DRYDEN. 265 



&quot; A schism, 



Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, 

 . . who went about 

 Holding a poor decrepit standard out, 

 Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in largo 

 The name of one Boileau 1 &quot; 



But Keats had never then* studied the writers of whom he 

 speaks so contemptuously, though he might have profited by 

 so doing. Boileau would at least have taught him that 

 flimsy would have been an apter epithet for the standard 

 than for the mottoes upon it. Dryden was the author of 

 that schism against which Keats so vehemently asserts the 

 claim of the orthodox teaching it had displaced. He was 

 far more just to Boileau, of whom Keats had probably 

 never read a word. &quot; If I would only cross the seas,&quot; he 

 says, &quot; I might find in France a living Horace and a 

 Juvenal in the person of the admirable Boileau, whose 

 numbers are excellent, whose expressions are noble, whose 

 thoughts are just, whose language is pure, whose satire is 

 pointed, and whose sense is just. What he borrows from 

 the ancients he repays with usury of his own, in coin as 

 good and almost as universally valuable.&quot; f 



Dryden has now been in his grave nearly a hundred and 

 seventy years ; in the second class of English poets perhaps 

 no one stands, on the whole, so high as he ; during his life 

 time, in spite of jealousy, detraction, unpopular politics, 

 and a suspicious change of faith, his pre-eminence was con 

 ceded ; he was the earliest complete type of the purely 

 literary man, in the modern sense; there is a singular 

 unanimity in allowing him a certain claim to greatness which 

 would be denied to men as famous and more read, to Pope 

 or Swift, for example ; he is supposed, in some way or 

 other, to have reformed English poetry. It is now about 

 half a century since the only uniform edition of his works 

 was edited by Scott. No library is complete without him, 



* He studied Dryden s versification before writing his &quot; Lamia,&quot; 

 t On the Origin and Progress of Satire. See Johnson s counter 

 opinion in his life of Dryden, 



