Drydcn and the Critical Canons of the Eightcdnth Century 25 



insensible to cacophony and verbal disorders of every sort, if it 

 does not actually affect them as picturesque or forcible or onom- 

 atopoeic in some sense or other. 



"Poor vaunt of life indeed, 

 Were man but formed to feed 

 On joy, to solely seek and find and feast; 

 Such feasting ended, then 

 As sure an end to men ; 

 Irks care the crop-fed bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?"' 



That is a clatter, a hubbub, a linguistic chaos. In the face of 

 such licentiousness one is bound to believe that art ought to be a 

 little artificial, at all events very artful. And it is upon the legiti- 

 mate euphony of speech, in contrast with this sort of thing, and 

 not upon musical mimicry, which Dryden insists. Of this prop- 

 erty of words he seems, as a matter of fact, to have had some 

 small sense, though to what may be called the intrinsic charm of 

 their associations he is much less responsive. "There is a beauty 

 of sound," he says, "in some Latin words, which is wholly lost 

 in any modern language" ; and he instances "that mollis aniaraciis, 

 on which Venus lays Cupid in the first Aeneid. If I should trans- 

 late it sweet marjoram, as the word signifies, the reader would 

 think I had mistaken Vergil ; for these village words, as I may 

 call them, give us a mean idea of the thing."^ 



In the face of this observation it is amusing to find Malone in 

 his edition of Dryden taking the poet to task for just such homely 

 and "village" words as the critic has here been condemning. 



"He wrote in general with as much spirit as any man, and in this work' 

 the translation of Vergil, was pressed by other causes to write with yet 

 more rapidity than usual. This must have occasioned several negligences, 

 and among the rest some low expressions and mean lines, sometimes very 

 unworthy of the subject he is treating. Hence he speaks of Bacchus' hon- 

 est face and of the jolly Autumn. It is hence that he calls Juno the buxom 

 bride of Jupiter, and Cybele the grandam goddess. It is thus that he speaks 

 of Juno's sailing on the winds and Apollo's bestriding the clouds." 



This is turning the tables with a vengeance and out-centuring 

 the century. But the fact is that Dryden had a natural vivacity 



' Browning. Rabbi Ben Ezra. 

 'Dryden. Dcciication of the Acncis. 



25 



