These are very favourable instances. Those who wish for a bad
one may read the dying speeches of Maximin, and may compare them
with the last scenes of Othello and Lear.

If Dryden had died before the expiration of the first of the
periods into which we have divided his literary life, he would
have left a reputation, at best, little higher than that of Lee
or Davenant. He would have been known only to men of letters;
and by them he would have been mentioned as a writer who threw
away, on subjects which he was incompetent to treat, powers
which, judiciously employed, might have raised him to eminence;
whose diction and whose numbers had sometimes very high merit,
but all whose works were blemished by a false taste, and by
errors of gross negligence. A few of his prologues and epilogues
might perhaps still have been remembered and quoted. In these
little pieces he early showed all the powers which afterwards
rendered him the greatest of modern satirists. But, during the
latter part of his life, he gradually abandoned the drama. His
plays appeared at longer intervals. He renounced rhyme in
tragedy. His language became less turgid--his characters less
exaggerated. He did not indeed produce correct representations
of human nature; but he ceased to daub such monstrous chimeras as
those which abound in his earlier pieces. Here and there
passages occur worthy of the best ages of the British stage. The
style which the drama requires changes with every change of
character and situation. He who can vary his manner to suit the
variation is the great dramatist; but he who excels in one manner
only will, when that manner happens to be appropriate, appear to
be a great dramatist; as the hands of a watch which does not go
point right once in the twelve hours. Sometimes there is a scene