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Updated: June 20, 2025
Undoubtedly every brain has its own set of moulds ready to shape all material of thought into its own individual set of patterns. If the mind comes into consciousness with a good set of moulds derived by "traduction," as Dryden called it, from a good ancestry, it may be all very well to give the counsel to the youth to plant himself on his instincts.
Unless, like Goethe, he is of a singularly uncontemporaneous nature, capable of being tutta in se romita, and of running parallel with his time rather than being sucked into its current, he will be thwarted in that harmonious development of native force which has so much to do with its steady and successful application. Dryden suffered, no doubt, in this way.
But this morning, getting Sir.W. Pen to read over the Narrative with me, he did sparingly, yet plainly, say that we might have intercepted their Zealand squadron coming home, if we had done our parts; and more, that we might have spooned before the wind as well as they, and have overtaken their ships in the pursuite, in all the while. Sea Dictionary. Dryden uses the word
Dryden had, not many years before, scattered criticism over his prefaces with very little parsimony; but though he sometimes condescended to be somewhat familiar, his manner was in general too scholastic for those who had yet their rudiments to learn, and found it not easy to understand their master.
The paper was in the pocket of my overcoat in the hall. I went and fetched it. "Here it is," I said. "A Romney belonging to Sir Bellamy Palmer " They all shouted "What!" exactly at the same time, like a chorus. Elizabeth grabbed the paper. "Let me look! Yes. 'Late last night burglars entered the residence of Sir Bellamy Palmer, Dryden Park, Midford, Hants " "Why, that's near here," I said.
"The wise for cure on exercise depend," saith Dryden, and that is our hobby. A great physician has said, "I know not which is most indispensable for the support of the frame, food or exercise." But who, in this community, really takes exercise?
And think'st thou, Scott! by vain conceit perchance, On public taste to foist thy stale romance." Then after a sneer at Scott for making money by his poems, Byron concludes with this passage: "These are the themes that claim our plaudits now; These are the bards to whom the muse must bow; While Milton, Dryden, Pope, alike forgot, Resign their hallowed bays to Walter Scott."
For nearly twenty years, the best of his life, Dryden gave himself up to this unfortunate work. Both by nature and habit he seems to have been clean in his personal life; but the stage demanded unclean plays, and Dryden followed his audience. That he deplored this is evident from some of his later work, and we have his statement that he wrote only one play, his best, to please himself.
We shall never again think that Dryden and Pope had the essence of poetry in them to the same extent, as, for instance, Wordsworth or Shelley; but neither shall we ever again treat them with the superficial and ignorant contempt which was not uncommon twenty or thirty years ago.
The new demand created an organ for its supply in the publisher, and through the publisher literature became a profession by which men might win their bread. That such a change was a healthy one time was to show. But in spite of such instances as Dryden, at the moment of the change its main result seemed the degradation of letters.
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