Malone conjectures that our poet would
have contributed to the academic collection of verses, entitled, "Oliva
Pacis," and published in 1654, on the peace between England and Holland,
had not his father's death interfered at that period. It is probable, we
lose but little by the disappearance of any occasional verses which may
have been produced by Dryden at this time. The elegy on Lord Hastings,
the lines prefixed to "Sion and Parnassus," and some complimentary
stanzas which occur in a letter to his cousin Honor Driden,[31] would
have been enough to assure us, even without his own testimony, that
Cowley was the darling of his youth; and that he imitated his points of
wit, and quirks of epigram, with a similar contempt for the propriety of
their application. From these poems, we learn enough to be grateful,
that Dryden was born at a later period in his century; for had not the
road to fame been altered in consequence of the Restoration, his
extensive information and acute ingenuity would probably have betrayed
the author of the "Ode to St. Cecilia," and the father of English
poetical harmony, into rivalling the metaphysical pindarics of Donne and
Cowley.
The verses, to which we allude, display their sublety [Transcriber's
note: sic] of thought, their puerile extravagance of conceit, and that
structure of verse, which, as the poet himself says of Holyday's
translations, has nothing of verse in it except the worst part of it--
the rhyme, and that far from being unexceptionable The following lines,
in which the poet describes the death of Lord Hastings by the small-pox,
will be probably admitted as a justification of this censure:
"Was there no milder way but the small-pox;
The very filthiness of Pandora's box?
So many spots, like naeves, our Venus soil?
One jewel set off with so many a foil?
Blisters with pride swelled, which through 's flesh did sprout,
Like rose-buds, stuck i'the lily-skin about.
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