since
written English verse. He first showed that the English language was
capable of uniting smoothness and strength. The hobbling verses of his
predecessors were abandoned even by the lowest versifiers; and by the
force of his precept and example, the meanest lampooners of the year
seventeen hundred wrote smoother lines than Donne and Cowley, the chief
poets of the earlier half of the seventeenth century. What was said of
Rome adorned by Augustus, has been, by Johnson, applied to English
poetry improved by Dryden; that he found it of brick, and left it of
marble. This reformation was not merely the effect of an excellent ear,
and a superlative command of gratifying it by sounding language; it was,
we have seen, the effect of close, accurate, and continued study of the
power of the English tongue. Upon what principles he adopted and
continued his system of versification, he long meditated to communicate
in his projected prosody of English poetry. The work, however, might
have been more curious than useful, as there would have been some danger
of its diverting the attention, and misguiding the efforts of poetical
adventurers; for as it is more easy to be masons than architects, we may
deprecate an art which might teach the world to value those who can
build rhymes, without attending to the more essential qualities of
poetry. Strict attention might no doubt discover the principle of
Dryden's versification; but it seems no more essential to the analysing
his poetry, than the principles of mathematics to understanding music,
although the art necessarily depends on them. The extent in which Dryden
reformed our poetry, is most readily proved by an appeal to the ear; and
Dr. Johnson has forcibly stated, that "he knew how to choose the flowing
and the sonorous words; to vary the pauses and adjust the accents; to
diversify the cadence, and yet preserve the smoothness of the metre." To
vary the English hexameter, he established the use of the triplet and
Alexandrine. Though ridiculed by Swift, who vainly thought he had
exploded them for ever, their force is still acknowledged in classical
poetry.

Of the various kinds of poetry which Dryden occasionally practised, the
drama was that which, until the last six years of his life, he chiefly
relied on for support. His style of tragedy, we have seen, varied with
his improved taste, perhaps with the change of manners. Although the
heroic drama, as we have described it at length in th