eare. And if, by Dryden, then by the age which he
eminently led, and for which he created, and for which he--destroyed.

"The Inchanted Island," and "The State of Innocence" come under no
criticism. They are literary FACINORA. No rational account--no theory of
them can be given. There they are--melancholy, but instructive facts. They
express the revolution of the national spirit, on the upper degrees of the
social scale. That which thirty, twenty, ten years before was impossible,
happens. The hewing in pieces of Shakspeare, to throw him into the magical
caldron, to reproduce him, not in youth but in dotage, shows a death, but
not yet the consequent life. Stupendous and sweet Nature whom we
possessed, has vanished--fled heavenward--resolved into a dew--gone, into
the country. At least, she is no longer in town! It may safely be averred,
that no straining of the human intellect can compute the interval
overleaped betwixt those originals, and these transcriptions. It is no
translation, paraphrase, metaphrase. It is as if we should catch a
confused and misapprehending glimpse of something that is going on in
Jupiter. It is a transference from one order of beings to another; who
have some intellectual processes in common, but are allied by no sympathy.
The sublime is gone! The beautiful is gone! The rational is gone! The
loving is gone! The divine is not here! Nor the angelical! Nor the human!
Alas! not even the diabolical! All is corrupted! banished! obliterated!

We have seen Dryden complaining of Shakspeare's language and style--of the
language as antiquated from the understanding of an audience in his own
day--of the whole style as being "so pestered with the figurative
expressions, that it is as affected as it is obscure." And we were aware
of the modest self-attribution, "_I have refined the language_," in
Drydenising Troilus and Cressida, "which before was _obsolete_." And
Samuel Johnson corroborates and enlarges the self-praise. "Dryden was the
first who _refined the language of poetry_."

At this day, such expressions fill the younger votary--creative or
critical--of our vernacular muse with astonishment and perplexity, and set
an older one upon thinking. Such assertions, it must be said, are
"_unintelligible_" now, because a nobler unfolding of time, a happy return
of our educated mind to the old and to the natural, has "_antiquated_" the
literary sentiment, which Dryden and Johnson shared, and which they so
confi