"
With one more extract from the same play, which is in every way his best,
for he had, when he wrote it, been feeding on the bee-bread of
Shakespeare, I shall conclude. Antony says,
"For I am now so sunk from what I was,
Thou find'st me at my lowest water-mark.
The rivers that ran in and raised my fortunes
Are all dried up, or take another course:
What I have left is from my native spring;
I've a heart still that swells in scorn of Fate,
And lifts me to my banks."
This is certainly, from beginning to end, in what used to be called the
_grand_ style, at once noble and natural. I have not undertaken to
analyze any one of the plays, for (except in "All for Love") it would
have been only to expose their weakness. Dryden had _no_ constructive
faculty; and in every one of his longer poems that required a plot, the
plot is bad, always more or less inconsistent with itself, and rather
hitched-on to the subject than combining with it. It is fair to say,
however, before leaving this part of Dryden's literary work, that Horne
Tooke thought "Don Sebastian" "the best play extant."[74]
Gray admired the plays of Dryden, "not as dramatic compositions, but as
poetry."[75] "There are as many things finely said in his plays as almost
by anybody," said Pope to Spence.
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