 a year.

Julian's third year at Camford was by no means the happiest period of his life there, because the sad absence of Kennedy and De Vayne made a gap in his circle of friends which could not easily be filled up; but this was the annus mirabilis of his university career.

Truly this year, from April, 1797, to April, 1798, was the annus mirabilis of his life. Never again was he so happy, never again did he do such good work, as when he harboured in this cottage, and slipped through the back gate to walk in the garden or read in the library of his good friend, Thomas Poole, or trudged down the road to the woods of Alfoxton to talk with the Wordsworths.

But need held him to the boards and years passed by, and Dryden still stood in the second rank of English poetry, outdone in comedy by men like Etherege and rivalled in tragedy by men like Settle. Only in a single poem, that of the "Annus Mirabilis," in 1671, had he given any true indications of his surpassing powers.

"Others may use the ocean as their road, Only the English make it their abode; * We tread on billows with a steady foot" long before Campbell. Campbell helps himself to both thoughts, enlivens them into "Her march is o'er the mountain wave, Her home is on the deep," and they are his forevermore. His "leviathans afloat" he lifted from the "Annus Mirabilis"; but in what court could Dryden sue?

William Clift, conservator of the Hunterian Museum, who asked me to tea. To Westminster Abbey. What a pity it could not borrow from Paris the towers of Notre Dame! But the glory of its interior made up for this shortcoming. Among the monuments, one to Rear Admiral Charles Holmes, a descendant, perhaps, of another namesake, immortalized by Dryden in the "Annus Mirabilis" as

He possessed one of the most commanding intellects of his own, or perhaps of any, age, and, notwithstanding all the disadvantages and discouragements to which he was subjected, made many discoveries, and came near to many more. There is still preserved at Oxford a rectified calendar in which he approximates closely to the truth. He received the sobriquet of the "Doctor Mirabilis."

There is some debatable ground on the common frontier; but the line may be drawn with tolerable accuracy. The year 1678 is that on which we should be inclined to fix as the date of a great change in his manner. During the preceding period appeared some of his courtly panegyrics his Annus Mirabilis, and most of his plays; indeed, all his rhyming tragedies.

Mirabilis est ergo Deus maxime in illo, quod ipse solus sufficit sibi: et mirabilis in altis Dominus, hoc est, in coelo et in coelestibus: sed et mirabilis in terris, et in terrestribus: tamen si verum indicauerimus, nihil est mirabile, quod mirum videri non debet, si ille qui omnipotens est, fecit quaecunque voluit in coelo et in terra.