Another of his great defects is, in true tenderness of feeling. He has very few passages which can be called pathetic. His Elegies and funeral Odes, such as those on "Mrs Killigrew" and "Eleonora," are eloquent; but they move you to admiration, not to tears. Dryden's long immersion in the pollutions of the playhouses, had combined, with his long course of domestic infelicity, and his employments as a hack author, a party scribe, and a satirist, to harden his heart, to brush away whatever fine bloom of feeling there had been originally on his mind, and to render him incapable of even simulating the softer emotions of the soul. But for the discovered fact, that he was in early life a lover of his relative, Honor Driden, you would have judged him from his works incapable of a pure passion. "Lust hard by Hate," being his twin idols, how could he represent human, far less ethereal love; and how could he touch those springs of holy tears, which lie deep in man's heart, and which are connected with all that is dignified, and all that is divine in man's nature? What could the author of "Limberham" know of love, or the author of "MacFlecknoe" of pity? Wordsworth, in that admirable letter to which we have repeatedly referred, says, "Whenever his language is poetically impassioned, it is mostly upon unpleasing subjects, such as the follies, vices, and crimes of classes of men, or individuals." This is unquestionable. He never so nearly reaches the sublime, as when he is expressing contempt. He never rises so high, as in the act of trampling. He is a "good hater," and expresses his hatred with a mixture of _animus_ and ease, of fierceness and of trenchant rapidity, which makes it very formidable. He only, as it were, waves off his adversaries disdainfully, but the very wave of his hand cuts like a sabre. His satire is not savage and furious, like Juvenal's; not cool, collected, and infernal, like that of Junius; not rabid and reckless, like that of Swift; and never darkens into the unearthly grandeur of Byron's: but it is strong, swift, dashing, and decisive. Nor does it want deep and subtle touches. His pictures of Shaftesbury and Buckingham are as delicately finished, as they are powerfully conceived. He flies best at the highest game; but even in dealing with Settles and Shadwells, he can be as felicitous as he is fierce. No satire in the world contains lines more exquisitely inverted, more ingeniously burlesqued, more artfully turned out of their apparently proper course, like rays at once refracted and cooled, than those which thus ominously panegyrise Shadwell:-- "His brows thick fogs, instead of glories grace, And _lambent dulness_ play'd about his face. As Hannibal did to the altar come, Sworn by his sire, a mortal foe to Rome; So Shadwell swore, nor should his vow be vain, That he till death true dulness would maintain." Better still the following picture, in imitation of the Homeric or Miltonic manner:--