great part of it.

That movement was, on the whole, a downward one, from faith to scepticism,
from enthusiasm to cynicism, from the imagination to the understanding. It
was in a direction altogether away from those springs of imagination and
faith at which they of the last age had slaked the thirst or renewed the
vigor of their souls. Dryden himself recognized that indefinable and
gregarious influence which we call nowadays the spirit of the age, when he
said that "every age has a kind of universal genius." He had also a just
notion of that in which he lived; for he remarks, incidentally, that "all
knowing ages are naturally sceptic and not at all bigoted, which, if I am
not much deceived, is the proper character of our own." It may be conceived
that he was even painfully half-aware of having fallen upon a time
incapable, not merely of a great poet, but perhaps of any poet at all; for
nothing is so sensitive to the chill of a skeptical atmosphere as that
enthusiasm which, if it be not genius, is at least the beautiful illusion,
that saves it from the baffling quibbles of self-consciousness. Thrice
unhappy he who, born to see things as they might be, is schooled by
circumstances to see them as people say they are--to read God in a prose
translation. Such was Dryden's lot, and such, for a good part of his days,
it was by his own choice. He who was of a stature to snatch the torch of
life that flashes from lifted hand to hand along the generations, over the
heads of inferior men, chose rather to be a link-boy to the stews....

But at whatever period of his life we look at Dryden, and whatever,
for the moment, may have been his poetic creed, there was something in
the nature of the man that would not be wholly subdued to what it
worked in. There are continual glimpses of something in him greater
than he, hints of possibilities finer than anything he has done. You
feel that the whole of him was better than any random specimens, tho
of his best, seem to prove. _Incessu patet_, he has by times the large
stride of the elder race, tho it sinks too often into the slouch of a
man who has seen better days. His grand air may, in part, spring from
a habit of easy superiority to his competitors; but must also, in
part, be ascribed to an innate dignity of character. That this
preeminence should have been so generally admitted, during his life,
can only be explained by a bottom of good sense, kindliness, and sound
judgment, whose soli