Dryden sometimes estranges his language from vulgar use by a Latinism; (he, himself, insists upon this, as a deliberate act of enriching our poor and barbarous tongue;) and in his highest writings, even where he has good matter that will sustain itself at due poetical height, here and there he has touches of an ornamental, imitative, and false poetical diction. But that is not his own style--not the style which he uses where he is fully himself. This is pure English, simple, masculine; turned into poetry by a true life of expression, and by the inhering melody of the numbers. That Lucretian Exordium he must have written in one of his happiest veins--under the sting of the poetical oestrum. It is an instance where he was called to his task by desire. In his greatest undertaking--his Translation of Virgil--he often had to write when the fervour was low and slack. The task was to be driven on; and it was luck if the best places of his author fell to the uncertain hour of his own inspiration. So possibly we may understand why sometimes, when his original seems to challenge a full exertion of power, he comes short of himself. The weariness of the long labour must often apologise for languor, where the claims of the matter are less importunate. But it is not easy--when culling for comparison some of the majestic or softer strains into which Virgil has thrown his full soul, which he has wrought with his most loving and exquisite skill--wholly to shut the door of belief against the uncharitable suggestion,--that the Translator less livelily apprehended, than you yourself do, some Virgilian charm, which lay away from his own manner of thinking, and feeling, and of poetical art.