Ovid, with all his sweetness, has as little variety of numbers and
sound as he; he is always, as it were, upon the hand-gallop, and his
verse runs upon carpet-ground."[87] What a dreary half-century would have
been saved to English poetry, could Pope have laid these sentences to
heart! Upon translation, no one has written so much and so well as Dryden
in his various prefaces. Whatever has been said since is either expansion
or variation of what he had said before. His general theory may be stated
as an aim at something between the literalness of metaphrase and the
looseness of paraphase. "Where I have enlarged," he says, "I desire the
false critics would not always think that those thoughts are wholly mine,
but either _they are secretly in the poet_, or may be fairly deduced from
him." Coleridge, with his usual cleverness of _assimilation_, has
condensed him in a letter to Wordsworth: "There is no medium between a
prose version and one on the avowed principle of _compensation_ in the
widest sense, i.e. manner, genius, total effect."[88]
I have selected these passages, not because they are the best, but
because they have a near application to Dryden himself. His own
characterization of Chaucer (though too narrow for the greatest but one
of English poets) is the best that could be given of himself: "He is a
perpetual fountain of good sense.
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