294 DRY DEN. 



drop it in his plays, while retaining it in his translations \ 

 afterwards his study of Milton leads him to think that blank 

 verse would suit the epic style better, and he proposes to 

 try it with Homer, but at last translates one book as a 

 specimen, and behold, it is in rhyme ! But the charm of 

 this great advocate is, that, whatever side he was on, he 

 could always find excellent reasons for it, and state them 

 with great force, and abundance of happy illustration. He 

 is an exception to the proverb, and is none the worse pleader 

 that he is always pleading his own cause. The blunder 

 about Chapman is of a kind into which his hasty tempera 

 ment often betrayed him. He remembered that Chapman s 

 &quot; Iliad &quot; was in a long measure, concluded without looking 

 that it was alexandrine, and then attributes it generally to 

 his &quot;Homer.&quot; Chapman s &quot;Iliad&quot; is done in fourteen- 

 syllable verse, and his &quot; Odyssee &quot; in the very metre that 

 Dry den himself used in his own version.* I remark also 

 what he says of the couplet, that it was easy because the 

 second verse concludes the labour of the poet. And yet it 

 was Dryden who found it hard for that very reason. His 

 vehement abundance refused those narrow banks, first 

 running over into a triplet, and, even then uncontainable, 

 rising to an alexandrine in the concluding verse. And I 

 have little doubt that it was the roominess, rather than the 

 dignity, of the quatrain which led him to choose it. As 

 apposite to this, I may quote what he elsewhere says 

 of octosyllablic verse : &quot; The thought can turn itself 

 with greater ease in a larger compass. When the 

 rhyme comes too thick upon us, it straightens the expres- 

 * In the same way he had two years before assumed that Shake 

 speare &quot; was the first who, to shun the pains of continued rhyming, 

 invented that kind of writing which we call blank verse ! &quot; Dryden 

 was never, I suspect, a very careful student of English literature. 

 He seems never to have known that Surrey translated a part of the 

 &quot;^Eneid&quot; (and with great spirit) into blank verse. Indeed, he was 

 not a scholar, in the proper sense of the word, but he had that 

 faculty of rapid assimilation without study, so remarkable in 

 Coleridge and other rich minds, whose office is rather to impregnate 

 than to invent. These brokers of thought perform a great office in 

 literature, second only to that of originators. 



