Among My Books, First Series | Page 6

rhyme: "Whatever causes he [Milton] alleges for the
abolishment of rhyme, his own particular reason is plainly this, that
rhyme was not his talent; he had neither the ease of doing it nor the
graces of it: which is manifest in his Juvenilia, ... where his rhyme is
always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age
when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost
every man a rhymer, though not a poet."[11] It was this, no doubt, that
heartened Dr. Johnson to say of "Lycidas" that "the diction was harsh,
the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing." It is Dryden's
excuse that his characteristic excellence is to argue persuasively and
powerfully, whether in verse or prose, and that he was amply endowed
with the most needful quality of an advocate,--to be always strongly
and wholly of his present way of thinking, whatever it might be. Next
we have, in 1660, "Astraea Redux" on the "happy restoration" of
Charles II. In this also we can forebode little of the full-grown Dryden
but his defects. We see his tendency to exaggeration, and to confound
physical with metaphysical, as where he says of the ships that brought
home the royal brothers, that
"The joyful London meets The princely York, himself alone a freight,
The Swiftsure groans beneath great Gloster's weight"
and speaks of the
"Repeated prayer Which stormed the skies and ravished Charles from

thence."
There is also a certain everydayness, not to say vulgarity, of phrase,
which Dryden never wholly refined away, and which continually
tempts us to sum up at once against him as the greatest poet that ever
was or could be made wholly out of prose.
"Heaven would no bargain for its blessings drive"
is an example. On the other hand, there are a few verses almost worthy
of his best days, as these:--
"Some lazy ages lost in sleep and ease, No action leave to busy
chronicles; Such whose supine felicity but makes In story chasms, in
epochas mistakes, O'er whom Time gently shakes his wings of down,
Till with his silent sickle they are mown,"
These are all the more noteworthy, that Dryden, unless in argument, is
seldom equal for six lines together. In the poem to Lord Clarendon
(1662) there are four verses that have something of the "energy divine"
for which Pope praised his master.
"Let envy, then, those crimes within you see From which the happy
never must be free; Envy that does with misery reside, The joy and the
revenge of ruined pride."
In his "Aurengzebe" (1675) there is a passage, of which, as it is a good
example of Dryden, I shall quote the whole, though my purpose aims
mainly at the latter verses:--
"When I consider life, 't is all a cheat; Yet, fooled with Hope, men
favor the deceit, Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay;
To-morrow's falser than the former day, Lies worse, and, while it says
we shall be blest With some new joys, cuts off what we possest.
Strange cozenage! none would live past years again, Yet all hope
pleasure in what yet remain, And from the dregs of life think to receive
What the first sprightly running could not give. I'm tired of waiting for
this chymic gold Which fools us young and beggars us when old."
The "first sprightly running" of Dryden's vintage was, it must be
confessed, a little muddy, if not beery; but if his own soil did not
produce grapes of the choicest flavor, he knew where they were to be
had; and his product, like sound wine, grew better the longer it stood
upon the lees. He tells us, evidently thinking of himself, that in a poet,
"from fifty to threescore, the balance generally holds even in our colder
climates, for he loses not much in fancy, and judgment, which is the

effect of observation, still increases. His succeeding years afford him
little more than the stubble of his own harvest, yet, if his constitution be
healthful, his mind may still retain a decent vigor, and the gleanings of
that of Ephraim, in comparison with others, will surpass the vintage of
Abiezer."[12] Since Chaucer, none of our poets has had a constitution
more healthful, and it was his old age that yielded the best of him. In
him the understanding was, perhaps, in overplus for his entire good
fortune as a poet, and that is a faculty among the earliest to mature. We
have seen him, at only ten years, divining the power of reason in
Polybius.[13] The same turn of mind led him later to imitate the French
school of tragedy, and to admire in Ben Jonson the most correct of
English poets. It was his imagination that needed quickening, and it is