328 DRYDEN. 



he had said before. His general theory may be stated as an 

 aim at something between the literalness of metaphrase and 

 the looseness of paraphrase. &quot; Where I have enlarged,&quot; he 

 says, &quot; I desire the false critics would not always think that 

 those thoughts are wholly mine, but either they are secretly 

 in the poet, or may be fairly deduced from him.&quot; Coleridge, 

 with his usual cleverness of assimilation, has condensed him 

 in a letter to Wordsworth : &quot; There is no medium between 

 a prose version and one on the avowed principle of compen 

 sation in the widest sense, i.e. manner, genius, total effect.&quot;* 

 I have selected these passages, not because they are the 

 best, but because they have a near application to Dryden 

 himself. His own characterisation of Chaucer (though too 

 narrow for the greatest but one of English poets) is the best 

 that could be given of himself : &quot; He is a perpetual fountain 

 of good sense.&quot; And the other passages show him a close 

 and open-minded student of the art he professed. Has his 

 influence on our literature, but especially on our poetry, 

 been on the whole for good or evil 1 If he could have been 

 read with the liberal understanding which he brought to the 

 works of others, I should answer at once that it had been 

 beneficial. But his translations and paraphrases, in some 

 ways the best things he did, were done, like his plays, under 

 contract to deliver a certain number of verses for a specified 

 sum. The versification, of which he had learned the art by 

 long practice, is excellent, but his haste has led him to fill 

 out the measure of lines with phrases that add only to 

 dilute, and thus the clearest, the most direct, the most 

 manly versifier of his time became, without meaning it, 

 the source (fons et origo malorum) of that poetic diction 

 from which our poetry has not even yet recovered. I do 

 not like to say it, but he has sometimes smothered the 

 childlike simplicity of Chaucer under feather-beds of 

 verbiage. What this kind of thing came to in the next 

 century, when everybody ceremoniously took a bushel- 

 basket to bring a wren s egg to market in, is only too sadly 

 familiar. It is clear that his natural taste led Dryden to 

 * Memoirs of Wordsworth, Vol. II. p. 74 (American edition). 



