spiritstirring

Updated: May 5, 2025

The consequence was that every man who had to live by his wit wrote plays, whether he had any internal vocation to write plays or not. It was thus with Dryden. As a satirist he has rivalled Juvenal. As a didactic poet he perhaps might, with care and meditation, have rivalled Lucretius. Of lyric poets he is, if not the most sublime, the most brilliant and spiritstirring.

Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay - The History of England, from the Accession of James II — Volume 1