to a merely personal treatment of artistic questions than in the century
between Dryden and Johnson; and that it was here, rather than in the
adoption of any specific form of literature--rather, for instance,
than in the growth of the heroic drama--that the influence of France
is to be traced.

Side by side, however, with the baser sort of comparisons, we find in
the Restoration critics no small use of the kind that profits and
delights. Rymer's _Remarks on the Tragedies of the Former Age_ are an
instance of the comparative method, in its just sense, as employed by
a man of talent. The essays of Dryden abound in passages of this nature,
that could only have been written by a man of genius. They may have
a touch of the desire to set one form of art, or one particular poet,
in array against another. But, when all abatements have been made,
they remain unrivalled samples of the manner in which the comparative
vein can be worked by a master spirit. To the student of English
literature they have a further interest--notably, perhaps, the
comparison between Juvenal and Horace and the eulogy of Shakespeare--as
being among the most striking examples of that change from the Latinized
style of the early Stuart writers to the short, pointed sentence
commonly associated with French; the change that was inaugurated by
Hobbes, but only brought to completion by Dryden.

Once again. As Dryden was among the earliest to give the comparative
method its due place in English criticism, so he was the first to make
systematic use of the historical method. Daniel, indeed, in a remarkable
essay belonging to the early years of the century, had employed that
method in a vague and partial manner. [Footnote: _A Defence of Ryme_
(1603). It was written in answer to a pamphlet by Campion (1602), of
which the second chapter "declares the unaptness of Rime in