290 DRYDEN. 



carried on, our conversation has very much degenerated. 5 * 

 Swift affirms that the language had grown corrupt since the 

 Restoration, and that &quot; the Court, which used to be the 

 standard of propriety and correctness of speech, was then, 

 and, I think, has ever since continued, the worst school in 

 England.&quot;! He lays the blame partly on the general 

 licentiousness, partly upon the French education of many 

 of Charles s courtiers, and partly on the poets. Dryden 

 undoubtedly formed his diction by the usage of the Court. 

 The age was a very free-and-easy, not to say a very coarse 

 one. Its coarseness was not external, like that of Eliza 

 beth s day, but the outward mark of an inward depravity. 

 What Swift s notion of the refinement of women was may 

 be judged by his anecdotes of Stella. I will not say that 

 Dryden s prose did not gain by the conversational elasticity 

 which his frequenting men and women of the world enabled 

 him to give it. It is the best specimen of every-day style 

 that we have. But the habitual dwelling of his mind in a 



* Letter to the Lord High Treasurer. 



t Ibid. He complains of &quot;manglings and abbreviations.&quot; &quot;What 

 does your Lordship think of the words drudg d, disturb d, rebuk d, 

 fledg d, and a thousand others ? &quot; In a contribution to the &quot; Tatler&quot; 

 (No. 230) he ridicules the use of urn for them, and a number of slang 

 phrases, among which is mob. &quot; The war,&quot; he says, &quot;has introduced 

 abundance of polysyllables, which will never be able to live many 

 more campaigns.&quot; Speculations, operations, preliminaries, ambas 

 sadors, pallisadoes, communication, circumvallation, battalions, are the 

 instances he gives, and all are now familiar. No man, or body of men, 

 can dam the stream of language. Dryden is rather fond of em for 

 them, but uses it rarely in his prose. Swift himself prefers t is to it is, 

 as does Emerson still. In what Swift says of the poets, he may be 

 fairly suspected of glancing at Dryden, who was his kinsman, and 

 whose prefaces and translation of Virgil he ridicules in the &quot; Tale of a 

 Tub.&quot; Dryden is reported to have said of him, &quot; Cousin Swift is no 

 poet.&quot; The Dean began his literary career by Pindaric odes to 

 Athenian Societies and the like, perhaps the greatest mistake as to 

 his own powers of which an author was ever guilty. It was very 

 likely that he would send these to his relative, already distinguished, 

 for his opinion upon them. If this was so, the justice of Dryden s 

 judgment must have added to the smart. Swift never forgot or for 

 gave ; Dryden was careless enough to do the one, and large enough to 

 do the other. 



