The piece of Dryden's which is the most fun, which is the most sustained display of surprise after surprise of wit from line to line, is "MacFlecknoe." Dryden's method here is something very near to parody; he applies vocabulary, images, and ceremony which arouse epic associations of grandeur, to make an enemy helplessly ridiculous. But the effect, though disastrous for the enemy, is very different from that of the humour which merely belittles, such as the satire of Mark Twain. Dryden continually enhances: he makes his object great, in a way contrary to expectation; and the total effect is due to the transformation of the ridiculous into poetry. As an example may be taken a fine passage plagiarized from Cowley, from lines which Dryden must have marked well, for he quotes them directly in one of his prefaces. Here is Cowley:-- Where their vast courts the mother-waters keep, And undisturbed by moons in silence sleep. . . . Beneath the dens where unfledged tempests lie, And infant winds their tender voices try. In "MacFlecknoe" this becomes:-- Where their vast courts the mother-strumpets keep, And undisturbed by watch, in silence sleep. Near these, a nursery erects its head, Where queens are formed, and future heroes bred; Where unfledged actors learn to laugh and cry, Where infant punks their tender voices try, And little Maximins the gods defy. The passage from Cowley is by no means despicable verse. But it is a commonplace description of commonly poetic objects; it has not the element of _surprise_ so essential to poetry, and this Dryden provides. A clever versifier might have written Cowley's lines; only a poet could have made what Dryden made of them. It is impossible to dismiss his verses as "prosaic"; turn them into prose and they are transmuted, the fragrance is gone. The reproach of the prosaic, levelled at Dryden, rests upon a confusion between the emotions considered to be poetic--which is a matter allowing considerable latitude of fashion--and the _result_ of personal emotion in poetry; and, in the third place, there is the emotion _depicted_ by the poet in some kinds of poetry, of which the "Testaments" of Villon is an example. Again, there is the intellect, the originality and independence and clarity of what we vaguely call the poet's "point of view." Our valuation of poetry, in short, depends upon several considerations, upon the permanent and upon the mutable and upon the transitory. When we try to isolate the essentially poetic, we bring our pursuit in the end to something insignificant; our standards vary with every poet whom we consider. All we can hope to do, in the attempt to introduce some order into our preferences, is to clarify our reasons for finding pleasure in the poetry that we like.