" And the other passages show him a
close and open-minded student of the art he professed. Has his influence
on our literature, but especially on our poetry, been on the whole for
good or evil? If he could have been read with the liberal understanding
which he brought to the works of others, I should answer at once that it
had been beneficial. But his translations and paraphrases, in some ways
the best things he did, were done, like his plays, under contract to
deliver a certain number of verses for a specified sum. The
versification, of which he had learned the art by long practice, is
excellent, but his haste has led him to fill out the measure of lines
with phrases that add only to dilute, and thus the clearest, the most
direct, the most manly versifier of his time became, without meaning it,
the source (_fons et origo malorum_) of that poetic diction from which
our poetry has not even yet recovered. I do not like to say it, but he
has sometimes smothered the childlike simplicity of Chaucer under
feather-beds of verbiage. What this kind of thing came to in the next
century, when everybody ceremoniously took a bushel-basket to bring a
wren's egg to market in, is only too sadly familiar. It is clear that his
natural taste led Dryden to prefer directness and simplicity of style.
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