330 DRYDEN. 



in this sense that Dryden was guilty. Instead of stabbing, 

 he &quot;with steel invades the life.&quot; The consequence was 

 that by-and-by we have Dr. Johnson s poet, Savage, 

 telling us, 



&quot; In front, a parlour meets my entering view, 

 Opposed a room to sweet refection due ; &quot; 



Dr. Blacklock making a forlorn maiden say of her &quot; dear,&quot; 

 who is out late, 



&quot; Or by some apoplectic fit deprest, 

 Perhaps, alas ! he seeks eternal rest ; &quot; 



and Mr. Bruce, in a Danish war-song, calling on the vikings 

 to &quot; assume their oars.&quot; But it must be admitted of 

 Dryden that he seldom makes the second verse of a couplet 

 the mere train-bearer to the first, as Pope was continually 

 doing. In Dryden the rhyme waits upon the thought ; in 

 Pope and his school the thought courtesies to the tune for 

 which it is written. 



Dryden has also been blamed for his gallicisms.* He 

 tried some, it is true, but they have not been accepted. 

 I do not think he added a single word to the language, 

 unless, as I suspect, he first used magnetism in its present 

 sense of moral attraction. What he did in his best writing 

 was to use the English as if it were a spoken, and not 

 merely an ink-horn language ; as if it were his own to do 

 what he pleased with it, as if it need not be ashamed of 

 itself.t In this respect, his service to our prose was greater 



* This is an old complaint. Puttenham sighs over such innovation 

 in Elizabeth s time, and Carew in James s. A language grows and is 

 not made. Almost all the new-fangled words with which Jonson taxes 

 Marston in his &quot; Poetaster &quot; are now current, 



t Like most idiomatic, as distinguished from correct writers, he 

 knew very little about the language historically or critically. His 

 prose and poetry swarm with locutions that would have made Lindley 

 Murray s hair stand on end. How little he knew is plain from his 

 criticising in Ben Jonson the use of ones in the plural, of &quot;Though 

 Heaven should speak with all his wrath,&quot; and be &quot;as false English 

 for are, though the rhyme hides it.&quot; Yet all are good English, and 

 I have found them all in Dry den s own writing ! Of his sins against 

 idiom I have a longer list than I have room for. And yet he is one 

 of our highest authorities for real English. 



