288 DRYDEN. 



In the same style, he makes his Don Sebastian (1690) say 

 that he is as much astonished as &quot;drowsy mortals&quot; at the 

 last trump, 



&quot;When, called in haste, they fumble for their limbs,&quot; 



and propose to take upon himself the whole of a crime 

 shared with another by asking Heaven to charge the bill 

 on him. And in &quot; King Arthur,&quot; written ten years after 

 the Preface from which I have quoted his confession about 

 Dubartas, we have a passage precisely of the kind he 

 condemned ; 



&quot; Ah for the many souls as but this morn 

 Were clothed with flesh and warmed with vital blood, 

 But naked now, or skirted but with air.&quot; 



Dryden too often violated his own admirable rule, that 

 &quot;an author is not to write all he can, but only all he 

 ought.&quot;* In his worst images, however, there is often a 

 vividness that half excuses them. But it is a grotesque 

 vividness, as from the flare of a bonfire. They do not flash 

 into sudden lustre, as in the great poets, where the imagin 

 ations of poet and reader leap toward each other and meet 

 half-way. 



English prose is indebted to Dryden for having freed it 

 from the cloister of pedantry. He, more than any other 

 single writer, contributed, as well by precept as example, to 

 give it suppleness of movement and the easier air of the 

 modern world. His own style, juicy with proverbial phrases, 

 has that familiar dignity, so hard to attain, perhaps unattain 

 able except by one who, like Dryden, feels that his position 

 is assured. Charles Cotton is as easy, but not so elegant ; 

 Walton as familiar, but not so flowing; Swift as idiomatic, 

 but not so elevated; Burke more splendid, but not so 

 equally luminous. That his style was no easy acquisition 

 (though, of course, the aptitude was innate) he himself tells 

 us. In his dedication of &quot; Troilus and Cressida&quot; (1679), 

 where he seems to hint at the erection of an Academy, he 



* Preface to Fables. 



