DRYDEN. 273 



Two other verses, 



&quot;And the isle, wheii her protecting genius went, 

 Upon his obsequies loud sighs conferred,&quot; 



are interesting, because they show that he had been study 

 ing the early poems of Milton. He has contrived to bury 

 under a rubbish of verbiage one of the most purely 

 imaginative passages ever written by the great Puritan poet. 



&quot; From haunted spring and dale, 



Edged with poplar pale, 

 The parting genius is with sighing sent.&quot; 



This is the more curious because, twenty-four years after 

 wards, he says, in defending rhyme : &quot; Whatever causes 

 he [Milton] alleges for the abolishment of rhyme, his own 

 particular reason is plainly this, that rhyme was not his 

 talent ; he had neither the ease of doing it nor the graces 

 of it : which is manifest in his Juvenilia, , , . where 

 his rhyme is always constrained and forced, and comes 

 hardly from him, at the age when the soul is most pliant, 

 and the passion of love makes almost every man a rhymer, 

 though not a poet. 5 * It was this, no doubt, that 

 heartened Dr. Johnson to say of &quot; Lycidas &quot; that &quot; the 

 diction was harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers 

 unpleasing.&quot; It is Dryden s excuse that his characteristic 

 excellence is to argue persuasively and powerfully, whether 

 in verse or prose, and that he was amply endowed with the 

 most needful quality of an advocate, to be always 

 strongly and wholly of his present way of thinking, what 

 ever it might be. Next we have, in 1660, &quot; Astrsea 

 Redux&quot; on the &quot;happy restoration&quot; of Charles II. In 

 this also we can forebode little of the full-grown Dryden 

 but his defects. We see his tendency to exaggeration, and 

 to confound physical with metaphysical, as where he says 

 of the ships that brought home the royal brothers, that 



&quot; The joyful London meets 

 The princely York, himself alone a freight, 

 The Swiftsure groans beneath great Gloster s weight 



* Essay on the Origin and Progress of Satire. 



146 



