microscope, and to see all her glory would exhaust an antediluvian life.
The appetite, in her case, "grows with what it feeds on;" but such an
appetite was not Dryden's.

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