DRYDEN. 281 



natural gift, and it is all the more remarkable that he should 

 so often have attained to what seems such an easy perfection 

 in both. Always a hasty writer,* he was long in forming 

 his style, and to the last was apt to snatch the readiest word 

 rather than wait for the fittest. He was not wholly and 

 unconsciously poet, but a thinker who sometimes lost him 

 self on enchanted ground and was transfigured by its touch. 

 This preponderance in him of the reasoning over the intuitive 

 faculties, the one always there, the other flashing in when 

 you least expect it, accounts for that inequality and even 

 incongruousness in his writing which makes one revise 

 his judgment at every tenth page. In his prose you come 

 upon passages that persuade you he is a poet, in spite of his 

 verses so often turning state s evidence against him as to 

 convince you he is none. He is a prose-writer, with a kind 

 of .^Eolian attachment. For example, take this bit of prose 

 from the dedication of his version of Virgil s Pastorals, 

 1694; &quot;He found the strength of his genius betimes, and 

 was even in his youth preluding to his Georgicks and his 

 -&amp;lt;3Eneis. He could not forbear to try his wings, though his 

 pinions were not hardened to maintain a long, laborious 

 flight ; yet sometimes they bore him to a pitch as lofty as 

 ever he was able to reach afterwards. But when he was 

 admonished by his subject to descend, he came down 

 gently circling in the air and singing to the ground, like a 

 lark melodious in her mounting and continuing her song 

 till she alights, still preparing for a higher flight at her 

 next sally, and tuning her voice to better music.&quot; This 

 is charming, and yet even this wants the ethereal tincture 

 that pervades the style of Jeremy Taylor, making 

 it, as Burke said of Sheridan s eloquence, &quot; neither prose 

 nor poetry, but something better than either.&quot; Let us 



* In his preface to &quot;All for Love,&quot; he says, evidently alluding to 

 himself : &quot; If he have a friend whose hastiness in writing is his great 

 est fault, Horace would have taught him to have minced the matter, 

 and to have called it readiness of thought and a flowing fancy.&quot; And 

 in the Preface to the Fables he says of Homer : &quot; This vehemence of 

 his, I confess, is more suitable to my temper.&quot; He makes other 

 allusions to it. 



