DRYDEN. 277 



fact) which is the only safe ground of judgment ? It is 

 the weight of the whole man, not of one or the other limb 

 of him, that we want. Expende Hannibalem. Very good, 

 but not in a scale capacious only of a single quality at a 

 time, for it is their union, and not their addition, that 

 assures the value of each separately. It was not this or 

 that which gave him his weight in council, his swiftness of 

 decision in battle that outran the forethought of other men, 

 it was Hannibal. But this prosaic element in Dryden 

 will force itself upon me. As I read him, I cannot help 

 thinking of an ostrich, to be classed with flying things, and 

 capable, what with leap and flap together, of leaving the 

 earth for a longer or shorter space, but loving the open 

 plain, where wing and foot help each other to something 

 that is both flight and run at once. What with his haste 

 and a certain dash, which, according to our mood, we may 

 call florid or splendid, he seems to stand among poets where 

 Rubens does among painters, greater, perhaps, as a colourist 

 than an artist, yet great here also, if we compare him with 

 any but the first. 



We have arrived at Dryden s thirty-second year, and 

 thus far have found little in him to warrant an augury that 

 he was ever to be one of the great names in English litera 

 ture, the most perfect type, that is, of his class, and that 

 class a high one, though not the highest. If Joseph de 

 Maistre s axiom, Qui ria pas vaincu a trente ans, ne vaincra 

 jamais, were true, there would be little hope of him, for he 

 has won no battle yet. But there is something solid and 

 doughty in the man, that can rise from defeat, the stuff of 

 which victories are made in due time, when we are able to 

 choose our position better, and the sun is at our back. 

 Hitherto his performances have been mainly of the obligate 

 sort, at which few men of original force are good, least of 

 all Dryden, who had always something of stiffness in his 

 strength. Waller had praised the living Cromwell in per 

 haps the manliest verses he ever wrote, not very manly, to 

 be sure, but really elegant, and, on the whole, better than 

 those in which Dryden squeezed out melodious tears. 



