Chapter XXXV: Section I: Dryden's Début

The subject of the following lines is a young man, Lord Hastings, who died of smallpox at the age of nineteen:

"His body was an orb, his sublime soul Did move on virtue's and on learning's pole; ... Come, learned Ptolemy, and trial make If thou this hero's altitude canst take. ... Blisters with pride swell'd, which through's flesh did sprout Like rose-buds, stuck i' the lily skin about. Each little pimple had a tear in it, To wail the fault its rising did commit.... Or were these gems sent to adorn his skin, The cabinet of a richer soul within? No comet need foretell his change drew on Whose corpse might seem a constellation."[376]

With such a pretty morsel, Dryden, the greatest poet of the classical age, makes his _début._

Such enormities indicate the close of a literary age. Excess of folly in poetry, as excess of injustice in political matters, leads up to and foretell revolutions. The Renaissance, unchecked and original, abandoned the minds of men to the excitement and caprice of imagination, the eccentricities, curiosities, outbreaks of a fancy which only cares to content itself, breaks out into singularities, has need of novelties, and loves audacity and extravagance, as reason loves justice and truth. After the extinction of genius folly remained; after the removal of inspiration nothing was left but absurdity. Formerly disorder and internal enthusiasm produced and excused _concetti_ and wild flights; thenceforth men threw them out in cold blood, by calculation and without excuse. Formerly they expressed the state of the mind, now they belie it. So are literary revolutions accomplished. The form, no longer original or spontaneous, but imitated and passed from hand to hand, outlives the old spirit which had created it, and is in opposition to the new spirit which destroys it. This preliminary strife and progressive transformation make up the life of Dryden, and account for his impotence and his failures, his talent and his success.