s "profaning the God-given strength and
marring the lofty line."

His other biographers--Dr Johnson, alone, with brevity and seeming
reluctance--have enumerated and characterised all Dryden's plays. We
have decided only to speak of them very generally, and that for the
following reasons:--1st, We are reprinting none of them; 2dly, From what
we have read of them, we are certain that, even as works of art, they
are utterly unworthy of their author, and that in morals they are, as a
whole, a disgrace to human nature. We are not the least lenient or
indulgent of critics. We have every wish to pity the errors, and to bear
with the frequent escapades and aberrations of genius. But when we see,
as in Dryden's case, what we are forced to consider either a deliberate
and systematic attempt to poison the sources of virtue, or, at least, an
elaborate and incessant habit of conformity to the bad tastes of a bad
age, we can think of no plea fully available for his defence. Vain to
say, "he wrote for bread." He did not--he wrote only for the luxuries,
not the staff of life. Vain to say, "he consulted the taste of his
audience, and suited their atmosphere." But why did he _select_ that
atmosphere as his? And why so much gratuitous and superfluous iniquity
in his works? "But he wrote to gratify his monarch." This would form a
good enough excuse for a Sporus, "a white curd of ass' milk," but not
for a strong man like Dryden. But he was "no worse than others of his
age." Pitiful apology! since, being the ablest man of his day, and
therefore bound to be before it, he was in reality behind it, his plays
excelling all contemporary productions in wickedness as well as in wit.
But his own "conduct was latterly irreproachable." This we doubt, and
Scott doubts so too. But even though it were true, it were damaging,
because it would deprive him of the plea of passion, and reduce him from
the warm human painter to the cold demon-like sculptor of unclean and
abominable ideas. It never can be forgotten, that whenever Dryden
translated a filthy play, he made it filthier than in the original, and
that he has once and again scattered his satyr-like fancies in spots
such as the Paradise of Milton, and the Enchanted Isle of Shakspeare,
which every imagination and every heart previously had regarded as holy
ground. The only extenuating circumstance we can mention is, that his
pruriency was latterly in part relinquished and much deplored by
himself, and t