Saturday strolls that he probably acquired the habit of pensive reverie
to which we owe many of the finest of his speculations in after days,
such as that in _Spectator_, No. 565, beginning, "I was yesterday, about
sunset, walking in the open fields, when insensibly the night fell upon
me," &c.

Prose English essays, however, were as yet strangers to his pen. His
ambition was to be a poet, and while still under twenty-two, he produced
and printed some complimentary verses to Dryden, then declining in years,
and fallen into comparative neglect. The old poet was pleased with the
homage of the young aspirant, which was as graceful in expression as it
was generous in purpose. For instance, alluding to Dryden's projected
translation of "Ovid," he says, that "Ovid," thus transformed, shall
"reveal"

"A nobler change than he himself can tell."

This, however, although happy, starts a different view of the subject. It
suggests the idea that most translations are metamorphoses to the worse,
like that of a living person into a dead tree, or at least of a superior
into an inferior being. In Pope's "Iliad," you have the metamorphosis of
an eagle into a nightingale; in Dryden's "Virgil," you have a stately
war-horse transformed into a hard-trotting hackney; in Hoole's versions
of the Italian Poets, you have nymphs nailed up in timber; while, on the
other hand, in Coleridge's "Wallenstein," you have the "nobler change,"
spoken of by Addison, of--shall we say?-a cold and stately holly-tree
turned into a murmuring and oracular oak.

That, after thus introducing himself to Dryden, he met him occasionally
seems certain, although the rumour circulated by Spence that he taught
the old man to sit late and drink hard seems ridiculous. Dryden
introduced him to Congreve, and through Congreve he made the valuable
acquaintance of Charles Montague, then leader of the Whigs in the House
of Commons, and Chancellor of the Exchequer.

He afterwards published a translation of that part of the "Fourth Book
of the Georgics" referring to bees, on which Dryden, who had procured a
preface to his own complete translation of the same poem from Addison,
complimented him by saying--"After his bees, my later swarm is scarcely
worth hiving." He published, too, a poem on "King William," and an
"Account of the Principal English Poets," in which he ventures on a
character of Spenser ere he had read his works. It thus is, as might have
been expected, poor a