282 DRYDEN. 



compare Taylor s treatment of the same image : &quot; For 

 so have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass and 

 soaring upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get 

 to heaven and climb above the clouds ; but the poor 

 bird was beaten back by the loud sighings of an eastern 

 wind, and his motion made irregular and inconstant, 

 descending more at every breath of the tempest than 

 it could recover by the libration and frequent weighing 

 of his wings, till the little creature was forced to sit 

 down and pant, and stay till the storm was over, and 

 then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and sing 

 as if it had learned music and motion of an angel as 

 he passed sometimes through the air about his ministries 

 here below.&quot; Taylor s fault is that his sentences too often 

 smell of the library, but what an open air is here ! How 

 unpremeditated it all seems ! How carelessly he knots 

 each new thought, as it comes, to the one before it with an 

 and, like a girl making lace! And what a slidingly 

 musical use he makes of the sibilants with which our 

 language is unjustly taxed by those who can only make 

 them hiss, not sing ! There are twelve of them in the first 

 twenty words, fifteen of which are monosyllables. We 

 notice the structure of Dryden s periods, but this grows up 

 as we read. It gushes, like the song of the bird itself, 



&quot; In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.&quot; 



Let us now take a specimen of Dryden s bad prose from one 

 of his poems. I open the &quot; Annus Mirabilis &quot; at random, 

 and hit upon this : 



&quot; Our little fleet was now engaged so far, 

 That, like the swordfish in the whale, they fought : 

 The combat only seemed a civil war, 

 Till through their bowels we our passage wrought.&quot; 



Is this Dryden, or Sternhold, or Shadwell, those Toms who 

 made him say that &quot;dulness was fatal to the name of 

 Tom ? &quot; The natural history of Goldsmith in the verse of 



