28o DRYDEN. 



&quot;The longest tyranny that ever swayed 

 Was that wherein our ancestors betrayed 

 Their freeborn reason to the Stagyrite, 

 And made his torch their universal light. 

 So truth, while only one supplied the state, 

 Grew scarce ahd dear and yet sophisticate. 

 Still it was bought, like cmp ric wares or charms , 

 Hard words sealed up with Aristotle s arms.&quot; 



Then we have his graceful sweetness of fancy, where he 

 speaks of the inhabitants of the New World : 



&quot; Guiltless men who danced away their time, 

 Fresh as their groves and happy as their clime.&quot; 



And, finally, there is a hint of imagination where &quot; mighty 

 visions of the Danish race &quot; watch round Charles sheltered 

 in Stonehenge after the battle of Worcester. These passages 

 might have been written by the Dryden whom we learn to 

 know fifteen years later. They have the advantage that he 

 wrote them to please himself. His contemporary, Dr. 

 Heylin, said of French cooks, that &quot; their trade was not to 

 feed the belly, but the palate.&quot; Dryden was a great while 

 in learning this secret, as available in good writing as in 

 cookery. He strove after it, but his thorougly English 

 nature, to the last, would too easily content itself with 

 serving up the honest beef of his thought, without regard to 

 daintiness of flavour in the dressing of it.* Of the best 

 English poetry, it might be said that it is understanding 

 aerated by imagination. In Dryden the solid part too often 

 refused to mix kindly with the leaven, either remaining 

 lumpish or rising to a hasty puffiness. Grace and lightness 

 were with him much more a laborious achievement than a 



* In one of the last letters he ever wrote, thanking his cousin, Mrs. 

 Steward, for a gift of marrow-puddings, he says : &quot;A chine of honest 

 bacon would please my appetite more than all the marrow-puddings ; 

 for I like them better plain, having a very vulgar stomach.&quot; So of 

 Cowley he says : &quot; There was plenty enough, but ill sorted, whole pyra 

 mids of sweetmeats for boys and women, but little of solid meat for 

 men.&quot; The physical is a truer antitype of the spiritual man than we 

 are willing to admit, and the brain is often forced to acknowledge 

 the inconvenient country-cousinship of the stomach. 



