neral
Odes, such as those on "Mrs Killigrew" and "Eleonora," are eloquent; but
they move you to admiration, not to tears. Dryden's long immersion in
the pollutions of the playhouses, had combined, with his long course of
domestic infelicity, and his employments as a hack author, a party
scribe, and a satirist, to harden his heart, to brush away whatever fine
bloom of feeling there had been originally on his mind, and to render
him incapable of even simulating the softer emotions of the soul. But
for the discovered fact, that he was in early life a lover of his
relative, Honor Driden, you would have judged him from his works
incapable of a pure passion. "Lust hard by Hate," being his twin idols,
how could he represent human, far less ethereal love; and how could he
touch those springs of holy tears, which lie deep in man's heart, and
which are connected with all that is dignified, and all that is divine
in man's nature? What could the author of "Limberham" know of love, or
the author of "MacFlecknoe" of pity?

Wordsworth, in that admirable letter to which we have repeatedly
referred, says, "Whenever his language is poetically impassioned, it is
mostly upon unpleasing subjects, such as the follies, vices, and crimes
of classes of men, or individuals." This is unquestionable. He never so
nearly reaches the sublime, as when he is expressing contempt. He never
rises so high, as in the act of trampling. He is a "good hater," and
expresses his hatred with a mixture of _animus_ and ease, of fierceness
and of trenchant rapidity, which makes it very formidable. He only, as
it were, waves off his adversaries disdainfully, but the very wave of
his hand cuts like a sabre. His satire is not savage and furious, like
Juvenal's; not cool, collected, and infernal, like that of Junius; not
rabid and reckless, like that of Swift; and never darkens into the
unearthly grandeur of Byron's: but it is strong, swift, dashing, and
decisive. Nor does it want deep and subtle touches. His pictures of
Shaftesbury and Buckingham are as delicately finished, as they are
powerfully conceived. He flies best at the highest game; but even in
dealing with Settles and Shadwells, he can be as felicitous as he is
fierce. No satire in the world contains lines more exquisitely inverted,
more ingeniously burlesqued, more artfully turned out of their
apparently proper course, like rays at once refracted and cooled, than
those which thus ominously panegyrise Shadwel