Still it was bought, like emp'ric wares or charms,
Hard words sealed up with Aristotle's arms_."

Then we have his graceful sweetness of fancy, where he speaks of the
inhabitants of the New World:--

"Guiltless men who danced away their time,
Fresh as their groves and happy as their clime."

And, finally, there is a hint of imagination where "mighty visions of the
Danish race" watch round Charles sheltered in Stonehenge after the battle
of Worcester. These passages might have been written by the Dryden whom
we learn to know fifteen years later. They have the advantage that he
wrote them to please himself. His contemporary, Dr. Heylin, said of
French cooks, that "their trade was not to feed the belly, but the
palate." Dryden was a great while in learning this secret, as available
in good writing as in cookery. He strove after it, but his thoroughly
English nature, to the last, would too easily content itself with serving
up the honest beef of his thought, without regard to daintiness of flavor
in the dressing of it.[15] Of the best English poetry, it might be said
that it is understanding aerated by imagination. In Dryden the solid part
too often refused to mix kindly with the leaven, either remaining lumpish
or rising to a hasty puffiness. Grace and lightness were with him much
more a laborious achievement than a natural gift, and it is all the more
remarkable that he should so often have attained to what seems such an
easy perfection in both. Always a hasty writer,[16] he was long in
forming his style, and to the last was apt to snatch the readiest word
rather than wait for the fittest. He was not wholly and unconsciously
poet, but a thinker who sometimes lost himself on enchanted ground and
was transfigured by its touch. This preponderance in him of the reasoning