l:--

"His brows thick fogs, instead of glories grace,
And _lambent dulness_ play'd about his face.
As Hannibal did to the altar come,
Sworn by his sire, a mortal foe to Rome;
So Shadwell swore, nor should his vow be vain,
That he till death true dulness would maintain."

Better still the following picture, in imitation of the Homeric or
Miltonic manner:--

"The Sire then shook the honours of his head,
And from his brows damps of oblivion shed
Full on the _filial dulness_--long he stood
Repelling from his breast the _raging_ God."

What inimitable irony in this epithet! The God of dulness _raging_! A
stagnant pool in a passion; a canal insane; a _mouton enrage_, as the
French says; or a snail in a tumultuous state of excitement, were but
types of the satirical ideas implied in these words. What a description
of labouring nonsense--of the Pythonic genius of absurdity, panting and
heaving on his solemnly ridiculous tripod!

The language and versification of Dryden have been praised, and justly.
His style is worthy of a still more powerful and original vein of genius
than his own. It is a masculine, clear, elastic, and varied diction,
fitted to express all feelings, save the deepest; all fancies, save the
subtlest; all passions, save the loftiest; all moods of mind, save the
most disinterested and rapt; to represent incidents, however strange;
characters, however contradictory to each other; shades of meaning,
however evasive: and to do all this, as if it were doing nothing, in
point of ease, and as if it were doing everything in point of felt and
rejoicing energy. No poetic style since can, in such respects, be
compared to Dryden's. Pope's to his is feeble--and Byron's forced. He
can say the strongest things in the swiftest way, and the most
felicitous expressions seem to fall unconsciously from his lips. Had his
matter, you say, but been equal to his manner, his thought in
originality and imaginative power but commensurate with the boundless
quantity, and no less admirable quality, of his words! His versification
deserves a commendation scarcely inferior. It is "all ear," if we may so
apply an expression of Shakspeare's. No studied rules,--no elaborate
complication of harmonies,--it is the mere sinking and swelling of the
wave of his thought as it moves onward to the shore of his purpose. And,
as in the sea, there are no furrows absolutely isolated from each other,
but each leans on, or melts