286 DRYDEN. 



And in the same play, 



&quot; That busy thing, 



The soul, is packing up, and just on wing 

 Like parting swallows when they seek the spring,&quot; 



where the last sweet verse curiously illustrates that in 

 equality (poetry on a prose background) which so often 

 puzzles us in Dryden. Infinitely worse is the speech of 

 Alraanzor to his mother s ghost : 



&quot; I ll rush into the covert of the night 

 And pull thee backward by the shroud to light, 

 Or else I ll squeeze thee like a bladder there, 

 And make thee groan thyself away to air.&quot; 



What wonder that Dryden should have been substituted 

 for Davenant as the butt of the &quot; Rehearsal,&quot; and that the 

 parody should have had such a run ? And yet it was 

 Dryden who, in speaking of Persius, hit upon the happy 

 phrase of &quot; boisterous metaphors ; &quot;* it was Dryden who 

 said of Cowley, whom he elsewhere calls &quot; the darling of 

 my youth,&quot;f that he was &quot; sunk in reputation because he 

 could never forgive any conceit which came in his way, but 

 swept, like a drag-net, great and small.&quot;! But the passages 



* Essay on Satire. t Ibid. 



$ Preface to Fables. Men are always inclined to revenge themselves 

 on their old idols in the first enthusiasm of conversion to a purer faith. 

 Cowley had all the faults that Dryden loads him with, and yet his 

 popularity was to some extent deserved. He at least had a theory 

 that poetry should soar, not creep, and longed for some expedient, in 

 the failure of natural wings, by which he could lift himself away from 

 the conventional and commonplace. By beating out the substance of 

 Pindar very thin, he contrived a kind of balloon, which, tumid with 

 gas, did certainly mount a little, into the clouds, if not above them, 

 though sure to come suddenly down with a bump. His odes, indeed, 

 are an alternation of upward jerks and concussions, and smack more 

 of Chapelain than of the Theban, but his prose is very agreeable, 

 Montaigne and water, perhaps, but with some flavour of the Gascon 

 wine left. The strophe of his ode to Dr. Scarborough, in which he 

 compares his surgical friend, operating for the stone, to Moses striking 

 the rock, more than justifies all the ill that Dryden could lay at his 

 door. It was into precisely such mud-holes that Cowley s Will-o -the- 

 Wisp had misguided him. Men may never wholly shake off a vice 

 but they are always conscious of it, and hate the tempter. 



