ther as in some sunny glorifying haze. For high above my
own station, hovered a gleaming host of heavenly beings, surrounding the
pillows of the dying children. And such beings sympathize equally with
sorrow that grovels and with sorrow that soars. Such beings pity alike the
children that are languishing in death, and the children that live only to
languish in tears.

NORTH'S SPECIMENS OF THE BRITISH CRITICS.

NO. III.

DRYDEN.

Sir Walter Scott's admirable Life of Dryden concludes with this
passage:--"I have thus detailed the life, and offered some remarks on the
literary character, of JOHN DRYDEN; who, educated in a pedantic taste and
a fanatical religion, was destined, if not to give laws to the stage of
England, at least to defend its liberties; to improve burlesque into
satire; to free translation from the fetters of verbal metaphrase, and
exclude from it the license of paraphrase; to teach posterity the powerful
and varied poetical harmony of which their language was capable; to give
an example of the lyric ode of unapproached excellence; and to leave a
name SECOND ONLY TO THOSE OF MILTON AND OF SHAKSPEARE." Two names we miss,
and muse where the immortal author of Waverley would have placed them; not
surely below Dryden's--those of CHAUCER and SPENSER.

Let those Four names form a constellation--and the star Dryden, large and
bright though it be, must not be looked for in the same region of the
heavens. First in the second order of English poets--let glorious John
keep the place assigned him by the greatest of Scotsmen. We desire not
that he shall vacate the throne. But between the first order and the
second, let that be remembered which seems here to have been forgotten,
that immeasurable spaces intervene. "Second only to Shakspeare and
Milton," implies near approach to them of another greatness inferior but
in degree, and Dryden is thus lifted up in our imagination into the sphere
of the Creators. On such mention of Milton, let us converse about him for
a short half hour, and then venture to descend on Dryden, not with
precipitation, but as in a balloon.

To an Englishman recollecting the poetical glories of his country, the
Seventeenth Century often appears as the mother of one great name--MILTON.
Original and mighty poets express, at its highest, the mind of their time
as it is localized on their own soil. With Elizabeth the splendour of the
feudal and chivalrous ages for England finally sets. A