forward in the memory and disturb it in the effort to recall that total
impression (for the office of a critic is not, though often so
misunderstood, to say _guilty_ or _not guilty_ of some particular fact)
which is the only safe ground of judgment? It is the weight of the whole
man, not of one or the other limb of him, that we want. _Expende
Hannibalem_. Very good, but not in a scale capacious only of a single
quality at a time, for it is their union, and not their addition, that
assures the value of each separately. It was not this or that which gave
him his weight in council, his swiftness of decision in battle that
outran the forethought of other men,--it was Hannibal. But this prosaic
element in Dryden will force itself upon me. As I read him, I cannot help
thinking of an ostrich, to be classed with flying things, and capable,
what with leap and flap together, of leaving the earth for a longer or
shorter space, but loving the open plain, where wing and foot help each
other to something that is both flight and run at once. What with his
haste and a certain dash, which, according to our mood, we may call
florid or splendid, he seems to stand among poets where Rubens does among
painters,--greater, perhaps, as a colorist than an artist, yet great here
also, if we compare him with any but the first.

We have arrived at Dryden's thirty-second year, and thus far have found
little in him to warrant an augury that he was ever to be one of the
_great_ names in English literature, the most perfect type, that is, of
his class, and that class a high one, though not the highest. If Joseph
de Maistre's axiom, _Qui n'a pas vaincu a trente ans, ne vaincra jamais_,
were true, there would be little hope of him, for he has won no battle
yet. But there is something solid and doughty in the man, that can rise
from defeat, the stuff of which victories are made in due time, when we
are able to choose our position better, and the sun is at our back.
Hitherto his performances have been mainly of the _obbligato_ sort, at