"The Sire then shook the honours of his head, And from his brows damps of oblivion shed Full on the _filial dulness_--long he stood Repelling from his breast the _raging_ God." What inimitable irony in this epithet! The God of dulness _raging_! A stagnant pool in a passion; a canal insane; a _mouton enragé_, as the French says; or a snail in a tumultuous state of excitement, were but types of the satirical ideas implied in these words. What a description of labouring nonsense--of the Pythonic genius of absurdity, panting and heaving on his solemnly ridiculous tripod! The language and versification of Dryden have been praised, and justly. His style is worthy of a still more powerful and original vein of genius than his own. It is a masculine, clear, elastic, and varied diction, fitted to express all feelings, save the deepest; all fancies, save the subtlest; all passions, save the loftiest; all moods of mind, save the most disinterested and rapt; to represent incidents, however strange; characters, however contradictory to each other; shades of meaning, however evasive: and to do all this, as if it were doing nothing, in point of ease, and as if it were doing everything in point of felt and rejoicing energy. No poetic style since can, in such respects, be compared to Dryden's. Pope's to his is feeble--and Byron's forced. He can say the strongest things in the swiftest way, and the most felicitous expressions seem to fall unconsciously from his lips. Had his matter, you say, but been equal to his manner, his thought in originality and imaginative power but commensurate with the boundless quantity, and no less admirable quality, of his words! His versification deserves a commendation scarcely inferior. It is "all ear," if we may so apply an expression of Shakspeare's. No studied rules,--no elaborate complication of harmonies,--it is the mere sinking and swelling of the wave of his thought as it moves onward to the shore of his purpose. And, as in the sea, there are no furrows absolutely isolated from each other, but each leans on, or melts into each, and the subsidence of the one is the rise of the other--so with the versification of his better poetry. The beginning of the "Hind and Panther," we need not quote; but it will be remembered, as a good specimen of that peculiar style of running the lines into one another, and thereby producing a certain free and noble effect, which the uniform tinkle of Pope and his school is altogether unable to reach; a style which has since been copied by some of our poets--by Churchill, by Cowper, and by Shelley. The lines of the artificial school, on the other hand, may be compared to _rollers_, each distinct from each other,--each being in itself a whole,--but altogether forming none. Pope, says Hazlitt, has turned Pegasus into a rocking-horse.