What wonder that Dryden should have been substituted for Davenant as the butt of the "Rehearsal," and that the parody should have had such a run? And yet it was Dryden who, in speaking of Persius, hit upon the happy phrase of "boisterous metaphors";[21] it was Dryden who said of Cowley, whom he elsewhere calls "the darling of my youth,"[22] that he was "sunk in reputation because he could never forgive any conceit which came in his way, but swept, like a drag-net, great and small."[23] But the passages I have thus far cited as specimens of our poet's coarseness (for poet he surely was intus, though not always in cute) were written before he was forty, and he had an odd notion, suitable to his healthy complexion, that poets on the whole improve after that date. Man at forty, he says, "seems to be fully in his summer tropic, … and I believe that it will hold in all great poets that, though they wrote before with a certain heat of genius which inspired them, yet that heat was not perfectly digested."[24] But artificial heat is never to be digested at all, as is plain in Dryden's case. He was a man who warmed slowly, and, in his hurry to supply the market, forced his mind. The result was the same after forty as before. In "Oedipus" (1679) we find,
"Not one bolt Shall err from Thebes, but more be called for, more, New-moulded thunder of a larger size!"
This play was written in conjunction with Lee, of whom Dryden relates[25] that, when some one said to him, "It is easy enough to write like a madman," he replied, "No, it is hard to write like a madman, but easy enough to write like a fool,"—perhaps the most compendious lecture on poetry ever delivered. The splendid bit of eloquence, which has so much the sheet-iron clang of impeachment thunder (I hope that Dryden is not in the Library of Congress!) is perhaps Lee's. The following passage almost certainly is his:—
"Sure 'tis the end of all things! Fate has torn
The lock of Time off, and his head is now
The ghastly ball of round Eternity!"
But the next, in which the soul is likened to the pocket of an indignant housemaid charged with theft, is wholly in Dryden's manner:—
"No; I dare challenge heaven to turn me outward,
And shake my soul quite empty in your sight."
In the same style, he makes his Don Sebastian (1690) say that he is as much astonished as "drowsy mortals" at the last trump,
"When, called in haste, they fumble for their limbs,"
and propose to take upon himself the whole of a crime shared with another by asking Heaven to charge the bill on him. And in "King Arthur," written ten years after the Preface from which I have quoted his confession about Dubartas, we have a passage precisely of the kind he condemned:—
"Ah for the many souls as but this morn
Were clothed with flesh and warmed with vital blood,
But naked now, or shirted but with air."