to do with its steady and successful application. Dryden suffered, no
doubt, in this way. Though in creed he seems to have drifted backward in
an eddy of the general current; yet of the intellectual movement of the
time, so far certainly as literature shared in it, he could say, with
Aeneas, not only that he saw, but that himself was a great part of it.
That movement was, on the whole, a downward one, from faith to
scepticism, from enthusiasm to cynicism, from the imagination to the
understanding. It was in a direction altogether away from those springs
of imagination and faith at which they of the last age had slaked the
thirst or renewed the vigor of their souls. Dryden himself recognized
that indefinable and gregarious influence which we call nowadays the
Spirit of the Age, when he said that "every Age has a kind of universal
Genius."[5] He had also a just notion of that in which he lived; for he
remarks, incidentally, that "all knowing ages are naturally sceptic and
not at all bigoted, which, if I am not much deceived, is the proper
character of our own."[6] It may be conceived that he was even painfully
half-aware of having fallen upon a time incapable, not merely of a great
poet, but perhaps of any poet at all; for nothing is so sensitive to the
chill of a sceptical atmosphere as that enthusiasm which, if it be not
genius, is at least the beautiful illusion that saves it from the
baffling quibbles of self-consciousness. Thrice unhappy he who, horn to
see things as they might be, is schooled by circumstances to see them as
people say they are,--to read God in a prose translation. Such was
Dryden's lot, and such, for a good part of his days, it was by his own
choice. He who was of a stature to snatch the torch of life that flashes
from lifted hand to hand along the generations, over the heads of
inferior men, chose rather to be a link-boy to the stews.

As a writer for the stage, he deliberately adopted and repeatedly
reaffirmed the maxim that