singularly disposed to admiration,--of a mind which diminished
vices, and magnified virtues and obligations. The most adulatory
of his addresses is that in which he dedicates the State of
Innocence to Mary of Modena. Johnson thinks it strange that any
man should use such language without self-detestation. But he
has not remarked that to the very same work is prefixed an
eulogium on Milton, which certainly could not have been
acceptable at the Court of Charles the Second. Many years later,
when Whig principles were in a great measure triumphant, Sprat
refused to admit a monument of John Phillips into Westminster
Abbey--because, in the epitaph, the name of Milton incidentally
occurred. The walls of his church, he declared, should not be
polluted by the name of a republican! Dryden was attached, both
by principle and interest, to the Court. But nothing could
deaden his sensibility to excellence. We are unwilling to accuse
him severely, because the same disposition, which prompted him to
pay so generous a tribute to the memory of a poet whom his
patrons detested, hurried him into extravagance when he described
a princess distinguished by the splendour of her beauty and the
graciousness of her manners.

This is an amiable temper; but it is not the temper of great men.
Where there is elevation of character, there will be
fastidiousness. It is only in novels and on tombstones that we
meet with people who are indulgent to the faults of others, and
unmerciful to their own; and Dryden, at all events, was not one
of these paragons. His charity was extended most liberally to
others; but it certainly began at home. In taste he was by no
means deficient. His critical works are, beyond all comparison,
superior to any which had, till then, appeared in England. They