The works of John Dryden, now first collected in eighteen volumes. Volume 09Dryden, John
General
The works of John Dryden, now first collected in eighteen volumes. Volume 09
Dryden, John
English literature
are entirely composed by Dryden, and contain some of the most masterly
strokes of his pen. The portraits of Doeg and Og, under which names
he stigmatized his personal antagonists, Settle and Shadwell, are
executed with a strength of satirical colouring, unmatched in the
English language. When we consider that Dryden had already, and very
lately, made Shadwell the subject of an entire independent satire, it
seems wonderful, with what ease he has executed a separate, and even
more striking, caricature of his adversary, without repeating an idea
or expression which he had used in "Mac Flecnoe." This is, indeed,
partly owing to the dexterous division of his subject, as well as
to the rich fertility of his vein of satire. For, after apparently
exhausting upon his enemy all the opprobrium and contempt with which a
literary character could be loaded, he seized this second occasion to
brand and blacken his political and moral principles, and to exaggerate
his former charge of dulness, by combining it with those of sedition,
profaneness, and immorality. The characters of Ben Jochanan, Judas,
Phaleg, &c. are all drawn with the same spirit and vivacity; and, on
the whole, these lines are equal to any of the kind which our author
ever wrote.
Had Dryden limited his assistance to furnishing this fragment, he would
rather have injured than served his coadjutor, since it would have
shone like a lamp in a dungeon, only to show the dreary waste in which
it was inclosed. To prevent Tate from suffering too much by comparison,
Dryden has obviously contributed much to the poem at large. Still,
though Tate's lines have doubtless been weeded of much that would at
once have ascertained their origin, our author's own couplet might have
been addressed to Nahum on the assistance lent him. Dryden's spirit is
---- ----so transfused, as oil and waters flow;
His always floats above, thine sinks below.
Much of the character of Corah, for example, is unquestionably
Dryden's; so probably is that of Arod, and the verses generally
descriptive of the Green-ribbon Club, which precede it. Such pungent
satire is easily distinguished from the smooth insipid flow of other
parts in which Dryden's corrections probably left nothing for censure,
and which fate was unable to qualify with any thing entitled to
praise. The character of Michal, of Dryden as Asaph, and some of the
encomiastic passages, seem to show the extent of Tate's powers, when
unsupported by the vivifying assistance of his powerful auxiliary. They
are just decently versified, but flat, common-place, and uninteresting.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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