s we have seen him painted by Titian
or Rubens! Lyrical poetry, of all others, bears the nearest resemblance
to painting: it deals in hieroglyphics and passing figures, which depend
for effect, not on the working out, but on the selection. It is the
dance and pantomime of poetry. In variety and rapidity of movement, the
Alexander's Feast has all that can be required in this respect; it only
wants loftiness and truth of character.

Dryden's plays are better than Pope could have written; for though he
does not go out of himself by the force of imagination, he goes out of
himself by the force of common-places and rhetorical dialogue. On the
other hand, they are not so good as Shakspeare's; but he has left the
best character of Shakspeare that has ever been written. [5]

His alterations from Chaucer and Boccaccio shew a greater knowledge
of the taste of his readers and power of pleasing them, than
acquaintance with the genius of his authors. He ekes out the lameness of
the verse in the former, and breaks the force of the passion in both.
The Tancred and Sigismunda is the only general exception, in which, I
think, he has fully retained, if not improved upon, the impassioned
declamation of the original. The Honoria has none of the bewildered,
dreary, preternatural effect of Boccaccio's story. Nor has the Flower
and the Leaf any thing of the enchanting simplicity and concentrated
feeling of Chaucer's romantic fiction. Dryden, however, sometimes seemed
to indulge himself as well as his readers, as in keeping entire that
noble line in Palamon's address to Venus:

"Thou gladder of the mount of Cithaeron!"

His Tales have been, upon the whole, the most popular of his works;
and I should think that a translation of some of the other serious tales
in Boccaccio and Chaucer, as that of Isabella, the Falcon, of Constance,
the Prioress's Tale, and others, if executed with taste and spirit,
could not fail to succeed in the present day.

___
[5] "To begin then with Shakspeare: he was the man who of all modern,
and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul.
All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not
laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see
it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give
him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned: he needed not
the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards