See _Preface to Fables_, below.]

This points to what was undoubtedly the most shining quality of Dryden,
as a critic: his absolute freedom from preconceived notions, his
readiness to "follow nature" and to welcome nature in whatever form
she might appear. That was the more remarkable because it ran directly
counter both to the general spirit of the period to which he belonged
and to the prevailing practice of the critics who surrounded him. The
spirit of the Restoration age was critical in the invidious, no less
than in the nobler, sense of the word. It was an age of narrow ideals
and of little ability to look beyond them. In particular, it was an
age of carping and of fault-finding; an age within measurable distance
of the pedantic system perfected in France by Boileau, [Footnote:
Boileau's _Art Poetique_ was published in 1674. A translation made by
Soame, with the aid of Dryden, was published in 1683.] and warmly
adopted by a long line of English critics from Roscoromon and
Buckinghamshire to the Monthly Reviewers and to Johnson. Such writers
might always have "nature" on their lips; but it was nature seen through
the windows of the lecture room or down the vista of a street.

With Dryden it was not so. With him we never fail to get an unbiassed
judgment; the judgment of one who did not crave for nature "to advantage
dressed", but trusted to the instinctive freshness of a mind, one of
the most alert and open that ever gave themselves to literature. It
is this that puts an impassable barrier between Dryden and the men of
his own day, or for a century to come. It is this that gives him a
place among the great critics of modern literature, and makes the
passage from him to the schoolmen of the next century so dreary a
descent.