268 DRYDEN. 



As a writer for the stage, he deliberately adopted and 

 repeatedly reaffirmed the maxim that 



&quot; He who lives to please, must please to live.&quot; 



Without earnest convictions, no great or sound literature 

 is conceivable. But if Dryden mostly wanted that inspira 

 tion which comes of belief in and devotion to something 

 nobler and more abiding than the present moment and its 

 petulant need, he had, at least, the next best thing to that, 

 a thorough faith in himself. He was, moreover, a man 

 of singularly open soul, and of a temper self-confident 

 enough to be candid even with himself. His mind was 

 growing to the last, his judgment widening and deepening, 

 his artistic sense refining itself more and more. He con 

 fessed his errors, and was not ashamed to retrace his steps 

 in search of that better knowledge which the omniscience 

 of superficial study had disparaged. Surely an intellect 

 that is still pliable at seventy is a phenomenon as interest 

 ing as it is rare. But at whatever period of his life we 

 look at Dryden, and whatever, for the moment, may have 

 been his poetic creed, there was something in the nature of 

 the man that would not be wholly subdued to what it 

 worked in. There are continual glimpses of something in 

 him greater than he, hints of possibilities finer than any 

 thing he has done. You feel that the whole of him was 

 better than any random specimens, though of his best, seem 

 to prove. Incessu patet, he has by times the large stride of 

 the elder race, though it sinks too often into the slouch of 

 a man who has seen better days. His grand air may, in 

 part, spring from a habit of easy superiority to his com 

 petitors; but must also, in part, be ascribed to an innate 

 dignity of character. That this pre-eminence should have 

 been so generally admitted, during his life, can only be ex 

 plained by a bottom of good sense, kindliness, and sound 

 judgment, whose solid worth could afford that many a 

 flurry of vanity, petulance, and even error should flit 

 across the surface and be forgotten. Whatever else 

 Dryden may have been, the last and abiding impression of 



