The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II

n the longer she is known; and he that loves her most warmly, has watched her with the narrowest inspection. She can bear the keenest glances of the microscope, and to see all her glory would exhaust an antediluvian life. The appetite, in her case, "grows with what it feeds on;" but such an appetite was not Dryden's.

Another of his great defects is, in true tenderness of feeling. He has very few passages which can be called pathetic. His Elegies and funeral Odes, such as those on "Mrs Killigrew" and "Eleonora," are eloquent; but they move you to admiration, not to tears. Dryden's long immersion in the pollutions of the playhouses, had combined, with his long course of domestic infelicity, and his employments as a hack author, a party scribe, and a satirist, to harden his heart, to brush away whatever fine bloom of feeling there had been originally on his mind, and to render him incapable of even simulating the softer emotions of the soul. But for the discovered fact, that he was in early life a lover of