In all this criticism there was much undeniable truth; but
sufficient weight was not given to the excellencies of the old school,
while their faults were ostentatiously and invidiously enumerated. It
would seem that Dryden, perhaps from the rigour of a puritanical
education, had not studied the ancient dramatic models in his youth, and
had only begun to read them with attention when it was his object rather
to depreciate than to emulate them. But the time came when he did due
homage to their genius.
Meanwhile, this avowed preference of his own period excited the
resentment of the older critics, who had looked up to the era of
Shakespeare as the golden age of poetry; and no less that of the
playwrights of his own standing, who pretended to discover that Dryden
designed to establish less the reputation of his age, than of himself
individually upon the ruined fame of the ancient poets. They complained
that, as the wild bull in the Vivarambla of Granada,
"monarch-like he ranged the listed field,
And some he trampled down, and some he kill'd."
Many, therefore, advancing, under pretence of vindicating the fame of
the ancients, gratified their spleen by attacking that of Dryden, and
strove less to combat his criticisms, than to criticise his productions.
We shall have too frequent occasion to observe, that there was, during
the reign of Charles II., a semi-barbarous virulence of controversy,
even upon abstract points of literature, which would be now thought
injudicious and unfair, even by the newspaper advocates of contending
factions.
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