276 DRYDEN. 



last he ceases to resist altogether, and is forced to acknow 

 ledge that there is something in this one man that is not 

 and never was anywhere else, something not to be reasoned 

 about, ineffable, divine; if contrary to the rules, so much 

 the worse for them. It may be conjectured that Dryden s 

 Puritan associations may have stood in the way of his 

 more properly poetic culture, and that his early knowledge 

 of Shakespeare was slight. He tells us that Davenant, 

 whom he could not have known before he himself was 

 twenty-seven, first taught him to admire the great poet. 

 But even after his imagination had become conscious of its 

 prerogative, and his expression had been ennobled by fre 

 quenting this higher society, we find him continually drop 

 ping back into that sermo pedestris which seems, on the 

 whole, to have been his more natural element. We always 

 feel his epoch in him, that he was the lock which let our 

 language down from its point of highest poetry to its level 

 of easiest and most gently flowing prose. His enthusiasm 

 needs the contagion of other minds to arouse it ; but his 

 strong sense, his command of the happy word, his wit, 

 which is distinguished by a certain breadth and, as it were, 

 power of generalisation, as Pope s by keenness of edge and 

 point, were his, whether he would or no. Accordingly, his 

 poetry is often best and his verse more flowing where (as in 

 parts of his version of the twenty-ninth ode of the third 

 book of Horace) he is amplifying the suggestions of another 

 mind.* Viewed from one side, he justifies Milton s re 

 mark of him, that &quot; he was a good rhymist, but no poet.&quot; 

 To look at all sides, and to distrust the verdict of a single 

 mood, is, no doubt, the duty of a critic. But how if a cer 

 tain side be so often presented as to thrust forward in the 

 memory and disturb it in the effort to recall that total 

 impression (for the office of a critic is not, though often so 

 misunderstood, to say guilt 1 }/ or not guilty of some particular 



* &quot;I have taken some pains to make it my masterpiece in English.&quot; 

 Preface to Second Miscellany. Fox said that it &quot; was better than the 

 original.&quot; J. C. Scaliger said of Erasmus &quot;Ex alieno ingenio poeta, 

 ex suo versificator.&quot; 



