DRYDEN. 263 



might ever be lost through neglect of so inexpensive a mor 

 dant for the memory. From this practice the older school of 

 critics would seem to have taken a hint for keeping fixed the 

 limits of good taste, and what was somewhat vaguely called 

 classical English. To mark these limits in poetry, they set 

 up as Hermse the images they had made to them of Dryden, 

 of Pope, and later of Goldsmith. Here they solemnly 

 castigated every new aspirant in verse, who in turn 

 performed the same function for the next generation, thus 

 helping to keep always sacred and immovable the ne plus 

 ultra alike of inspiration and the vocabulary. Though no 

 two natures were ever much more unlike than those of 

 Dryden and Pope, and again of Pope and Goldsmith, and 

 no two styles, except in such externals as could be easily 

 caught and copied, yet it was the fashion, down even to the 

 last generation, to advise young writers to form themselves, 

 as it was called, on these excellent models. Wordsworth 

 himself began in this school ; and though there were 

 glimpses, here and there, of a direct study of nature, yet 

 most of the epithets in his earlier pieces were of the 

 traditional kind so fatal to poetry during great part of the 

 last century ; and he indulged in that alphabetic personifica 

 tion which enlivens all such words as Hunger, Solitude, 

 Freedom, by the easy magic of an initial capital. 



11 Where the green apple shrivels on the spray, 

 And pines the unripened pear in summer s kindliest ray, 

 Even here Content has fixed her smiling reign 

 With Independence, child of high Disdain. 

 Exulting mid the winter of the skies, 

 Shy as the jealous chamois, Freedom flies, 

 And often grasps her sword, and often eyes.&quot; 



Here we have every characteristic of the artificial method, 

 even to the triplet, which Swift hated so heartily as &quot;a 

 vicious way of rhyming wherewith Mr. Dryden abounded, 

 imitated by all the bad versifiers of Charles the Second s 

 reign.&quot; Wordsworth became, indeed, very early the leader of 

 reform ; but, like Wesley, he endeavoured a reform within 

 the Establishment, Purifying the substance, he retained 



