Sir Walter Scott's admirable Life of Dryden concludes with this passage:--"I have thus detailed the life, and offered some remarks on the literary character, of JOHN DRYDEN; who, educated in a pedantic taste and a fanatical religion, was destined, if not to give laws to the stage of England, at least to defend its liberties; to improve burlesque into satire; to free translation from the fetters of verbal metaphrase, and exclude from it the license of paraphrase; to teach posterity the powerful and varied poetical harmony of which their language was capable; to give an example of the lyric ode of unapproached excellence; and to leave a name SECOND ONLY TO THOSE OF MILTON AND OF SHAKSPEARE." Two names we miss, and muse where the immortal author of Waverley would have placed them; not surely below Dryden's--those of CHAUCER and SPENSER. Let those Four names form a constellation--and the star Dryden, large and bright though it be, must not be looked for in the same region of the heavens. First in the second order of English poets--let glorious John keep the place assigned him by the greatest of Scotsmen. We desire not that he shall vacate the throne. But between the first order and the second, let that be remembered which seems here to have been forgotten, that immeasurable spaces intervene. "Second only to Shakspeare and Milton," implies near approach to them of another greatness inferior but in degree, and Dryden is thus lifted up in our imagination into the sphere of the Creators. On such mention of Milton, let us converse about him for a short half hour, and then venture to descend on Dryden, not with precipitation, but as in a balloon.