"
A few verses, like the pleasantly alliterative one in which he makes the
spider, "from the silent ambush of his den," "feel far off the trembling
of his thread," show that he was beginning to study the niceties of
verse, instead of trusting wholly to what he would have called his
natural _fougue_. On the whole, this part of the poem is very good war
poetry, as war poetry goes (for there is but one first-rate poem of the
kind in English,--short, national, eager as if the writer were personally
engaged, with the rapid metre of a drum beating the charge,--and that is
Drayton's "Battle of Agincourt"),[41] but it shows more study of Lucan
than of Virgil, and for a long time yet we shall find Dryden bewildered
by bad models. He is always imitating--no, that is not the word, always
emulating--somebody in his more strictly poetical attempts, for in that
direction he always needed some external impulse to set his mind in
motion. This is more or less true of all authors; nor does it detract
from their originality, which depends wholly on their being able so far
to forget themselves as to let something of themselves slip into what
they write.[42] Of absolute originality we will not speak till authors
are raised by some Deucalion-and-Pyrrha process; and even then our faith
would be small, for writers who have no past are pretty sure of having no
future.
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