Dear Dr. Johnson had his doubts about Shakespeare, but here at least was poetry! This is one of the quatrains which he pronounces "worthy of our author."[39]
But Dryden himself has said that "a man who is resolved to praise an author with any appearance of justice must be sure to take him on the strongest side, and where he is least liable to exceptions." This is true also of one who wishes to measure an author fairly, for the higher wisdom of criticism lies in the capacity to admire.
Leser, wie gefall ich dir?
Leser, wie gefällst du mir?
are both fair questions, the answer to the first being more often involved in that to the second than is sometimes thought. The poet in Dryden was never more fully revealed than in such verses as these:—
"And threatening France, placed like a painted Jove,[40]
Kept idle thunder in his lifted hand";
"Silent in smoke of cannon they come on";
"And his loud guns speak thick, like angry men";
"The vigorous seaman every port-hole plies,
And adds his heart to every gun he fires";
"And, though to me unknown, they sure fought well,
Whom Rupert led, and who were British born."
This is masculine writing, and yet it must be said that there is scarcely a quatrain in which the rhyme does not trip him into a platitude, and there are too many swaggering with that expression forte d'un sentiment faible which Voltaire condemns in Corneille,—a temptation to which Dryden always lay too invitingly open. But there are passages higher in kind than any I have cited, because they show imagination. Such are the verses in which he describes the dreams of the disheartened enemy:—