334 DRYDEN. 



Dryden certainly was, is to be one of a very small company. 

 He had, beyond most, the gift of the right word. And if 

 he does not, like one or two of the greater masters of song, 

 stir our sympathies by that indefinable aroma so magical in 

 arousing the subtile associations of the soul, he has this in 

 common with the few great writers, that the winged seeds 

 of his thought embed themselves in the memory and 

 germinate there. If I could be guilty of the absurdity of 

 recommending to a young man any author on whom to 

 form his style, I should tell him that, next to having some 

 thing that will not stay unsaid, he could find no safer guide 

 than Dryden. 



Cowper, in a letter to Mr. Unwin (5th January 1782), 

 expresses what I think is the common feeling about 

 Dryden, that, with all his defects, he had that indefinable 

 something we call Genius. &quot; But I admire Dryden most 

 [he had been speaking of Pope], who has succeeded by mere 

 dint of genius, and in spite of a laziness and a carelessness 

 almost peculiar to himself. His faults are numberless, and 

 so are his beauties. His faults are those of a great man, 

 and his beauties are such (at least sometimes) as Pope with 

 all his touching and retouching could never equal.&quot; But, 

 after all, perhaps no man has summed him up so well as 

 John Dennis, one of Pope s typical dunces, a dull man 

 outside of his own sphere, as men are apt to be, but who 

 had some sound notions as a critic, and thus became the 

 object of Pope s fear and therefore of his resentment. 

 Dennis speaks of him as his &quot; departed friend, whom I 

 infinitely esteemed when living for the solidity of his 

 thought, for the spring and the warmth and the beautiful 

 turn of it ; for the power and variety and fulness of his 

 harmony ; for the purity, the perspicuity, the energy of his 

 expression ; and, whenever these great qualities are required, 

 for the pomp and solemnity and majesty of his style.&quot;* 



* Dennis in a letter to Tonson, 1715. 



