DRYDEN. 301 



surface in his fancy. In his &quot; Amphitryon,* he makes 

 Alcmena say : 



1 No, I would fly thee to the ridge of earth, 

 And leap the precipice to scape thy sight.&quot; 



And in his &quot; Spanish Friar,&quot; Lorenzo says to Elvira that 

 they &quot;will travel together to the ridge of the world, and 

 then drop together into the next.&quot; It is idle for us poor 

 Yankees to hope that we can invent anything. To say 

 sooth, if Dryden had left nothing behind him but the 

 &quot; Annus Mirabilis,&quot; he might have served as a type of the 

 kind of poet America would have produced by the biggest- 

 river-and-tallest-mountain recipe, longitude and latitude 

 in plenty, with marks of culture scattered here and there 

 like the carets on a proof-sheet. 



It is now time to say something of Dryden as a dramatist. 

 In the thirty-two years between 1662 and 1694 he produced 

 twenty-five plays, and assisted Lee in two. I have hinted 

 that it took Dryden longer than most men to find the true 

 bent of his genius. On a superficial view, he might almost 

 seem to confirm that theory, maintained by Johnson, among 

 others, that genius was nothing more than great intellectual 

 power exercised persistently in some particular direction 

 which chance decided, so that it lay in circumstance merely 

 whether a man should turn out a Shakespeare or a Newton. 

 But when we come to compare what he wrote, regardless of 

 Minerva s averted face, with the spontaneous production of 

 his happier muse, we shall be inclined to think his example 

 one of the strongest cases against the theory in question. 

 He began his dramatic career, as usual, by rowing against 

 the strong current of his nature, and pulled only the more 

 doggedly the more he felt himself swept down the stream. 

 His first attempt was at comedy, and, though his earliest 

 piece of that kind (the &quot;Wild Gallant,&quot; 1663) utterly failed, 

 he wrote eight others afterwards. On the 23d February 

 1663 Pepys writes in his diary : &quot; To Court, and there saw 

 the * Wild Gallant performed by the king s house ; but it 

 was ill acted, and the play so poor a thing as I never saw in 



