With regard to satire, which Walter Scott speaks of him as condemned to, no man ever lived, to whose genius, satire, such as he wrote, that is, individual satire, what in its lowest state was then called lampoon, was so thoroughly suited. Whether Archilochus surpassed him, we cannot tell. We may be sure that in one respect he did not; the extraordinary mixture of it with good-nature and ease. What Walter Scott might have observed, however, with regard to the romantic and chivalrous style, is, that Dryden, though he did not write a whole poem in that taste, wrote his plays, many of them at least, avowedly upon that plan. He tells us, in his Defence of heroic plays, that their subjects are such as are contained in the first two lines of Ariosto.

"Le donne, i cavalier, l'arme, gli amori,

Le cortesie, l'audaci imprese, io canto."

His Almanzor is certainly a romance character, beyond, I believe, any in Corneille : though indeed hardly beyond Achilles in Homer; who frightens a whole army merely with shouting; though it must be owned, when he comes to actual fighting, (as Sir Uvedale Price pointed out against Knight,) he tells his followers that he cannot do without their assistance; and does not, like some heroes in Ariosto, scatter whole armies before himself alone.

As to the loose style of Dryden, which Walter Scott mentions, I cannot think he was driven into it by the age in which he lived, or the court; though Pope seems to have thought so from his ejaculation, "Unhappy Dryden!” But Dryden is found fault with for the excess of it, by Lord Rochester himself; and not as his own opinion only, but that of the public; and one of his comedies is said to have been condemned by the audience, for this fault.

Dryden is never, properly speaking, heavy, when he is dull. This is owing, perhaps, to the constant flow of his metre ; but also, to the nature of his mind, which was not pedantic and oppressive, but went on in a stream of ideas, whatever they might be. And both the turn of his mind acted upon his versification, and his versification upon the flow and forward movement of his mind. The converse might be said of Fletcher; whose natural coldness of mind, and stiff versification, react upon each other.

It is impossible to form a full idea of the merit of Dryden's versification, without reading it aloud, and rather rapidly. It is opposed, both to the careless, and the regular writers, of his time. The former, of course, are continually liable to be clumsy; and they, particularly, allowed themselves the resource of does make, for makes, &c.; nay, I have somewhere seen does do. Dryden, indeed, is not free from this. As to the regular, he went to work in a totally different manner from them, such as Waller, &c., who, like Pope afterwards, composed slowly, and repolished coolly and carefully. The harmony of Dryden arises from his mind being constantly turned to that object, as co-existent with the original conception of the thought. The consequence is, that sometimes his matter is neglected, and his verses have not much in them; which however is by no means his natural character; for his early works have rather too much thought than too little.

The style of Dryden seems to me the most perfect we have-classical, polished, cultivated; but vernacular, manly, bold, and full of individual feeling. These last qualities, some of those who followed him were for taming down, in order to carry the first to a still greater extent. Swift would have introduced a rule, to have no triplets or

Alexandrines; but it would spoil Dryden's verse very much, to take them away.

It is possible that his Alexandrines were not altogether suggested by Spenser; but partly, though irregular in the way he introduces them, authorised in his mind by the very sources of his regularity, the French; and particularly Corneille, whose manly, and somewhat careless, flow must have been very pleasing to him.

When his versification was formed, it seems to have been an irresistible faculty; and that he went on turning into verse, for whole scenes or pages together, sometimes what was unimportant, sometimes what might be solid argument in prose, but still prose. I should make him very angry, but I cannot help comparing him, in this respect, to Wither. But you can hardly complain, as Boileau does of Chapelain, "Que n'écrit il en prose?" Johnson thinks, that the principal disposition of Dryden's mind was to reasoning: but if that were the case, there would be more appearance of it, one would think, in the great quantity of prose compositions which he has left: on the contrary, these are remarkable for the lightness, and even versatility, of their propositions, and the absence of any thing like a habit of profound or exact reasoning, in maintaining them. It is true, they turn upon literary subjects, not on subjects requiring much deep argument; but compare the turn of mind which they display, with that of Johnson himself, for instance, in the same subjects. In short, to use an old expression, he was a reasoner among poets, but a poet among reasoners. He delighted to show his faculty of reasoning in verse; but it does not follow that his reasonings were clearer or better than other people's. If Cowper had written sermons, perhaps they would never have been noticed.

His taste was formed a good deal upon Cowley, as was natural; but he had of himself a love for conceits; and as he has more fire and rapidity than Cowley, (though Cowley was not wanting in these,) his style carries off, according to the principle of Longinus, conceits which might disgust if they were more coldly put, and more deliberately introduced.

His mind is eminently poetical. He turns every thing into imagination. It is like great painters, such as Titian or Rubens, representing common objects; quite naturally, indeed, but at the same time with a warmth and richness which they do not suggest to the minds of the vulgar observer, nor derive from the pencil of inferior artists. His elegant ideas and expressions are thrown out with a real delight, and scattered with an easy profuseness, where a writer of the later school would crow over them, and make much of them, individually.

When we see the spirit of Dryden bursting into poetry and imagination upon every subject, and particularly when, becoming more and more matured, he discards the love of ingenious conceits which he had been taught, and perhaps had taught himself, in his youth, it forms an extraordinary contrast with the very prosaic subjects, nay style, which he so frequently chooses and cultivates. But he was an eminently manly character. Poet as he was, he did not like, as Lord Byron says, to be "all poet." But also, it was not a poetical age. If he did not write on poetical subjects, nobody else did.

More than any writer I know, he had a spontaneous facility in expressing things in verse. He came to his extraordinary facility of writing verse, slowly. His verses written under the age of thirty are few, and rather laboured. Ovid tells us, that he had the same faculty

when a boy. The case of Cowper, another great instance of poetical facility, differed from both: he simply did not write at all, till advanced in life.

Dryden's power of translation is astonishing for its freedom. Of course, he is not very faithful; but to write freely at all, with a model before him, shows great spirit.

A new poet, at the Restoration, laboured under a peculiar difficulty, from the almost entire extinction of elegant literature for eighteen years. Owing to the residence of the court, and many of the higher class of people, abroad, he had no certain measure, by which to judge what the taste of the nation would be. Literature and taste in France, in the meanwhile, had made an enormous progress. Dryden's mind was naturally complicated, almost contradictory; but in respect of models, he thought he might even cultivate extravagance, as Cowley, and others whom he had been used to read, had done; while at the same time he himself greatly promoted the French taste; which, even in its bolder state under Corneille, no longer allowed of that irregular freedom; but which, at the time when Dryden began to write plays, was about entering under the guidance of still more cautious, exact, judicious, and classical writers.

The introduction of actresses was another great revolution, against the habits of English dramatic composition. It is curious, that it led Dryden to introduce some most blustering and viraginous heroines: though never exclusively, as is the case in Corneille's Rodogune.

Dryden may be thought to have followed three different schools in his plays. We may suppose that upon the Restoration, people were too happy to have any plays at all, and did not require any great force and solidity