"Dryden" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... power; and he who should then hope to conjure with it would find himself as much mistaken as Cassim in the Arabian tale, when he stood crying, 'Open Wheat,' 'Open Barley,' to the door which obeyed no sound but 'Open Sesame.' The miserable failure of Dryden in his attempt to translate into his own diction some parts of the 'Paradise Lost' is ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Dryden's "Alexander's Feast" deserves a perpetual bookmark for the remarkable success with which the trend of emotion is interpreted by the rhythm. "The Bells," by Edgar Allan Poe, is another example of this treatment and is held by some critics to ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... of Colonel Inman. Kit Carson never had a company of soldiers, was not a military man, and at no time raided the Indians. As will be seen in another chapter of this book, he was simply a scout and protector for the soldiers. Like Dryden, however, "I have given my opinion against the authority of two great men, but I hope without offense to their memories." Kit Carson said that the Indian, as a people, are just as brave as any people. Their warriors were not expected to go out as soldiers with a ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... Anastagio's.] Two noble families of Ravenna. She to whom Dryden has given the name of Honoria, in the fable so admirably paraphrased from Boccaccio, was of the former: her lover and the specter were of ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... task, charmingly done. Indeed we may call it the last of those great editorial labors by which Scott's fame might live unsupported by anything else. First came the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, then the editions of Dryden and Swift. Next we may count the Lives of the Novelists, even in the fragmentary state in which the failure of the Novelists' Library left them; and finally the Opus Magnum. When, in addition, we remember the mass of his critical work written for periodicals, and the ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... than modern grammar and Latin school in a provincial village. The country magistrate used on the bench language too coarse, brutal, and vulgar for a modern tap-room. Fine gentlemen in London vied with each other in the lowest ribaldry and the grossest profanity. The poets of the time, from Dryden to Durfey, ministered to the popular licentiousness. The most shameless indecency polluted their pages. The theatre and the brothel were in strict unison. The Church winked at the vice which opposed itself to the austere morality or hypocrisy of Puritanism. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... tortoise-shell, curiously chased and ornamented, and were carried in the pocket as constantly as the snuff-box. At Court, on the Mall, and in the boxes, gentlemen conversed and combed their perukes "(Sir John Hawkins' "Hist, of Music," vol. iv. p. 447, note). Cf. Dryden's ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... that the phrases of one language, if exactly reproduced in another, while they may have the same sense, convey a wholly different impression to the imagination. It is to such cases that the Italian proverb, Tradutiore traditore, applies. Dryden, citing approvingly Denham's verses ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... collection, a black-letter edition of Chaucer, and other specimens of the early English printers; and I was impressed, as I have often been, with the idea that we have made few, if any, improvements in the art of printing, though we have greatly facilitated the modes of it. He showed us Dryden's translation of Virgil, with Dr. Johnson's autograph in it and a large collection of Bibles, of all dates,—church Bibles, family Bibles of the common translation, and older ones. He says he has written or is writing a history of the Bible (as a printed work, I presume). Many of ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... chosen hardships rather than ease that he might realize the dream of his youth, and the object of his manly endeavors—the right of suffrage to all. Her children could not build their play-house of Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, or Southey. All the instruction Duke William obtained came from his mother. She was very large and healthy. Her complexion was of perfect black. She was possessed of excellent judgment, patience, and industry. She stored the young mind of ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... there are some fine descriptions and energetic declamations. All Macaulay's tastes and habits of mind made him a poor judge of such a poet as Wordsworth. He valued spirit, energy, pomp, stateliness of form and diction, and actually thought Dryden's fine lines about to-morrow being falser than the former clay equal to any eight lines in Lucretius. But his words truly express the effect of the Prelude on more vulgar minds than his own. George Eliot, ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... stranger is not supposed to introduce anyone, so that titles of address are not necessary then either; but if you happen to be the hostess and French or Americans are present, who like introductions, you introduce Sir Arthur Dryden to the Duke and Duchess of Overthere, or to Prince and Princess Capri. In talking to her, the latter would be called "Princess" and her husband "Prince Capri" or "Prince" or by those who know him ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... one half world/Nature seems dead] That is, over our hemisphere all action and motion seem to have ceased. This image, which is perhaps the most striking that poetry can produce, has been adopted by Dryden in his Conquest ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... was tempted. It was that burglary at Dryden Park. It tempted me. It made it all so simple. I knew you would put it down to the same gang, ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... gentleman; and his son would be such another. I observed, a family could not expect a poet but in a hundred generations. 