ile he forces himself upon our esteem, we cannot refuse him to
stand high in his own. Everything is excused by the play of images and
the sprightliness of expression. Though all is easy, nothing is feeble;
though all seems careless, there is nothing harsh; and though, since his
earlier works, more than a century has passed, they have nothing yet
uncouth or obsolete."

"He, who writes much, will not easily escape a manner, such a recurrence
of particular modes as may be easily noted. Dryden is always _another
and the same._ He does not exhibit a second time the same elegancies in
the same form, nor appears to have any art other than that of expressing
with clearness what he thinks with vigour. His style could not easily be
imitated, either seriously or ludicrously; for, being always equable and
always varied, it has no prominent or discriminative characters. The
beauty, who is totally free from disproportion of parts and features,
cannot be ridiculed by an overcharged resemblance."

The last paragraph is not to be understood too literally; for although
Dryden never so far copied himself as to fall into what has been
quaintly called _mannerism_; yet accurate observation may trace, in his
works, the repetition of some sentiments and illustrations from prose to
verse, and back again to prose.[24] In his preface to the _AEneid_, he
has enlarged on the difficulty of varying phrases, when the same sense
returned on the author; and surely we must allow full praise to his
fluency and command of language, when, during so long a literary career,
and in the course of such a variety of miscellaneous productions, we can
detect in his style so few instances of repetition, or self-imitation.

The prose of Dryden, excepting his translations, and one or two
controversial tracts, is entirely dedicated to criticism, either general
and didactic, or defensive and exculpatory. There, as in other branches
of polite learning, it was his lot to be a light to his people. About
the time of the Restoration, the cultivation of letters was prosecuted
in France with some energy. But the genius of that lively nation being
more fitted for criticism than poetry; for drawing rules from what
others have done, than for writing works which might be themselves
standards; they were sooner able to produce an accurate table of laws
for those intending to write epic poems and tragedies, according to the
best Greek and Roman authorities, than to exhibit distingui