2QO POPE. 



nobler rage (that is, madness) than that of Greece would 

 follow the horticultural devices he recommends. It never 

 seems to have occurred to Waller that it is the substance of 

 what you polish, and not the polish itself, that insures duration. 

 Dryden, in his rough-and-ready way, has hinted at this in his 

 verses to Congreve on the Double Dealer. He begins by 

 stating the received theory about the improvement of English 

 literature under the new regime, but the thin ice of sophistry 

 over which Waller had glided smoothly gives way under his 

 greater weight, and he finds himself in deep water ere he is 

 aware. 



Well, then, the promised hour has come at last, 



The present age in wit obscures the past ; 



Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ, 



Conquering with force of arm * and dint of wit. 



Theirs was the giant race before the Flood ; 



And thus when Charles returned our Empire stood ; 



Like Janus he the stubborn soil manured, 



With rules of husbandry the rankness cured, 



Tamed us to manners when the stage was rude, 



And boisterous English wit with art endued ; 



Our age was cultivated thus at length, 



But what we gained in skill we lost in strength ; 



Our builders were with want of genius curst, 



The second temple was not like the first. 



There would seem to be a manifest reminiscence of Waller s 

 verse in the half-scornful emphasis which Dryden lays on cul 

 tivated. Perhaps he was at first led to give greater weight to 

 correctness and to the restraint of arbitrary rules from a conscious 

 ness that he had a tendency to hyperbole and extravagance. 

 But he afterwards became convinced that the heightening of 

 discourse by passion was a very different thing from the ex 

 aggeration which heaps phrase on phrase, and that genius, like 

 beauty, can always plead its privilege. Dryden, by his powerful 

 example, by the charm of his verse which combines vigour and 

 fluency in a measure perhaps never reached by any other of our 

 poets, and above all because it is never long before the sunshine 

 of his cheerful good sense breaks through the clouds of rhetoric, 

 and gilds the clipped hedges over which his thought clambers 

 like an unpruned vine Dryden, one of the most truly English 

 of English authors, did more than all others combined to bring 

 about the triumphs of French standards in taste and French 

 principles in criticism. But he was always like a deserter who 

 cannot feel happy in the victories of the alien arms, and who 

 would go back if he could to the camp where he naturally 



* Usually printed arnis, but Dryden certainly wrote arm, to correspond with 

 dint i which he used in its old meaning of a downright blow. 



