The second part, treating of the Fire of London, is infinitely better. Dryden exhibits one of the most certain marks of a good writer, he rises with his subject. Yet there is no lack of absurdities. The Deity extinguishes the conflagration precisely in the manner in which Dryden would have put out his own candle: 'An hollow crystal pyramid he takes, In firmamental waters dipt above; Of it a broad extinguisher he makes, And hoods the flames that to their quarry drove.' Nothing in Dryden is more amazing than his inequality. This stanza is succeeded by the following: 'The vanquished fires withdraw from every place, Or, full with feeding, sink into a sleep; Each household genius shows again his face, And from the hearths the little Lares creep.' Other quatrains are still better, as, for instance, this on the burning of St. Paul's: 'The daring flames peeped in, and saw from far The awful beauties of the sacred quire; But since it was profaned by civil war, Heaven thought it fit to have it purged by fire.' A thought so striking, that the reader does not pause to reflect that the celestial sentence would have been equally applicable to every cathedral in the country. Perhaps the following stanzas compose the passage of most sustained excellence. In them, as in the apostrophe to the Royal Society, in an earlier part of the poem, Dryden appears truly the _vates sacer_, and his poetry becomes prophecy: 'Methinks already from this chymic flame I see a city of more precious mould; Rich as the town which gives the Indies name, With silver paved, and all divine with gold. 'Already labouring with a mighty fate She shakes the rubbish from her mounting brow, And seems to have renewed her charter's date, Which heaven will to the death of Time allow. 'More great than human now, and more august, Now deified she from her fires doth rise; Her widening streets on new foundations trust, And opening into larger parts she flies. 'Before, she like some shepherdess did show, Who sat to bathe her by a river's side; Not answering to her fame, but rude and low, Nor taught the beauteous arts of modern pride. 'Now like a Maiden Queen she will behold From her high turrets hourly suitors come; The East with incense and the West with gold Will stand like suppliants to receive her doom. 'The silver Thames, her own domestic flood, Shall bear her vessels like a sweeping train; And often wind, as of his mistress proud, With longing eyes to meet her face again. 'The wealthy Tagus, and the wealthier Rhine, The glory of their towns no more shall boast; And Seine, that would with Belgian rivers join, Shall find her lustre stained and traffic lost.