296 DRYDEN. 



The first part of the &quot; Annus Mirabilis &quot; is by no means 

 clear of the false taste of the time,* though it has some of 

 Dryden s manliest verses and happiest comparisons, always 

 his two distinguishing merits. Here, as almost everywhere 

 else in Dryden, measuring him merely as poet, we recall 

 what he, with pathetic pride, says of himself in the 

 prologue to &quot; Aurengzebe &quot; : 



&quot; Let him retire, betwixt two ages cast, 

 The first of this, the hindmost of the last.&quot; 



What can be worse than what he says of comets ? 



&quot; &quot;Whether they unctuous exhalations are 

 Fired by the sun, or seeming so alone, 

 Or each some more remote and slippery star 

 Which loses footing when to mortals shown.&quot; 



Or than this, of the destruction of the Dutch India- 

 ships 1 



&quot; Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball, 

 And now their odours armed against them fly ; 

 Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall, 

 And some by aromatic splinters die.&quot; 



Dear Dr. Johnson had his doubts about Shakespeare, but 

 here at least was poetry ! This is one of the quatrains 

 which he pronounces &quot;worthy of our author.&quot;! 



But Dryden himself has said that &quot;a man who is resolved 



* Perhaps there is no better lecture on the prevailing vices of style 

 and thought (if thought this frothy ferment of the mind may be 

 called) than in Cotton Mather s &quot;Magnalia.&quot; For Mather, like a 

 true provincial, appropriates only the mannerism, and, as is usual 

 in such cases, betrays all its weakness by the unconscious parody of 

 exaggeration. 



t The Doctor was a capital judge of the substantial value of the 

 goods he handled, but his judgment always seems that of the thumb 

 and forefinger. For the shades, the disposition of colours, the beauty 

 of the figures, he has as good as no sense whatever. The critical parts 

 of his Life of Dryden seem to me the best of his writing in this kind. 

 There is little to be gleaned after him. He had studied his author, 

 which he seldom did, and his criticism is sympathetic, a thing still 

 rarer with him. As illustrative of his own habits, his remarks ow 

 Dryden s reading are curious, 



