nd on, full of vigour and
splendour, of reason and wit, as if verse were a mother tongue to him, or
some special gift of the universal Mother--or the perfected art of Pope?
Your choice changes as your own humour or the weathercock turns. If jolly
Boreas, the son of the clear sky, as Homer calls him, career scattering
the clouds, and stirring up life over all the face of the waters, grown
riotous with exuberant power, you are a Drydenite. But if brightness and
stillness fall together upon wood and valley, upon hill and lake, then the
spirit of beauty possesses you, and you lean your ear towards Pope. For
the spirit of beauty reigns in his musical style; and if he sting and
kill, it is with an air and a grace that quite win and charm the
lookers-on; and a sweetness persuades them that he is more concerned about
embalming his victims to a perennial pulchritude after death, than intent
upon ravishing from them the breath of a short-lived existence.

Dryden is all power--and he knows it. He soars at ease--he sails at
ease--he swoops at ease--and he trusses at ease. In his own verse, not
another approaches him for energy brought from familiar uses of
expression. Witness the hazardous but inimitable--

"To file and polish God Almighty's fool,"

and a hundred others. Shakespeare and Milton are now and then (_in
blanks_, as Tweedie used to say) all-surpassing by such a happiness. But
Dryden alone moves unfettered in the fettering couplet--alone of those who
have submitted to the fetters. For those who write distichs, running them
into one another, head over heels, till you do not know where to look
after the rhyme--these do not wear their fetters and with an all-mastering
grace dance to the chime, but they break them and caper about, the
fragments clanking dismally and strangely about their heels. Turn from the
clumsy clowns to glorious John:--sinewy, flexible, well-knit, agile,
stately-stepping, gracefully-bending, stern, stalwarth--or sitting his
horse, "erect and fair," in career, and carrying his steel-headed lance of
true stuff, level and steady to its aim, and impetuous as a thunderbolt.
His strokes are like the shots of that tremendous ordnance--

"chain'd thunderbolts and hail
Of iron globes----
That whom they hit none on their feet might stand,
Though standing else as rocks."

But we are forgetting ourselves. We must not run into elongated criticism,
however excellent, in a SUPPLEMENT--and therefo