Poesie".--Ancient Critical Essays, ii. t64, &c.] He had defended rhyme
on the score of its popularity with all ages and all nations. Celts,
Slavs, and Huns--Parthians and Medes and Elamites--are all pressed
into the service. [Footnote: "The Turks, Slavonians, Arabians,
Muscovites, Polacks, Hungarians ... use no other harmony of words. The
Irish, Britons, Scots, Danes, Saxons, English, and all the inhabiters
of this island either have hither brought, or here found the same in
use."--Ib. p. 198.] That is, perhaps, the first instance in which
English criticism can be said to have attempted tracing a literary
form through the various stages of its growth. But Daniel wrote without
system and without accuracy. It was reserved for Dryden--avowedly
following in the steps of the French critic Dacier--to introduce the
order and the fulness of knowledge--in Dryden's case, it must be
admitted, a knowledge at second hand--which are indispensable to a
fruitful use of the historical method. In this sense, too--as in his
use of the comparative method, as in the singular grace and aptness
of his style--Dryden was a pioneer in the field of English criticism.

III. Over the century that parts Dryden from Johnson it is not well
to linger. During that time criticism must be said, on the whole, to
have gone back rather than to have advanced. With some reservations
to be noticed later, the critics of the eighteenth century are a
depressing study. Their conception of the art they professed was barren;
their judgments of men and things were lamentably narrow. The more
valuable elements traceable in the work of Dryden--the comparative and
the historical treatment--disappear or fall into the background. We
are left with little but the futile exaltation of one poet at the
expense of his rivals, or the still more futile insistence upon faults,
shortcomings, and absurdities. The _Dunciad_, the most marked critical
work of the period, may be defended on the ground that it _is_ the