In his "Amphitryon," he makes Alcmena say:--
"No, I would fly thee to the ridge of earth,
And leap the precipice to 'scape thy sight."
And in his "Spanish Friar," Lorenzo says to Elvira that they "will travel
together to the ridge of the world, and then drop together into the
next." It is idle for us poor Yankees to hope that we can invent
anything. To say sooth, if Dryden had left nothing behind him but the
"Annus Mirabilis," he might have served as a type of the kind of poet
America would have produced by the biggest-river-and-tallest-mountain
recipe,--longitude and latitude in plenty, with marks of culture
scattered here and there like the _carets_ on a proof-sheet.
It is now time to say something of Dryden as a dramatist. In the
thirty-two years between 1662 and 1694 he produced twenty-five plays, and
assisted Lee in two. I have hinted that it took Dryden longer than most
men to find the true bent of his genius. On a superficial view, he might
almost seem to confirm that theory, maintained by Johnson, among others,
that genius was nothing more than great intellectual power exercised
persistently in some particular direction which chance decided, so that
it lay in circumstance merely whether a man should turn out a Shakespeare
or a Newton.
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