284 DRYDEN. 



Now when the winter s keener breath began 

 To crystallise the Baltic ocean, 

 To glaze the lakes, to bridle up the floods, 

 And periwig with snow* the baldpate woods. 



I am much deceived if this be not abominable fustian.&quot; 

 Swift, in his &quot; Tale of a Tub,&quot; has a ludicrous passage in 

 this style: &quot;Look on this globe of earth, you will find it 

 to be a very complete and fashionable dress. What is that 

 which some call land, but a fine coat faced with green ? or 

 the sea, but a waistcoat of water-tabby ? Proceed to the 

 particular works of creation, you will find how curious 

 journeyman Nature has been to trim up the vegetable 

 beaux ; observe how sparkish a periwig adorns the head of 

 a beech, and what a fine doublet of white satin is worn by 

 the birch.&quot; The fault is not in any inaptness of the images, 

 nor in the mere vulgarity of the things themselves, but in 

 that of the associations they awaken. The &quot; Prithee, undo 

 this button &quot; of Lear, coming where it does and expressing 

 what it does, is one of those touches of the pathetically 

 sublime, of which only Shakespeare ever knew the secret. 

 Herrick, too, has a charming poem on &quot; Julia s petticoat,&quot; 

 the charm being that he lifts the familiar and the low to 

 the region of sentiment. In the passage from Sylvester, it 

 is precisely the reverse, and the wig takes as much from the 

 sentiment as it adds to a Lord Chancellor. So Pope s 

 proverbial verse, 



&quot;True wit is Nature to advantage drest,&quot; 



unpleasantly suggests Nature under the hands of a lady s- 

 maid.f We have no word in English that will exactly 



* Wool is Sylvester s word. Dryden reminds us of Burke in this 

 also, that he always quotes from memory and seldom exactly. His 

 memory was better for things than for words. This helps to explain 

 the length of time it took him to master that vocabulary at last so 

 various, full, and seemingly extemporaneous. He is a large quoter, 

 though, with his usual inconsistency, he says, &quot;lam no admirer of 

 quotations.&quot; (Essay on Heroic Plays.) 



t In the Epimetheus of a poet usually as elegant as Gray himself, 

 one s finer sense is a little jarred by the 



&quot; Spectral gleam their snow-white dresses.&quot; 



