[544]. It may be said that this was later. But Prior was a man of thirty-six in 1700.
[545]. Yet it is not for the twentieth century to throw stones at the seventeenth, till we leave off laying down rules of our own manufacture for still earlier ages, and reproving Marlowe and the youthful Shakespeare for being “too lyrical” in tragedy.
[546]. See Spenser Redivivus. London, 1686-87. The Person of Quality “delivers” Spenser “in Heroick numbers,” as per sample—
“Then to the lady gallant Arthur said,
All grief repeated is more grievous made.”
This is “what Spenser ought to have been instead of what is to be found in himself.”
[547]. Dryden and Fontenelle themselves are of course not quite sinless. The latter (v. infra, p. [505]) proposes emendations in the magnificent couplet which he cites from Saint-Louis; and Dryden, let us say, does not improve Shakespeare and Chaucer. But it was on Shakespeare and Chaucer as they were, not as he travestied them for popular use, that Dryden passed the immortal eulogies; and Fontenelle thought that the couplet even as it stood “might easily not have been found by distinguished poets,” which is from him equivalent to a blare of superlatives from our modern critics.
[548]. P. 325.
[549]. See the whole absurd scheme in the appendix-matter to Dryden’s Translation of Du Fresnoy (ed. cit. sup., xvii. 429).
[550]. Parallèle, ii. 45; cf. Rigault, p. 187.