very curious to trace through his different prefaces the gradual opening
of his eyes to the causes of the solitary pre-eminence of Shakespeare. At
first he is sensible of an attraction towards him which he cannot
explain, and for which he apologizes, as if it were wrong. But he feels
himself drawn more and more strongly, till at last he ceases to resist
altogether, and is forced to acknowledge that there is something in this
one man that is not and never was anywhere else, something not to be
reasoned about, ineffable, divine; if contrary to the rules, so much the
worse for _them_. It may be conjectured that Dryden's Puritan
associations may have stood in the way of his more properly poetic
culture, and that his early knowledge of Shakespeare was slight. He tells
us that Davenant, whom he could not have known before he himself was
twenty-seven, first taught him to admire the great poet. But even after
his imagination had become conscious of its prerogative, and his
expression had been ennobled by frequenting this higher society, we find
him continually dropping back into that _sermo pedestris_ which seems, on
the whole, to have been his more natural element. We always feel his
epoch in him, that he was the lock which let our language down from its
point of highest poetry to its level of easiest and most gently flowing
prose. His enthusiasm needs the contagion of other minds to arouse it;
but his strong sense, his command of the happy word, his wit, which is
distinguished by a certain breadth and, as it were, power of
generalization, as Pope's by keenness of edge and point, were his,
whether he would or no. Accordingly, his poetry is often best and his
verse more flowing where (as in parts of his version of the twenty-ninth
ode of the third book of Horace) he is amplifying the suggestions of
another mind.[14] Viewed from one side, he justifies Milton's remark of
him, that "he was a good rhymist, but no poet." To look at all sides, and
to distrust the verdict of a single mood, is, no doubt, the duty of a
critic. But how if a certain side be so often presented as to thrust