critic,--unite to render Dryden's Essays the most
delightful prose in the English language.

The didactic criticism of Dryden is necessarily, at least naturally,
mingled with that which he was obliged to pour forth in his own defence;
and this may be one main cause of its irregular and miscellaneous form.
What might otherwise have resembled the extended and elevated front of a
regular palace, is deformed by barriers, ramparts, and bastions of
defence; by cottages, mean additions, and offices necessary for personal
accommodation. The poet, always most in earnest about his immediate
task, used, without ceremony, those arguments, which suited his present
purpose, and thereby sometimes supplied his foes with weapons to assail
another quarter. It also happens frequently, if the same allusion may be
continued, that Dryden defends with obstinate despair, against the
assaults of his foemen, a post which, in his cooler moments, he has
condemned as untenable. However easily he may yield to internal
conviction, and to the progress of his own improving taste, even these
concessions, he sedulously informs us, are not wrung from him by the
assault of his enemies; and he often goes out of his road to show, that,
though conscious he was in the wrong, he did not stand legally convicted
by their arguments. To the chequered and inconsistent appearance which
these circumstances have given to the criticism of Dryden, it is an
additional objection, that through the same cause his studies were
partial, temporary, and irregular. His mind was amply stored with
acquired knowledge, much of it perhaps the fruits of early reading and
application. But, while engaged in the hurry of composition, or overcome
by the lassitude of continued literary labour, he seems frequently to
have trusted to the tenacity of his memory, and so drawn upon this fund
with injudicious liberality, without being sufficiently anxious as to
accuracy of quotation, or even of assertion. If, on the other hand, he
felt himself obliged to resort to more profound learning than his own,
he was at little pains to arrange or digest it, or even to examine
minutely the information he acquired, from hasty perusal of the books he
consulted; and thus but too often poured it forth in the crude form in
which he had himself received it, from the French critic, or Dutch
schoolman. The scholarship, for example, displayed in the Essay on
Satire, has this raw and ill-arranged appearance; and stuck