'Nay,' said Dr Johnson, 'not one family in a hundred can expect a poet in a hundred generations.' He then repeated Dryden's celebrated lines, ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... have cancelled the whole, and written it anew. But I do not know how it is. I retained, I suppose, some tolerable opinion of my own composition, though Janet did not comprehend it, and felt loath to retrench those Delilahs of the imagination, as Dryden calls them, the tropes and figures of which are caviar to the multitude. Besides, I hate rewriting as much as Falstaff did paying back—it is a double labour. So I determined with myself to consult Janet, in future, only on such things as were within the limits of her comprehension, ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... sound and movement of the verse to the meaning of the passage, than in all our other writers, whether of rhyme or blank verse, put together, (with the exception already mentioned). Spenser is the most harmonious of our stanza writers, as Dryden is the most sounding and varied of our rhymists. But in neither is there any thing like the same ear for music, the same power of approximating the varieties of poetical to those of musical rhythm, as there is in ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... was Dryden's bookseller; in the earlier times a seller was also a publisher of books. Dryden was not always on amiable terms with Tonson, presumably because Dryden invariably was in debt to Tonson. On one occasion Dryden asked for an advance of money, ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... about their beautiful women found them flying away in the arms of knights who had broken lances at tournaments, or had performed the greatest feats of arms. In fine, all the peoples of the world have said with Dryden: ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... "Edinburgh Review,"— Macaulay. I wish you would read his articles which have special reference to literature, perhaps in this order: Moore's "Life of Byron," "Mme. D'Arblay," "Goldsmith," "Samuel Johnson," "Addison," "Dryden," "Leigh Hunt," "Bunyan," "Milton," "Bacon." Of miscellaneous essays, please note "Von Ranke," "Warren Hastings," and "Frederick ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... Hercules. But what was most pleasant, was the use Jupiter made of his metamorphosis; for you no sooner saw him under the figure of Amphitrion, but, instead of flying to Alcmena, with the raptures Mr Dryden puts into his mouth, he sends for Amphitrion's taylor, and cheats him of a laced coat, and his banker of a bag of money, a Jew of a diamond ring, and bespeaks a great supper in his name; and the ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... of criticism which he produced about this time was entitled, "Account of the English Poets." A significant feature of the work is that Shakespeare is not mentioned, even once, while Dryden is placed as the standard of excellence, just as in "Modern Painters," Ruskin takes Turner and lets him stand for one hundred, and all other artists ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... accusing a woman of witchcraft; a fact which alone proves that the superior court sifted the evidence in these cases with much more care and severity than it had done a few years previously. The enlightened Sir George Mackenzie, styled by Dryden "the noble wit of Scotland," laboured hard to introduce this rule into court, that the confessions of the witches should be held of little worth, and that the evidence of the prickers and other interested persons should be received with distrust ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... in Milton, Dryden, Pope; Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey; Because the first is crazed beyond all hope, The second drunk,[86] the third so quaint and mouthy: With Crabbe it may be difficult to cope, And Campbell's Hippocrene is somewhat drouthy: Thou shalt not steal ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... by Gorky, was soon adopted by most of his young contemporaries, and became the characteristic mark of the literature of the Revolution. By that token the literature of Young Russia of that day is as easily recognized as is the English literature of the Dryden and Pope epoch by its sententiousness. It contrasts sharply with the tone of passive resignation and hopelessness of the preceding period. Even Chekhov, the greatest representative of what may be called the period of despondence, was caught by the new ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... the anagram or the acrostic were the greater blockhead; and, in describing the latter, says, "I have seen some of them where the verses have not only been edged by a name at each extremity, but have had the same name running down like a seam through the middle of the poem.'' And Dryden, in Mac Flecknoe, scornfully assigned Shadwell the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... peaceful days, Of finding means our scalps to raise, The War had since revealed in him A super-Transatlantic vim, And day by day his paper's bills Gave us fresh epileptic thrills. The sons of Belial, in the rhyme Of DRYDEN, had a glorious time, But never managed to attain To Jim's success in giving pain. But while his power was at its height It perished in a single night; For, with his bills by law abolished, Jim's occupation was demolished; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 28, 1917 • Various
