abolishment of rhyme, his own particular reason is plainly this, that
rhyme was not his talent; he had neither the ease of doing it nor the
graces of it: which is manifest in his _Juvenilia_, ... where his rhyme
is always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age
when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost every
man a rhymer, though not a poet."[11] It was this, no doubt, that
heartened Dr. Johnson to say of "Lycidas" that "the diction was harsh,
the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing." It is Dryden's excuse
that his characteristic excellence is to argue persuasively and
powerfully, whether in verse or prose, and that he was amply endowed with
the most needful quality of an advocate,--to be always strongly and
wholly of his present way of thinking, whatever it might be. Next we
have, in 1660, "Astraea Redux" on the "happy restoration" of Charles II.
In this also we can forebode little of the full-grown Dryden but his
defects. We see his tendency to exaggeration, and to confound physical
with metaphysical, as where he says of the ships that brought home the
royal brothers, that

"The joyful London meets
The princely York, himself alone a freight,
The Swiftsure groans beneath great Gloster's weight"

and speaks of the

"Repeated prayer
Which stormed the skies and ravished Charles from thence."

There is also a certain everydayness, not to say vulgarity, of phrase,
which Dryden never wholly refined away, and which continually tempts us
to sum up at once against him as the greatest poet that ever was or could