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Updated: May 20, 2025
The credit of this first alliance proved so grateful to Nahum, that he never after ventured upon literary enterprise without the aid of a similar coalition. His genius was inherently parasitic. In conjunction with Tory and Jesuit, he coalesced in the celebration of Castlemaine's gaudy reception at Rome. In conjunction with Dryden and others, he translated Juvenal.
And he had issued one prose exercise in criticism, of such solidity and force as had not been shown by any poet since Dryden, except Coleridge. The contents of all three must be carefully considered, and the consideration may be prefaced by a few words on Cromwell. It may also be found in the useful non-copyright edition above referred to.
Like Dryden, Pope wrote in the heroic couplet, and in his hands it became much more neat and polished than ever it did in the hands of the older poet. Pope saw Dryden only once, even if the story is true; but with another old poet, a dramatist, he struck up a great friendship.
But can they really think that Homer, or Pindar, or Shakespeare, or Dryden, or Walter Scott, were accustomed to aim at diction for its own sake, instead of being inspired with their subject, and pouring forth beautiful words because they had beautiful thoughts? this is surely too great a paradox to be borne.
It was to Mistress Anne Killigrew that Dryden wrote his noble elegiac ode, which Dr. Johnson thought the finest in the language. With the dignity and melody that distinguished Dryden at his best, he apostrophises the lady as one who had herself courted the muses of poetry and painting
Dryden has now been in his grave nearly a hundred and seventy years; in the second class of English poets perhaps no one stands, on the whole, so high as he; during his lifetime, in spite of jealousy, detraction, unpopular politics, and a suspicious change of faith, his pre-eminence was conceded; he was the earliest complete type of the purely literary man, in the modern sense; there is a singular unanimity in allowing him a certain claim to greatness which would be denied to men as famous and more read, to Pope or Swift, for example; he is supposed, in some way or other, to have reformed English poetry.
The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. It is a small matter, but not irrelevant, that this striking mistake is commonly supported by a striking misquotation. We have all heard people cite the celebrated line of Dryden as "Great genius is to madness near allied."
What was his reason, I know not; Dryden was then no longer in his way. His head still teemed with heroic poetry; and he published "Eliza," in ten books. I am afraid that the world was now weary of contending about Blackmore's heroes, for I do not remember that by any author, serious or comical, I have found "Eliza" either praised or blamed. She "dropped," as it seems, "dead-born from the press."
It is the simplest truth to say that at those times many a face illustrated involuntarily the loveliest line in the noblest ode in the language, where Dryden has sung even of a warrior "And now and then a sigh he heaved, And tears began to flow."
It is not probable that the man who had printed of Charles I. what Milton had printed, could have been offered office under Charles II. Even were court favour to be purchased by concessions, Milton was not the man to make them, or to belie his own antecedents, as Marchmont, Needham, Dryden, and so many others did.
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