"--Congress.
[82] Coleridge says excellently: "You will find this a good gauge or
criterion of genius,--whether it progresses and evolves, or only
spins upon itself. Take Dryden's Achitophel and Zimri; every line
adds to or modifies the character, which is, as it were, a-building
up to the very last verse; whereas in Pope's Timon, &c. the first two
or three couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the
twenty or thirty lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of
overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever it may be that is
satirized." (Table-Talk, 192.) Some of Dryden's best satirical hits
are let fall by seeming accident in his prose, as where he says of
his Protestant assailants, "Most of them love all whores but her of
Babylon." They had first attacked him on the score of his private
morals.
[83] That he taxes Shadwell with it is only a seeming exception, as
any careful reader will see.
[84] Preface to Fables.
[85] Dedication of the Georgics.
[86] Preface to Second Miscellany.
[87] Ibid.
[88] Memoirs of Wordsworth, Vol. II. p. 74 (American edition).
[89] A Discourse of Epick Poetry "If the _public_ approve.
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