298 DRYDEN. 



trip him into a pla.titude, and there are too many swaggering 

 with that expression forte d un sentiment faible which 

 Voltaire condemns in Corneille, a temptation to which 

 Dryden always lay too invitingly open. But there are 

 passages higher in kind than any I have cited, because they 

 show imagination. Such are the verses in which he describes 

 the dreams of the disheartened enemy : 



* In dreams they fearful precipices tread, 

 Or, shipwrecked, labour to some distant shore, 

 Or in dark churches walk among the dead ; &quot; 



and those in which he recalls glorious memories, and sees 

 where 



&quot;The mighty ghosts of our great Harries rose, 

 And armed Edwards looked with anxious eyes.&quot; 



A few verses, like the pleasantly alliterative one in which 

 he makes the spider &quot; from the silent ambush of his den,&quot; 

 &quot; feel far off the trembling of his thread,&quot; show that he was 

 beginning to study the niceties of verse, instead of trusting 

 wholly to what he would have called his natural fougue. 

 On the whole, this part of the poem is very good war 

 poetry, as war poetry goes (for there is but one first- 

 rate poem of the kind in English, short, national, 

 eager, as if the writer were personally engaged, 

 with the rapid metre of a drum beating the charge, 

 and that is Drayton s &quot; Battle of Agincourt,&quot;*) but it 

 shows more study of Lucan than of Virgil, and for a long 

 time yet we shall find Dryden bewildered by bad models. 

 He is always imitating no that is not the word, always 

 emulating somebody in his more strictly poetical attempts, 

 for in that direction he always needed some external 

 impulse to set his mind in motion. This is more or less 

 true of all authors ; nor does it detract from their 

 originality, which depends wholly on their being able so 

 far to forget themselves as to let something of themselves 



* Not his solemn historical droning under that title, but addressed 

 11 To the Cambrio-Britons on their harp.&quot; 



