Indeed, he was not a scholar, in the
proper sense of the word, but he had that faculty of rapid
assimilation without study, so remarkable in Coleridge and other rich
minds, whose office is rather to impregnate than to invent. These
brokers of thought perform a great office in literature, second only
to that of originators.
[36] Essay on Satire. What he has said just before this about Butler
is worth noting. Butler had had a chief hand in the "Rehearsal," but
Dryden had no grudges where the question was of giving its just
praise to merit.
[37] The conclusion of the second canto of Book Third is the best
continuously fine passage. Dryden's poem has nowhere so much meaning
in so small space as Davenant, when he says of the sense of honor
that,
"Like Power, it grows to nothing, growing less."
Davenant took the hint of the stanza from Sir John Davies. Wyatt
first used it, so far as I know, in English.
[38] Perhaps there is no better lecture on the prevailing vices of
style and thought (if thought this frothy ferment of the mind may be
called) than in Cotton Mather's "Magnalia." For Mather, like a true
provincial, appropriates only the mannerism, and, as is usual in such
cases, betrays all its weakness by the unconscious parody of
exaggeration.
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