The splendid bit of eloquence, which has so much
the sheet-iron clang of impeachment thunder (I hope that Dryden is not in
the Library of Congress!) is perhaps Lee's. The following passage almost
certainly is his:--
"Sure 'tis the end of all things! Fate has torn
The lock of Time off, and his head is now
The ghastly ball of round Eternity!"
But the next, in which the soul is likened to the pocket of an indignant
housemaid charged with theft, is wholly in Dryden's manner:--
"No; I dare challenge heaven to turn me outward,
And shake my soul quite empty in your sight."
In the same style, he makes his Don Sebastian (1690) say that he is as
much astonished as "drowsy mortals" at the last trump,
"When, called in haste, _they fumble for their limbs_,"
and propose to take upon himself the whole of a crime shared with another
by asking Heaven _to charge the bill_ on him. And in "King Arthur,"
written ten years after the Preface from which I have quoted his
confession about Dubartas, we have a passage precisely of the kind he
condemned:--
"Ah for the many souls as but this morn
Were clothed with flesh and warmed with vital blood,
But naked now, or _shirted_ but with air."
Dryden too often violated his own admirable rule, that "an author is not
to write all he can, but only all he ought.
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