e
select men in succeeding generations. This verdict has been as good as
unanimous in favor of Dryden. It is, perhaps, worth while to take a
fresh observation of him, to consider him neither as warning nor
example, but to endeavor to make out what it is that has given so
lofty and firm a position to one of the most unequal, inconsistent,
and faulty writers that ever lived. He is a curious example of what we
often remark of the living, but rarely of the dead--that they get
credit for what they might be quite as much as for what they are--and
posterity has applied to him one of his own rules of criticism,
judging him by the best rather than the average of his achievement, a
thing posterity is seldom wont to do. On the losing side in politics,
it is true of his polemical writings as of Burke's--whom in many
respects he resembles, and especially in that supreme quality of a
reasoner, that his mind gathers not only heat, but clearness and
expansion, by its own motion--that they have won his battle for him in
the judgment of after times.

To us, looking back at him, he gradually becomes a singularly
interesting and even picturesque figure. He is, in more senses than
one, in language, in turn of thought, in style of mind, in the
direction of his activity, the first of the moderns. He is the first
literary man who was also a man of the world, as we understand the
term. He succeeded Ben Jonson as the acknowledged dictator of wit and
criticism, as Dr. Johnson, after nearly the same interval, succeeded
him. All ages are, in some sense, ages of transition; but there are
times when the transition is more marked, more rapid; and it is,
perhaps, an ill fortune for a man of letters to arrive at maturity
during such a period, still more to represent in himself the change
that is going on, and to be an efficient cause in bringing it about.
Unless, like Goethe, he is of a singularly uncontemporaneous nature,
capable of being _tutta in se romita_, and of running parallel with
his time rather than being sucked into its current, he will be
thwarted in that harmonious development of native force which has so
much to do with its steady and successful application. Dryden
suffered, no doubt, in this way. Tho in creed he seems to have drifted
backward in an eddy of the general current; yet of the intellectual
movement of the time, so far certainly as literature shared in it, he
could say, with AEneas, not only that he saw, but that himself was a