“I must confess that I took up the book with some
degree of trepidation, considering an edition of such a
ELLIS ON THE EDITION OF DRYDEN.
163
writer as on every account
periculosæ plenum opus
aleæ; but as soon as I became acquainted with your plan
I proceeded boldly, and really feel at this moment sincerely grateful to you
for much exquisite amusement. It now seems to me that your critical remarks
ought to have occurred to myself. Such a passionate admirer of Dryden’sfables, the noblest specimen of
versification (in my mind) that is to be found in any modern language, ought to
have perused his theatrical pieces with more candour than I did, and to have
attributed to the bad taste of the age, rather than to his own, the numerous
defects by which those hasty compositions are certainly deformed. I ought to
have considered that whatever Dryden wrote must, for some
reason or other, be worth reading; that his bombast and his indelicacy, however
disgusting, were not without their use to any one who took an interest in our
literary history; that—in short, there are a thousand reflections which I ought
to have made and never did make, and the result was that yourDryden was to
me a perfectly new book. It is certainly painful to see a race-horse in a
hackney-chaise, but when one considers that he will suffer infinitely less from
the violent exertion to which he is condemned, than a creature of inferior
race—and that the wretched cock-tail on whom the same task is usually imposed,
must shortly become a martyr in the service, one’s conscience becomes
more at ease, and we are enabled to enjoy Dr
Johnson’s favourite pleasure of rapid motion without much
remorse on the score of its cruelty. Since, then, your hackneyman is not
furnished with a whip, and you can so easily canter from post to post, go on
and prosper!”
John Dryden (1631-1700)
English poet laureate, dramatist, and critic; author of Of Dramatick
Poesie (1667), Absalom and Achitophel (1681), Alexander's Feast; or the Power of Musique (1697), The Works of Virgil translated into English Verse (1697), and Fables (1700).
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
English man of letters, among many other works he edited A Dictionary
of the English Language (1755) and Shakespeare (1765), and wrote Lives of the Poets (1779-81).