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