he says elsewhere: "What judgment I had increases rather than diminishes,
and thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me that my
only difficulty is to choose or to reject, to run them into verse or to
give them the other harmony of prose; I have so long studied and
practised both, that they are grown into a habit and become familiar to
me."[17] I think that a man who was primarily a poet would hardly have
felt this equanimity of choice.

I find a confirmation of this feeling about Dryden in his early literary
loves. His taste was not an instinct, but the slow result of reflection
and of the manfulness with which he always acknowledged to himself his
own mistakes. In this latter respect few men deal so magnanimously with
themselves as he, and accordingly few have been so happily inconsistent.
_Ancora imparo_ might have served him for a motto as well as Michael
Angelo. His prefaces are a complete log of his life, and the habit of
writing them was a useful one to him, for it forced him to think with a
pen in his hand, which, according to Goethe, "if it do no other good,
keeps the mind from staggering about." In these prefaces we see his taste
gradually rising from Du Bartas to Spenser, from Cowley to Milton, from
Corneille to Shakespeare. "I remember when I was a boy," he says in his
dedication of the "Spanish Friar," 1681, "I thought inimitable Spenser a
mean poet in comparison of Sylvester's _Du Bartas_, and was rapt into an
ecstasy when I read these lines:--

'Now when the winter's keener breath began
To crystallize the Baltic ocean,
To glaze the lakes, to bridle up the floods,
And periwig with snow[18] the baldpate woods.'

I am much deceived if this be not abominable fustian." Swift, in his