Perhaps the analytical mode in which he exercised
his studies of human life tended to confine his observation to the more
energetic feelings of pride, anger, ambition, and other high-toned
passions. He that mixes in public life must see enough of these stormy
convulsions; but the finer and more imperceptible operations of love, in
its sentimental modifications, if the heart of the author does not
supply an example from its own feelings, cannot easily be studied at the
expense of others. Dryden's bosom, it must be owned, seems to have
afforded him no such means of information; the licence of his age, and
perhaps the advanced period at which he commenced his literary career,
had probably armed him against this more exalted strain of passion. The
love of the senses he has in many places expressed, in as forcible and
dignified colouring as the subject could admit; but of a mere moral and
sentimental passion he seems to have had little idea, since he
frequently substitutes in its place the absurd, unnatural, and
fictitious refinements of romance. In short, his love is always in
indecorous nakedness, or sheathed in the stiff panoply of chivalry. But
if Dryden fails in expressing the milder and more tender passions, not
only did the stronger feelings of the heart, in all its dark or violent
workings, but the face of natural objects, and their operation upon the
human mind, pass promptly in review at his command.
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