attempted, by affected fits of poetical fury, to bring on a real
paroxysm; and, like them, he got nothing but his distortions for
his pains.

Horace very happily compares those who, in his time, imitated
Pindar to the youth who attempted to fly to heaven on waxen
wings, and who experienced so fatal and ignominious a fall. His
own admirable good sense preserved him from this error, and
taught him to cultivate a style in which excellence was within
his reach. Dryden had not the same self-knowledge. He saw that
the greatest poets were never so successful as when they rushed
beyond the ordinary bounds, and that some inexplicable good
fortune preserved them from tripping even when they staggered on
the brink of nonsense. He did not perceive that they were guided
and sustained by a power denied to himself. They wrote from the
dictation of the imagination; and they found a response in the
imaginations of others. He, on the contrary, sat down to work
himself, by reflection and argument, into a deliberate wildness,
a rational frenzy.

In looking over the admirable designs which accompany the Faust,
we have always been much struck by one which represents the
wizard and the tempter riding at full speed. The demon sits on
his furious horse as heedlessly as if he were reposing on a
chair. That he should keep his saddle in such a posture, would
seem impossible to any who did not know that he was secure in the
privileges of a superhuman nature. The attitude of Faust, on the
contrary, is the perfection of horsemanship. Poets of the first
order might safely write as desperately as Mephistopheles rode.
But Dryden, though admitted to communion with higher spirits,