nificent gallop. Scott exhibits in his poetry the soul of a warrior; but it is of a warrior of the Border-somewhat savage and coarse. Dryden can, for the nonce at least, assume the appearance, and display the spirit, of a knight of ancient chivalry-gallant, accomplished, elegant, and gay.

Next to this poet's astonishing ease, spirit, and elastic vigour, may be ranked his clear, sharp intellect. He may be called more a logician than a poet. He reasons often, and always acutely, and his rhyme, instead of shackling, strengthens the movement of his argumentation. Parts of his "Religio Laici" and the "Hind and Panther" resemble portions of Duns Scotus or Aquinas set on fire. Indeed, keen, strong intellect, inflamed with passion, and inspirited by that "ardour and impetuosity of mind" which Wordsworth is compelled to allow to him, rather than creative or original genius, is the differentia of Dryden. We have compared him to a courser, but he was not one of those coursers of Achilles, who fed on no earthly food, but on the golden barley of heaven, having sprung from the gods—

Ξάνθον καὶ Βαλίον, τὸ ἅμα πνοιῇσι, πετέσθην.

Τοὺς ἔτεκε Ζεφύρῳ ἀνέμῳ Αρπυια Ποδάργη,

Dryden resembled rather the mortal steed which was yoked with these immortal twain, the brood of Zephyr and the Harpy Podarga; only we can hardly say of the poet what Homer says of Pedasus

*Ος καὶ θνητὸς ἐὼν, ἔπεθ ̓ ἵπποις ἀθανάτοισι.

He was not, although a mortal, able to keep up with the immortal coursers. His path was on the plains or table-lands of earth-never or seldom in "cloudland, gorgeous land," or through the aerial altitudes which stretch away and above the clouds to the gates of heaven. He can hardly be said to have possessed the power of sublimity, in the high sense of that term, as the power of sympathising with the feeling of the Infinite. Often he gives us the impression of the picturesque, of the beautiful, of the heroic, of the nobly disdainful-but never (when writing, at least, entirely from his own mind) of that infinite and nameless grandeur which the imaginative

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soul feels shed on it from the multitudinous waves of oceanfrom the cataract leaping from his rock, as if to consummate an act of prayer to God-from the hum of great assemblies of men-from the sight of far-extended wastes and wildernesses -and from the awful silence, and the still more mysterious sparkle of the midnight stars. This sense of the presence of the shadow of immensity-immensity itself cannot be felt any more than measured-this sight like that vouchsafed to Moses of the "backparts" of the Divine-the Divine itself cannot be seen-has been the inspiration of all the highest poetry of the world—of the "Paradise Lost," of the "Divina Commedia," of the "Night Thoughts," of Wordsworth and Coleridge, of "Festus," and, highest far, of the Hebrew Prophets, as they cry, "Whither can we go from Thy presence? whither can we flee from Thy Spirit?" Such poets have resembled a blind man, who feels, although he cannot see, that a stranger of commanding air is in the room beside him; so they stand awe-struck in the "wind of the going" of a majestic and unseen Being. This feeling differs from mysticism, inasmuch as it is connected with a reality, while the mystic dreams a vague and unsupported dream, and the poetry it produces is simply the irresistible cry springing from the perception of this wondrous Some One who is actually near them. The feeling is connected, in general, with a lofty moral and religious nature; and yet not always, since, while wanting in Dryden, we find it intensely discovered, although in an imperfect and perverted shape, in Byron and Rousseau.

In Dryden certainly it exists not. We do not-and in this we have Jeffrey's opinion to back us-remember a single line in his poetry that can be called sublime, or, which is the same thing, that gives us a thrilling shudder, as if a god or a ghost were passing by. Pleasure, high excitement,―rapture even, he often produces; but such a feeling as is created by that line of Milton,

"To bellow through the vast and boundless deep,"

never. Compare, in proof of this, the description of the tournament in "Palamon and Arcite"-amazingly spirited as it is -to the description of the war-horse in Job; or, if that appear

too high a test, to the contest of Achilles with the rivers in Homer; to the war of the Angels, and the interrupted preparations for contest between Gabriel and Satan in Milton; to the contest between Apollyon and Christian in the "Pilgrim's Progress;" to some of the combats in Spenser; and to that wonderful one of the Princess and the Magician in midair in the "Arabian Nights," in order to understand the distinction between the most animated literal pictures of battle and those into which the element of imagination is strongly injected by the poet, who can, to the inevitable shiver of human nature at the sight of struggle and carnage, add the far more profound and terrible shiver, only created by a vision of the concomitants, the consequences-the UNSEEN BORDERS of the bloody scene.

Take these lines, for instance :

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They look anew: the beauteous form of fight
Is changed, and war appears a grisly sight;
Two troops in fair array one moment showed-
The next, a field with fallen bodies strowed;
Not half the number in their seats are found,
But men and steeds lie grovelling on the ground.
The points of spears are stuck within the shield,
The steeds without their riders scour the field;
The knights, unhorsed, on foot renew the fight-
The glittering faulchions cast a gleaming light;
Hauberks and helms are hew'd with many a wound,
Out-spins the streaming blood, and dyes the ground."

This is vigorous and vivid, but is not imaginative or suggestive. It does not carry away the mind from the field to bring back thoughts and images, which shall, so to speak, brood over, and aggravate the general horror. It is, in a word, plain, good painting, but it is not poetry. There is not a metaphor, such as "he laugheth at the shaking of a spear,' in it all.

In connexion with this defect in imagination is the lack of natural imagery in Dryden's poetry. Wordsworth, indeed, greatly overcharges the case, when he says (in a letter to Scott), "that there is not a single image from nature in the whole body of his poetry." We have this minute taken up

the "Hind and the Panther," and find two images from nature in one page :—

"As where in fields the fairy rounds are seen,

A rank sour herbage rises on the green;
So," &c.

And a few lines down:

"As where the lightning runs along the ground,
No husbandry can heal the blasting wound."

And some pages farther on occurs a description of Spring, not unworthy of Wordsworth himself; beginning—

"New blossoms flourish and new flowers arise,
As God had been abroad, and walking there,
Had left his footsteps, and reform'd the year."

Still it is true, that, taking his writings as a whole, they are thin in natural images; and even those which occur, are often rather the echoes of his reading, than the results of his observation. And what Wordsworth adds is, we fear, true; in his translation of Virgil, where Virgil can be fairly said to have his eye upon his object, Dryden always spoils the passage. The reason of this, apart from his want of high imaginative sympathy, may be found in his long residence in London; and his lack of that intimate daily familiarity with natural scenes, which can alone supply thorough knowledge, or enkindle thorough love. Nature is not like the majority of other mistresses. Her charms deepen the longer she is known; and he that loves her most warmly, has watched her with the narrowest inspection. She can bear the keenest glances of the microscope, and to see all her glory would exhaust an antediluvian life. The appetite, in her case, "grows with what it feeds on;" but such an appetite was not Dryden's.

Another of his great defects is, in true tenderness of feeling. He has very few passages which can be called pathetic. His Elegies and funeral 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 pollu

tions 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 Shadwell: