DRYDEN. 283 



Pye ! His thoughts did not &quot; voluntary move harmonious 

 numbers.&quot; He had his choice between prose and verse, and 

 seems to be poetical on second thought. I do not speak 

 without book. He was more than half conscious of it 

 himself. In the same letter to Mrs. Steward, just cited, he 

 says, &quot; I am still drudging on, always a poet and never a 

 good one ; &quot; and this from no mock-modesty, for he is 

 always handsomely frank in telling us whatever of his own 

 doing pleased him. This was written in the last year of 

 his life, and at about the same time he says elsewhere : 

 &quot; What judgment I had increases rather than diminishes, 

 and thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast 

 upon me that my only difficulty is to choose or to reject, 

 to run them into verse or to give them the other harmony 

 of prose ; I have so long studied and practised both, that 

 they are grown into a habit and become familiar to me.&quot;* 

 I think that a man who was primarily a poet would hardly 

 have felt this equanimity of choice. 



I find a confirmation of this feeling about Dryden in 

 his early literary loves. His taste was not an instinct, but 

 the slow result of reflection and of the manfulness with 

 which he always acknowledged to himself his own mistakes. 

 In this latter respect few men deal so magnanimously with 

 themselves as he, and accordingly few have been so happily 

 inconsistent. Ancora imparo might have served him for a 

 motto as well as Michael Angelo. His prefaces are a 

 complete log of his life, and the habit of writing them was 

 a useful one to him, for it forced him to think with a pen 

 in his hand, which, according to Goethe, &quot; if it do no other 

 good, keeps the mind from staggering about.&quot; In these 

 prefaces we see his taste gradually rising from Du Bartas 

 to Spenser, from Cowley to Milton, from Oorneille to 

 Shakespeare. &quot; I remember when I was a boy,&quot; he says in 

 his dedication of the &quot; Spanish Friar,&quot; 1681, &quot;I thought 

 inimitable Spenser a mean poet in comparison of Sylvester s 

 Du artas t and was rapt into an ecstacy when I read these 



lines : 



* Preface to the Tables. 



