er-bed;
From east to west triumphantly she rides,
All shores are watered by her wealthy tides.
The gospel sound diffused from Pole to Pole,
Where winds can carry and where waves can roll,
The selfsame doctrine of the sacred page
Conveyed to every clime, in every age."

But though Dryden's poetry is not of the highest class, it is of the
very highest kind in its class. Wherever the pure intellect comes into
play, there he is invariably excellent. There is never any weakness;
there is never any vagueness; there is never any deviation from the
true path into aimless digression. His words invariably go straight to
the mark, and not unfrequently with a directness and force that fully
merit the epithet of "burning" applied to them by the poet Gray. His
thoughts always rise naturally out of the matter in hand; and in the
treatment of the meanest subjects he is not only never mean, but often
falls without apparent effort into a felicity of phrase which holds
the attention and implants itself in the memory. The benefit of
exercise, for instance, is not a topic that can be deemed highly
poetical; but in his epistle on country life addressed to his cousin
John Driden, the moment he comes to speak of hunting and its salutary
results his expression at once leaves the commonplace, and embodies
the thought in these pointed lines:--

"So lived our sires, ere doctors learned to kill,
And multiply with theirs the weekly bill.
The first physicians by debauch were made;
Excess began, and sloth sustains the trade.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
By chase our long-lived fathers earned their food;
Toil strung the nerves and purified the blood:
But we their sons, a pampered race of men,
Are dwindled down to threescore years and ten.
Better to hunt in fields for health unbought
Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.
The wise for cure on exercise depend;
God never made his work for man to mend."

In a similar way in 'Cymon and Iphigenia' the contempt which Dryden,
in common with the Tories of his time, felt for the English militia
force, found vent in the following vigorous passage, really
descriptive of them and their conduct though the scene is laid in
Rhodes:--

"The country rings around with loud alarms,
And raw in fields the rude militia swarms;
Mouths without hands; maintained at vast expense,
In peace a charge, in war a weak defense;
Stout once a month th