Accordingly, his poetry is often best and his
verse more flowing where (as in parts of his version of the twenty-ninth
ode of the third book of Horace) he is amplifying the suggestions of
another mind.[14] Viewed from one side, he justifies Milton's remark of
him, that "he was a good rhymist, but no poet." To look at all sides, and
to distrust the verdict of a single mood, is, no doubt, the duty of a
critic. But how if a certain side be so often presented as to thrust
forward in the memory and disturb it in the effort to recall that total
impression (for the office of a critic is not, though often so
misunderstood, to say _guilty_ or _not guilty_ of some particular fact)
which is the only safe ground of judgment? It is the weight of the whole
man, not of one or the other limb of him, that we want. _Expende
Hannibalem_. Very good, but not in a scale capacious only of a single
quality at a time, for it is their union, and not their addition, that
assures the value of each separately. It was not this or that which gave
him his weight in council, his swiftness of decision in battle that
outran the forethought of other men,--it was Hannibal. But this prosaic
element in Dryden will force itself upon me. As I read him, I cannot help
thinking of an ostrich, to be classed with flying things, and capable,
what with leap and flap together, of leaving the earth for a longer or
shorter space, but loving the open plain, where wing and foot help each
other to something that is both flight and run at once.
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