_"
In the "Conquest of Grenada" (1670), we have:--
"This little loss in our vast body shews
So small, that half _have never heard the news;
Fame's out of breath e'er she can fly so far
To tell 'em all that you have e'er made war_."[20]
And in the same play,
"That busy thing,
_The soul, is packing up_, and just on wing
Like parting swallows when they seek the spring,"
where the last sweet verse curiously illustrates that inequality (poetry
on a prose background) which so often puzzles us in Dryden. Infinitely
worse is the speech of Almanzor to his mother's ghost:--
"I'll rush into the covert of the night
And pull thee backward by the shroud to light,
Or else I'll squeeze thee like a bladder there,
And make thee groan thyself away to air."
What wonder that Dryden should have been substituted for Davenant as the
butt of the "Rehearsal," and that the parody should have had such a run?
And yet it was Dryden who, in speaking of Persius, hit upon the happy
phrase of "boisterous metaphors";[21] it was Dryden who said of Cowley,
whom he elsewhere calls "the darling of my youth,"[22] that he was "sunk
in reputation because he could never forgive any conceit which came in
his way, but swept, like a drag-net, great and small.
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