The character
of Zimri in my 'Absalom' is, in my opinion, worth the whole poem. It is
not bloody, but it is ridiculous enough, and he for whom it was intended
was too witty to resent it as an injury.... I avoided the mention of
great crimes, and applied myself to the representing of blind sides and
little extravagances, to which, the wittier a man is, he is genrally the
more obnoxious."
Dryden thought his genius led him that way. In his elegy on the satirist
Oldham, whom Hallam, without reading him, I suspect, ranks next to
Dryden,[80] he says:--
"For sure our souls were near allied, and thine
Cast in the same poetic mould with mine;
One common note in either lyre did strike,
And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike."
His practice is not always so delicate as his theory; but if he was
sometimes rough, he never took a base advantage. He knocks his antagonist
down, and there an end. Pope seems to have nursed his grudge, and then,
watching his chance, to have squirted vitriol from behind a corner,
rather glad than otherwise if it fell on the women of those he hated or
envied. And if Dryden is never dastardly, as Pope often was, so also he
never wrote anything so maliciously depreciatory as Pope's unprovoked
attack on Addison.
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