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.

We are, perhaps, nearly right when we call Dryden the most _eloquent_
and _rhetorical_ of English poets. He bears in this respect an analogy
to Lucretius among the Romans, who, inferior in polish to Virgil, was
incomparably more animated and energetic in style; who exhibited,
besides, traits of lofty imagination rarely met with in Virgil, and
never in Dryden; and who equalled the English poet in the power of
reasoning in verse, and setting the severe abstractions of metaphysical
thought to music. With the Shakspeares, Chaucers, Spensers, Miltons,
Byrons, Wordsworths, and Coleridges, the _Dii majorum gentium_ of the
Poetic Pantheon of Britain, Dryden ranks not, although towering far
above the Moores, Goldsmiths, Gays, and Priors. He may be classed with a
middle, but still high order, in which we find the names of Scott, as a
_poet_, Johnson, Pope, Cowper, Southey, Crabbe, and two or three others,
who, while all excelling Dryden in some qualities, are all excelled by
him in others, and bulk on the whole about as largely as he on the
public eye.

We come to make a few remarks, in addition to some we have already
incidentally made, on Dryden's separate works. And first of his Lyrics.
His songs, properly so called, are lively, buoyant, and elastic; yet,