Although Dryden's style has nothing obsolete, we can occasionally trace a reluctance to abandon an old word or idiom; the consequence, doubtless of his latter studies in ancient poetry. In other respects, nothing can be more elegant than the diction of the praises heaped upon his patrons, for which he might himself plead the apology he uses for Maimbourg, "who, having enemies, made himself friends by panegyrics." Of these lively critical prefaces, which, when we commence, we can never lay aside till we have finished, Dr. Johnson has said with equal force and beauty,--"They have not the formality of a settled style, in which the first half of the sentence betrays the other. The clauses are never balanced, nor the periods modelled; every word seems to drop by chance, though it falls into its proper place. Nothing is cold or languid; the whole is airy, animated, and vigorous; what is little is gay, what is great is splendid. He may be thought to mention himself too frequently; but while he forces himself upon our esteem, we cannot refuse him to stand high in his own. Everything is excused by the play of images and the sprightliness of expression. Though all is easy, nothing is feeble; though all seems careless, there is nothing harsh; and though, since his earlier works, more than a century has passed, they have nothing yet uncouth or obsolete." "He, who writes much, will not easily escape a manner, such a recurrence of particular modes as may be easily noted. Dryden is always _another and the same._ He does not exhibit a second time the same elegancies in the same form, nor appears to have any art other than that of expressing with clearness what he thinks with vigour. His style could not easily be imitated, either seriously or ludicrously; for, being always equable and always varied, it has no prominent or discriminative characters. The beauty, who is totally free from disproportion of parts and features, cannot be ridiculed by an overcharged resemblance." The last paragraph is not to be understood too literally; for although Dryden never so far copied himself as to fall into what has been quaintly called _mannerism_; yet accurate observation may trace, in his works, the repetition of some sentiments and illustrations from prose to verse, and back again to prose.[24] In his preface to the _Æneid_, he has enlarged on the difficulty of varying phrases, when the same sense returned on the author; and surely we must allow full praise to his fluency and command of language, when, during so long a literary career, and in the course of such a variety of miscellaneous productions, we can detect in his style so few instances of repetition, or self-imitation.