cern the smallest glimpse of merit; he was indulgent even to
gross improprieties, when accompanied by any redeeming talent. When he
said a severe thing, it was to serve a temporary purpose,--to support an
argument, or to tease a rival. Never was so able a critic so free
from fastidiousness. He loved the old poets, especially Shakspeare. He
admired the ingenuity which Donne and Cowley had so wildly abused. He
did justice, amidst the general silence, to the memory of Milton. He
praised to the skies the school-boy lines of Addison. Always looking on
the fair side of every object, he admired extravagance on account of the
invention which he supposed it to indicate; he excused affectation
in favour of wit; he tolerated even tameness for the sake of the
correctness which was its concomitant.

It was probably to this turn of mind, rather than to the more
disgraceful causes which Johnson has assigned, that we are to attribute
the exaggeration which disfigures the panegyrics of Dryden. No writer,
it must be owned, has carried the flattery of dedication to a greater
length. But this was not, we suspect, merely interested servility: it
was the overflowing of a mind singularly disposed to admiration,--of a
mind which diminished vices, and magnified virtues and obligations. The
most adulatory of his addresses is that in which he dedicates the State
of Innocence to Mary of Modena. Johnson thinks it strange that any
man should use such language without self-detestation. But he has not
remarked that to the very same work is prefixed an eulogium on Milton,
which certainly could not have been acceptable at the Court of Charles
the Second. Many years later, when Whig principles were in a great
measure triumphant, Sprat refused to admit a monument of John Phillips
into Westminster Abbey--because, in the epitaph, the name of Milton
incidentally occurred. The walls of his church, he declared, should not
be polluted by the name of a republican! Dryden was attached, both
by principle and interest, to the Court. But nothing could deaden his
sensibility to excellence. We are unwilling to accuse him severely,
because the same disposition, which prompted him to pay so generous a
tribute to the memory of a poet whom his patrons detested, hurried him
into extravagance when he described a princess distinguished by the
splendour of her beauty and the graciousness of her manners.

This is an amiable temper; but it is not the temper of great men. Where