It must indeed have a share in the
composition of everything that is truly estimable in the fine arts, as
well as in philosophy. Nothing is so easily attained as the power of
presenting the extrinsic qualities of fine painting, fine music, or fine
poetry; the beauty of colour and outline, the combination of notes, the
melody of versification, may be imitated by artists of mediocrity; and
many will view, hear, or peruse their performances, without being able
positively to discover why they should not, since composed according to
all the rules, afford pleasure equal to those of Raphael, Handel, or
Dryden. The deficiency lies in the vivifying spirit, which, like
_alcohol_, may be reduced to the same principle in all, though it
assumes such varied qualities from the mode in which it is exerted or
combined. Of this power of intellect, Dryden seems to have possessed
almost an exuberant share, combined, as usual, with the faculty of
correcting his own conceptions, by observing human nature, the practical
and experimental philosophy as well of poetry as of ethics or physics.
The early habits of Dryden's education and poetical studies gave his
researches somewhat too much of a metaphysical character; and it was a
consequence of his mental acuteness, that his dramatic personages often
philosophised or reasoned, when they ought only to have felt. The more
lofty, the fiercer, the more ambitious feelings, seem also to have been
his favourite studies.
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