The worst offence of _The Conquest of Granada_, after all, is not its bombast, but its bathos. It is true that both spring from the same root, that want of genuine creative imagination which in attempting the great only achieves the big, which a small oversight easily converts into the laughable. But apart from this failing, which Dryden shares with most epic poets of the second rank, it is difficult to acquit him of a singular insensibility to the ridiculous. This is evinced among other things by the entire conception of one of his most serious and elaborate works, _The Hind and the Panther_, and it requires all the gravity and obvious conviction of his preface to _The Conquest of Granada_ to convince us that he did not occasionally mean to burlesque his own principles. The rapid changes of fortune, the constant fallings into and out of love, the odd predicaments in which heroes and heroines continually find themselves, frequently produce the effect of the broadest comedy--an effect much assisted by the extraordinary rants of the principal speakers; as when Lyndaraxa desires the personage who has first stabbed her and then himself to 'Die for us both, I have not leisure now;' or Almahide threatens to send her ghost to fetch back Almanzor's scarf, as if she and her ghost were different beings; or Almanzor's astounding menace to his mother's spirit: 'I'll squeeze thee like a bladder there, And make thee groan thyself away in air.' So unequal is Dryden's genius that the second of these monstrosities occurs in close proximity to the exquisite verses: 'What precious drops are those Which silently each other's track pursue, Bright as young diamonds in their infant dew?' and the burlesque threat to the ghost is immediately succeeded by the noble couplet: 'I am the ghost of her who gave thee birth, The airy shadow of her mouldering earth.'