fault is that his sentences too often smell of the library, but what an
open air is here! How unpremeditated it all seems! How carelessly he
knots each new thought, as it comes, to the one before it with an _and_,
like a girl making lace! And what a slidingly musical use he makes of the
sibilants with which our language is unjustly taxed by those who can only
make them hiss, not sing! There are twelve of them in the first twenty
words, fifteen of which are monsyllables. We notice the structure of
Dryden's periods, but this grows up as we read. It gushes, like the song
of the bird itself,--

"In profuse strains of unpremeditated art."

Let us now take a specimen of Dryden's bad prose from one of his poems. I
open the "Annus Mirabilis" at random, and hit upon this:--

'Our little fleet was now engaged so far,
That, like the swordfish in the whale, they fought.
The combat only seemed a civil war,
Till through their bowels we our passage wrought.'

Is this Dryden, or Sternhold, or Shadwell, those Toms who made him say
that "dulness was fatal to the name of Tom"? The natural history of
Goldsmith in the verse of Pye! His thoughts did not "voluntary move
harmonious numbers." He had his choice between prose and verse, and seems
to be poetical on second thought. I do not speak without book. He was
more than half conscious of it himself. In the same letter to Mrs.
Steward, just cited, he says, "I am still drudging on, always a poet and
never a good one"; and this from no mock-modesty, for he is always
handsomely frank in telling us whatever of his own doing pleased him.
This was written in the last year of his life, and at about the same time