porE. 397 



•' Double Dealer.'' He begins by stating the received 

 theory about the improvement of English literature un- 

 der the new regime, but the thin ice of sophistry over 

 which Waller had glided smoothly gives way under his 

 greater weight, and he finds himself in deep water ere 

 he is aware. 



" Well, then, the promised hour has come at last. 

 The present age in wit obscures the past ; 

 Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ, 

 Conquering with force of arm * and dint of wit. 

 Theirs was the giant race before the Flood ; 

 And thus when Charles returned our Empire stood ; 

 Like Janus he the stubborn soil manured, 

 With rules of husbandry the rankness cured, 

 Tamed us to manners when the stage was rude. 

 And boisterous English wit with art endued ; 

 Our age was cultivated thus at length, 

 But what we gained in skill we lost in strength; 

 Our builders were with want of genius curst, 

 * The second temple was not like the first." 



There would seem to be a manifest reminiscence of 

 Waller's verse in the half-scornful emphasis which Dry- 

 den lays on " cultivated." Perhaps he was at first led to 

 give greater weight to correctness and to the restraint 

 of arbitrary rules from a consciousness that he had a 

 tendency to hyperbole and extravagance. But he after- 

 wards became convinced that the heightening of dis- 

 course by passion was a very different thing from the 

 exaggeration which heaps phrase on phrase, and that 

 genius, like beauty, can always plead its privilege. Dry- 

 den, by his powerful example, by the charm of his verse 

 which combines vigor and fluency in a measure perhaps 

 never reached by any other of our poets, and above all 

 because it is never long before the sunshine of his cheer- 

 ful good sense breaks through the clouds of rhetoric, 



* Usually printed arms, but Dryden certainly wrote arm, to corre- 

 spond with dint, which he used in its old meaning of a downright 

 blow. 



