The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II | Page 5

the unearthly
grandeur of Byron's: but it is strong, swift, dashing, and decisive. Nor
does it want deep and subtle touches. His pictures of Shaftesbury and
Buckingham are as delicately finished, as they are powerfully
conceived. He flies best at the highest game; but even in dealing with
Settles and Shadwells, he can be as felicitous as he is fierce. No satire
in the world contains lines more exquisitely inverted, more ingeniously
burlesqued, more artfully turned out of their apparently proper course,
like rays at once refracted and cooled, than those which thus ominously
panegyrise Shadwell:--
"His brows thick fogs, instead of glories grace,
And lambent dulness
play'd about his face.
As Hannibal did to the altar come,
Sworn by
his sire, a mortal foe to Rome;
So Shadwell swore, nor should his
vow be vain,
That he till death true dulness would maintain."
Better still the following picture, in imitation of the Homeric or
Miltonic manner:--
"The Sire then shook the honours of his head,
And from his brows
damps of oblivion shed
Full on the filial dulness--long he stood

Repelling from his breast the raging God."
What inimitable irony in this epithet! The God of dulness raging! A
stagnant pool in a passion; a canal insane; a _mouton enragé_, as the
French says; or a snail in a tumultuous state of excitement, were but
types of the satirical ideas implied in these words. What a description
of labouring nonsense--of the Pythonic genius of absurdity, panting and
heaving on his solemnly ridiculous tripod!

The language and versification of Dryden have been praised, and justly.
His style is worthy of a still more powerful and original vein of genius
than his own. It is a masculine, clear, elastic, and varied diction, fitted
to express all feelings, save the deepest; all fancies, save the subtlest;
all passions, save the loftiest; all moods of mind, save the most
disinterested and rapt; to represent incidents, however strange;
characters, however contradictory to each other; shades of meaning,
however evasive: and to do all this, as if it were doing nothing, in point
of ease, and as if it were doing everything in point of felt and rejoicing
energy. No poetic style since can, in such respects, be compared to
Dryden's. Pope's to his is feeble--and Byron's forced. He can say the
strongest things in the swiftest way, and the most felicitous expressions
seem to fall unconsciously from his lips. Had his matter, you say, but
been equal to his manner, his thought in originality and imaginative
power but commensurate with the boundless quantity, and no less
admirable quality, of his words! His versification deserves a
commendation scarcely inferior. It is "all ear," if we may so apply an
expression of Shakspeare's. No studied rules,--no elaborate
complication of harmonies,--it is the mere sinking and swelling of the
wave of his thought as it moves onward to the shore of his purpose.
And, as in the sea, there are no furrows absolutely isolated from each
other, but each leans on, or melts into each, and the subsidence of the
one is the rise of the other--so with the versification of his better poetry.
The beginning of the "Hind and Panther," we need not quote; but it will
be remembered, as a good specimen of that peculiar style of running
the lines into one another, and thereby producing a certain free and
noble effect, which the uniform tinkle of Pope and his school is
altogether unable to reach; a style which has since been copied by some
of our poets--by Churchill, by Cowper, and by Shelley. The lines of the
artificial school, on the other hand, may be compared to rollers, each
distinct from each other,--each being in itself a whole,--but altogether
forming none. Pope, says Hazlitt, has turned Pegasus into a
rocking-horse.
We are, perhaps, nearly right when we call Dryden the most eloquent
and rhetorical of English poets. He bears in this respect an analogy to
Lucretius among the Romans, who, inferior in polish to Virgil, was

incomparably more animated and energetic in style; who exhibited,
besides, traits of lofty imagination rarely met with in Virgil, and never
in Dryden; and who equalled the English poet in the power of
reasoning in verse, and setting the severe abstractions of metaphysical
thought to music. With the Shakspeares, Chaucers, Spensers, Miltons,
Byrons, Wordsworths, and Coleridges, the Dii majorum gentium of the
Poetic Pantheon of Britain, Dryden ranks not, although towering far
above the Moores, Goldsmiths, Gays, and Priors. He may be classed
with a middle, but still high order, in which we find the names of Scott,
as a poet, Johnson, Pope, Cowper, Southey, Crabbe, and two or three
others, who, while all excelling Dryden in some qualities, are all
excelled by him in others, and bulk on the whole about as largely as he
on the