[79] See also that noble passage in the "Hind and Panther" (1572-1591), where this is put into verse. Dryden always thought in prose.
[80] Probably on the authority of this very epitaph, as if epitaphs were to be believed even under oath! A great many authors live because we read nothing but their tombstones. Oldham was, to borrow one of Dryden's phrases, "a bad or, which is worse, an indifferent poet."
[81] "He was of a nature exceedingly humane and compassionate easily forgiving injuries, and capable of a prompt and sincere reconciliation with them that had offended him."—Congress.
[82] Coleridge says excellently: "You will find this a good gauge or criterion of genius,—whether it progresses and evolves, or only spins upon itself. Take Dryden's Achitophel and Zimri; every line adds to or modifies the character, which is, as it were, a-building up to the very last verse; whereas in Pope's Timon, &c. the first two or three couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirized." (Table-Talk, 192.) Some of Dryden's best satirical hits are let fall by seeming accident in his prose, as where he says of his Protestant assailants, "Most of them love all whores but her of Babylon." They had first attacked him on the score of his private morals.
[83] That he taxes Shadwell with it is only a seeming exception, as any careful reader will see.
[84] Preface to Fables.
[85] Dedication of the Georgics.
[86] Preface to Second Miscellany.
[87] Ibid.
[88] Memoirs of Wordsworth, Vol. II. p. 74 (American edition).