But he feels
himself drawn more and more strongly, till at last he ceases to resist
altogether, and is forced to acknowledge that there is something in this
one man that is not and never was anywhere else, something not to be
reasoned about, ineffable, divine; if contrary to the rules, so much the
worse for _them_. It may be conjectured that Dryden's Puritan
associations may have stood in the way of his more properly poetic
culture, and that his early knowledge of Shakespeare was slight. He tells
us that Davenant, whom he could not have known before he himself was
twenty-seven, first taught him to admire the great poet. But even after
his imagination had become conscious of its prerogative, and his
expression had been ennobled by frequenting this higher society, we find
him continually dropping back into that _sermo pedestris_ which seems, on
the whole, to have been his more natural element. We always feel his
epoch in him, that he was the lock which let our language down from its
point of highest poetry to its level of easiest and most gently flowing
prose. His enthusiasm needs the contagion of other minds to arouse it;
but his strong sense, his command of the happy word, his wit, which is
distinguished by a certain breadth and, as it were, power of
generalization, as Pope's by keenness of edge and point, were his,
whether he would or no.
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