Of their rant, their fustian, their
bombast, their bad English, of their innumerable sins against Dryden's
own better conscience both as poet and critic, I shall excuse myself from
giving any instances.[76] I like what is good in Dryden so much, and it
_is_ so good, that I think Gray was justified in always losing his temper
when he heard "his faults criticised."[77]
It is as a satirist and pleader in verse that Dryden is best known, and
as both he is in some respects unrivalled. His satire is not so sly as
Chaucer's, but it is distinguished by the same good-nature. There is no
malice in it. I shall not enter into his literary quarrels further than
to say that he seems to me, on the whole, to have been forbearing, which
is the more striking as he tells us repeatedly that he was naturally
vindictive. It was he who called revenge "the darling attribute of
heaven." "I complain not of their lampoons and libels, though I have been
the public mark for many years. I am vindictive enough to have repelled
force by force, if I could imagine that any of them had ever reached me."
It was this feeling of easy superiority, I suspect, that made him the
mark for so much jealous vituperation. Scott is wrong in attributing his
onslaught upon Settle to jealousy because one of the latter's plays had
been performed at Court,--an honor never paid to any of Dryden's.
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