DRYDEN. 333 



Pitt, of a fresh colour and a down look, and not very 

 eonversible.&quot; So Pope described him to Spence. He 

 still reigns in literary tradition, as when at Will s his 

 elbow-chair had the best place by the fire in winter, or 

 on the balcony in summer, and when a pinch from his 

 suuff-box made a young author blush with pleasure as would 

 now-a-days a favourable notice in the Saturday Review. 

 What gave and secures for him this singular eminence ? 

 To put it in a single word, I think that his qualities and 

 faculties were in that rare combination which makes 

 character. This gave flavour to whatever he wrote, 

 a very rare quality. 



Was he, then, a great poet ? Hardly, in the narrowest 

 definition. But he was a strong thinker who sometimes 

 carried common sense to a height where it catches the light 

 of a diviner air, and warmed reason till it had well-nigh the 

 illuminating property of intuition. Certainly he is not, like 

 Spenser, the poets poet, but other men have also their 

 rights. Even the Philistine is a man and a brother, and is 

 entirely right so far as he sees. To demand more of him is 

 to be unreasonable. And he sees, among other things, that 

 a man who undertakes to write should first have a meaning 

 perfectly defined to himself, and then should be able to set 

 it forth clearly in the best words. This is precisely 

 Dryden s praise,* and amid the rickety sentiment looming 

 big through misty phrase which marks so much of modern 

 literature, to read him is as bracing as a north-west wind. 

 He blows the mind clear. In ripeness of mind and bluff 

 heartiness of expression, he takes rank with the best. 

 His phrase is always a short-cut to his sense, for his 

 estate was too spacious for him to need that trick of 

 winding the path of his thought about, and planting it out 

 with clumps of epithet, by which the landscape-gardeners 

 of literature give to a paltry half -acre the air of a park. 

 In poetry, to be next-best is, in one sense, to be nothing ; 

 and yet to be among the first in any kind of writing, as 



* &quot; Nothing is truly sublime,&quot; he himself said, &quot; that is not just and 

 proper.&quot; 



