[19] We
have no word in English that will exactly define this want of propriety
in diction. _Vulgar_ is too strong, and _commonplace_ too weak. Perhaps
_bourgeois_ comes as near as any. It is to be noticed that Dryden does
not unequivocally condemn the passage he quotes, but qualifies it with an
"if I am not much mistaken." Indeed, though his judgment in substantials,
like that of Johnson, is always worth having, his taste, the negative
half of genius, never altogether refined itself from a colloquial
familiarity, which is one of the charms of his prose, and gives that air
of easy strength in which his satire is unmatched. In his "Royal Martyr"
(1669), the tyrant Maximin says to the gods:--
"Keep you your rain and sunshine in the skies,
And I'll keep back my flame and sacrifice;
_Your trade of Heaven shall soon be at a stand,
And all your goods lie dead upon your hand,_"--
a passage which has as many faults as only Dryden was capable of
committing, even to a false idiom forced by the last rhyme. The same
tyrant in dying exclaims:--
"And after thee I'll go,
Revenging still, and following e'en to th' other world my blow,
And, _shoving back this earth on which I sit,
I'll mount and scatter all the gods I hit.
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