266 DRYDEN. 



no name is more familiar than his, and yet it may be 

 suspected that few writers are more thoroughly buried in 

 that great cemetery of the &quot;British Poets.&quot; If contem 

 porary reputation be often deceitful, posthumous fame may 

 be generally trusted, for it is a verdict made up of the 

 suffrages of the select men in succeeding generations. This 

 verdict has been as good as unanimous in favour of Dryden. 

 It is, perhaps, worth while to take a fresh observation of 

 him, to consider him neither as warning nor example, but 

 to endeavour to make out what it is that has given so lofty 

 and firm a position to one of the most unequal, inconsistent, 

 and faulty writers that ever lived. He is a curious 

 example of what we often remark of the living, but rarely 

 of the dead, that they get credit for what they might be 

 quite as much as for what they are, and posterity has 

 applied to him one of his own rules of criticism, judging 

 him by the best rather than the average of his achievement, 

 a thing posterity is seldom wont to do. On the losing side 

 in politics, it is true of his polemical writings as of Burke s, 

 whom in many respects he resembles, and especially in 

 that supreme quality of a reasoner, that his mind gathers 

 not only heat, but clearness and expansion by its own 

 motion, that they have won his battle for him in the 

 judgment of after times. 



To us, looking back at him, he gradually becomes a 

 singularly interesting and even picturesque figure. He is 

 in more senses than one, in language, in turn of thought, in 

 style of mind, in the direction of his activity, the first of 

 the moderns. He is the first literary man who was also a 

 man of the world, as we understand the term. He 

 succeeded Ben Jonson as the acknowledged dictator of 

 wit and criticism, as Dr. Johnson, after nearly the same 

 interval, succeeded him. All ages are, in some sense, ages 

 of transition ; but there are times when the transition is 

 more marked, more rapid ; and it is, perhaps, an ill fortune 

 for a man of letters to arrive at maturity during such a 

 period, still more to represent in himself the change that is 

 going on ? and to be an efficient cause in bringing it about. 



