unpleasantly suggests Nature under the hands of a lady's-maid.[19] We have no word in English that will exactly define this want of propriety in diction. Vulgar is too strong, and commonplace too weak. Perhaps bourgeois comes as near as any. It is to be noticed that Dryden does not unequivocally condemn the passage he quotes, but qualifies it with an "if I am not much mistaken." Indeed, though his judgment in substantials, like that of Johnson, is always worth having, his taste, the negative half of genius, never altogether refined itself from a colloquial familiarity, which is one of the charms of his prose, and gives that air of easy strength in which his satire is unmatched. In his "Royal Martyr" (1669), the tyrant Maximin says to the gods:—
"Keep you your rain and sunshine in the skies,
And I'll keep back my flame and sacrifice;
Your trade of Heaven shall soon be at a stand,
And all your goods lie dead upon your hand,"—
a passage which has as many faults as only Dryden was capable of committing, even to a false idiom forced by the last rhyme. The same tyrant in dying exclaims:—
"And after thee I'll go,
Revenging still, and following e'en to th' other world my blow,
And, shoving back this earth on which I sit,
I'll mount and scatter all the gods I hit."
In the "Conquest of Grenada" (1670), we have:—
"This little loss in our vast body shews
So small, that half have never heard the news;
Fame's out of breath e'er she can fly so far
To tell 'em all that you have e'er made war."[20]
And in the same play,
"That busy thing,
The soul, is packing up, and just on wing
Like parting swallows when they seek the spring,"
where the last sweet verse curiously illustrates that inequality (poetry on a prose background) which so often puzzles us in Dryden. Infinitely worse is the speech of Almanzor to his mother's ghost:—
"I'll rush into the covert of the night
And pull thee backward by the shroud to light,
Or else I'll squeeze thee like a bladder there,
And make thee groan thyself away to air."