were still present to him; and he drew them not laboriously, but
luckily. When he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel
it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning give him the great
commendation. He was naturally learned. He needed not the spectacles
of books to read nature; he looked inwards and found her there. I
cannot say he is everywhere alike. Were he so, I should do him injury
to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat,
insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling
into bombast. But he is always great when some great occasion is
presented to him. No man can say, he ever had a fit subject for his
wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets,

Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi."
[Footnote: _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_. _English Garner_, iii. 549.]

The same keenness of appreciation is found in Dryden's estimate of
other writers who might have seemed to lie beyond the field of his
immediate vision. Of Milton he is recorded to have said: "He cuts us
all out, and the ancients too". [Footnote: The anecdote is recorded
by Richardson, who says the above words were written on the copy of
_Paradise Lost_ sent by Dorset to Milton. Dryden, _Poetic Works_, p.
161. Comp. _Dramatic Works_, i. 590; _Discourse on Satire_, p. 386.]
On Chaucer he is yet more explicit. "As he is the father of English
poetry, so I hold him in the same degree of veneration as the Grecians
held Homer, or the Romans Virgil. He is a perpetual fountain of good
sense; learned in all sciences, and therefore speaks properly on all
subjects. As he knew what to say, so he knows also when to leave off,
a continence which is practised by few writers, and scarcely by any
of the ancients, excepting Virgil and Horace ... Chaucer followed
nature everywhere, but was never so bold to go beyond her." [Footnote: