Such language is pure Dryden: it sounds, in Mr. van Doren's phrase, "like a gong." _All for Love_, from which the lines are taken, is Dryden's best play, and this is perhaps the highest reach. In general, he is best in his plays when dealing with situations which do not demand great emotional concentration; when his situation is more trivial, and he can practise his art of making the small great. The back-talk between the Emperor and his Empress Nourmahal, in _Aurungzebe_ is admirable purple comedy:-- _Emperor_: Such virtue is the plague of human life: A virtuous woman, but a cursed wife. In vain of pompous chastity y'are proud: Virtue's adultery of the tongue, when loud. I, with less pain, a prostitute could bear, Than the shrill sound of virtue, virtue hear. In unchaste wives-- There's yet a kind of recompensing ease: Vice keeps 'em humble, gives 'em care to please: But against clamourous virtue, what defence? It stops our mouths, and gives your noise pretence. . . What can be sweeter than our native home? Thither for ease, and soft repose, we come; Home is the sacred refuge of our life: Secure from all approaches but a wife. If thence we fly, the cause admits no doubt: None but an inmate foe could force us out. Clamours, our privacies uneasy make: Birds leave their nests disturbed, and beasts their haunts forsake. But drama is a mixed form; pure magnificence will not carry it through. The poet who attempts to achieve a play by the single force of the word provokes comparison, however strictly he confine himself to his capacity, with poets of other gifts. Corneille and Racine do not attain their triumphs by magnificence of this sort; they have concentration also, and, in the midst of their phrases, an undisturbed attention to the human soul as they knew it. Nor is Dryden unchallenged in his supreme ability to make the ridiculous, or the trivial, great. Avez-vous observé que maints cercueils de vieilles Sont presque aussi petits que celui d'un enfant? Those lines are the work of a man whose verse is as magnificent as Dryden's, and who could see profounder possibilities in wit, and in violently joined images, than ever were in Dryden's mind. For Dryden, with all his intellect, had a commonplace mind. His powers were, we believe, wider, but no greater, than Milton's; he was confined by boundaries as impassable, though less strait. He bears a curious antithetical resemblance to Swinburne. Swinburne was also a master of words, but Swinburne's words are all suggestions and no denotation; if they suggest nothing, it is because they suggest too much. Dryden's words, on the other hand, are precise, they state immensely, but their suggestiveness is almost nothing. That short dark passage to a future state; That melancholy riddle of a breath, That something, or that nothing, after death.