"[26] In his worst images,
however, there is often a vividness that half excuses them. But it is a
grotesque vividness, as from the flare of a bonfire. They do not flash
into sudden lustre, as in the great poets, where the imaginations of poet
and reader leap toward each other and meet half-way.
English prose is indebted to Dryden for having freed it from the cloister
of pedantry. He, more than any other single writer, contributed, as well
by precept as example, to give it suppleness of movement and the easier
air of the modern world. His own style, juicy with proverbial phrases,
has that familiar dignity, so hard to attain, perhaps unattainable except
by one who, like Dryden, feels that his position is assured. Charles
Cotton is as easy, but not so elegant; Walton as familiar, but not so
flowing; Swift as idiomatic, but not so elevated; Burke more splendid,
but not so equally luminous. That his style was no easy acquisition
(though, of course, the aptitude was innate) he himself tells us. In his
dedication of "Troilus and Cressida" (1679), where he seems to hint at
the erection of an Academy, he says that "the perfect knowledge of a
tongue was never attained by any single person. The Court, the College,
and the Town must all be joined in it.
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