Volume I Part 6 (1/2)

[14] ”I have taken some pains to make it my masterpiece in English.”

Preface to Second Miscellany. Fox said that it ”was better than the original.” J.C. Scaliger said of Erasmus: ”Ex alieno ingenio poeta, ex suo versificator.”

[15] In one of the last letters he ever wrote, thanking his cousin Mrs. Steward for a gift of marrow-puddings, he says: ”A chine of honest bacon would please my appet.i.te more than all the marrow-puddings; for I like them better plain, having a very vulgar stomach.” So of Cowley he says: ”There was plenty enough, but ill sorted, whole pyramids of sweetmeats for boys and women, but little of solid meat for men.” The physical is a truer ant.i.type of the spiritual man than we are willing to admit, and the brain is often forced to acknowledge the inconvenient country-cousins.h.i.+p of the stomach.

[16] In his preface to ”All for Love,” he says, evidently alluding to himself: ”If he have a friend whose hastiness in writing is his greatest fault, Horace would have taught him to have minced the matter, and to have called it readiness of thought and a flowing fancy.” And in the Preface to the Fables he says of Homer: ”This vehemence of his, I confess, is more suitable to my temper.” He makes other allusions to it.

[17] Preface to the Fables.

[18] _Wool_ is Sylvester's word. Dryden reminds us of Burke in this also, that he always quotes from memory and seldom exactly. His memory was better for things than for words. This helps to explain the length of time it took him to master that vocabulary at last so various, full, and seemingly extemporaneous. He is a large quoter, though, with his usual inconsistency, he says, ”I am no admirer of quotations.” (Essay on Heroic Plays.)

[19] In the _Epimetheus_ of a poet usually as elegant as Gray himself, one's finer sense is a little jarred by the

”Spectral gleam their snow-white _dresses_.”

[20] This probably suggested to Young the grandiose image in his ”Last Day” (B. ii.):--

”Those overwhelming armies....

Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking dawn Roused the broad front and called the battle on.”

This, to be sure, is no plagiarism; but it should be carried to Dryden's credit that we catch the poets of the next half-century oftener with their hands in his pockets than in those of any one else.

[21] Essay on Satire.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Preface to Fables. Men are always inclined to revenge themselves on their old idols in the first enthusiasm of conversion to a purer faith. Cowley had all the faults that Dryden loads him with, and yet his popularity was to some extent deserved. He at least had a theory that poetry should soar, not creep, and longed for some expedient, in the failure of natural wings, by which he could lift himself away from the conventional and commonplace. By beating out the substance of Pindar very thin, he contrived a kind of balloon which, tumid with gas, did certainly mount a little, _into_ the clouds, if not above them, though sure to come suddenly down with a b.u.mp. His odes, indeed, are an alternation of upward jerks and concussions, and smack more of Chapelain than of the Theban, but his prose is very agreeable,--Montaigne and water, perhaps, but with some flavor of the Gascon wine left. The strophe of his ode to Dr. Scarborough, in which he compares his surgical friend, operating for the stone, to Moses striking the rock, more than justifies all the ill that Dryden could lay at his door. It was into precisely such mud-holes that Cowley's Will-o'-the-Wisp had misguided him. Men may never wholly shake off a vice but they are always conscious of it, and hate the tempter.

[24] Dedication of Georgics.

[25] In a letter to Dennis, 1693.

[26] Preface to Fables.

[27] More than half a century later, Orrery, in his ”Remarks” on Swift, says: ”We speak and we write at random; and if a man's common conversation were committed to paper, he would be startled _for_ _to_ find himself guilty in _so few_ sentences of so many solecisms and such false English.” I do not remember _for to_ anywhere in Dryden's prose. _So few_ has long been denizened; no wonder, since it is nothing more than _si peu_ Anglicized.

[28] Letter to the Lord High Treasurer.