... poetry requires a retreat from the bustle of the world, has been so often repeated, that it is now considered as a truth, from which there can be no appeal. Milton, it is true, wrote his Paradise Lost in a small house near Bunhill Fields; and Dryden courted the muse in the hurry and dissipation of a town life. But neither of them fixed his residence by choice. Pope grew immortal on the banks of the Thames. But though the country seems to be the seat of contemplation, two great writers have been in opposite opinions. ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... fancy painting of Chaucer at the back. Before this monument are the graves of the two most famous poets of our generation, the Laureate Tennyson and Robert Browning, side by side. Above them is the beautiful bust of another Poet Laureate, Dryden, and the less artistic portrait bust ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... Dryden starting off "Mark his majestic fabric" were suggested by his appearance and general style. He always dressed well and rode a good horse, but at Valley Forge frosted his feet severely, and could have drawn a pension, "but ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... away from Cambridge are such as had already found expression more than once in English literature; for it has been the fortune of that ancient University to receive in her bosom most of that long line of poets who form the peculiar glory of our English speech. Spenser, Ben Jonson, and Marlowe; Dryden, Cowley, and Waller; Milton, George Herbert, and Gray—to mention only the most familiar names—had owed allegiance to that mother who received Wordsworth now, and Coleridge and Byron immediately after him. ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... Tatler, and whose six Pastorals preceded those of Pope. Philips's Pastorals had appeared in 1709 in a sixth volume of a Poetical Miscellany issued by Jacob Tonson. The first four volumes of that Miscellany had been edited by Dryden, the fifth was collected after Dryden's death, and the sixth was notable for opening with the Pastorals of Ambrose Philips and closing with those of young Pope which Tonson had volunteered to print, thereby, said Wycherley, furnishing a Jacob's ladder by which Pope mounted to immortality. ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... Queen Anne the musical life of London was developing in a new fashion as compared with what it was in the last twenty years of the previous century. The type of English opera which Purcell and Dryden had created came to an end with Purcell's death in 1695. Italian music, especially when sung by Italian singers, was gradually becoming more and more popular with London concert-audiences, and in 1705 Thomas Clayton produced at Drury Lane an opera called Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus. ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... close student, shy in manner, given to late hours of work. His literary tastes and appetite were early disclosed, and in his twenty-second year he was already known in London, had written an 'Account of the Greatest English Poets,' and had addressed some complimentary verses to Dryden, then the recognized head ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... those unsubstantial Ianthes and Zuleikas to whom he addressed the outpourings of his gushing muse. He read his favourite poems over and over again, he called upon Alma Venus the delight of gods and men, he translated Anacreon's odes, and picked out passages suitable to his complaint from Waller, Dryden, Prior, and the like. Smirke and he were never weary, in their interviews, of discoursing about love. The faithless tutor entertained him with sentimental conversations in place of lectures on algebra and Greek; for Smirke was in ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... said my friend, "you will humbly endeavour not to be a fool. What is the sense of this mad modern notion that every literary man must live in the country, with the pigs and the donkeys and the squires? Chaucer and Spenser and Milton and Dryden lived in London; Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson came to London because they had had quite enough of the country. And as for trumpery topical journalists like you, why, they would cut their throats in the country. You have confessed it yourself in your own last ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... William Dugdale, Elias Ashmole,[77] Dr. Grew, and others, were members of the astrological club. Congreve's character of Foresight, in Love for Love, was then no uncommon person, though the humour, now, is scarcely intelligible. Dryden cast the nativities of his sons; and what is remarkable, his prediction relating to his son Charles, was accomplished. The incident being of so late a date, one might hope that it would have been cleared up; but, if it be a fact, it must be allowed that it forms a rational exultation for ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... only constitute an entire drama betwixt them,—seems to have been a favourite with Dryden, as well as with the public. In the Essay upon Heroic Plays, as well as in the dedication, the character of Almanzor is dwelt upon with that degree of complacency which an author experiences in analyzing a successful effort ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... critic. The union of the two functions is not unusual in the history of literature; but where success has been attained in both, the critic has commonly sprung from the poet in the man, and his range and quality have been limited thereby. It was so with Dryden and Wordsworth, and, less obviously, with Landor and Lowell. In Arnold's case there is no such growth: the two modes of writing, prose and verse, were disconnected. One could read his essays without suspecting a poet, and his poems without discerning a critic, except so far as one finds ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... ez Dryden hez it, tho I bleeve, to keep off chills, in this country, they mix three and a half parts uv whiskey to one uv tea, the name uv ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... of Pericles, which was published in 1609 with the name of Shakespeare in the title-page, and of which Dryden says in one of his prologues to a first play, "Shakespeare's own muse his Pericles first bore," was probably acted in 1590, and appears to have been long popular. Romeo and Juliet was certainly an early production of his muse, and one which excited much interest, as may well ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... from Jeremy Taylor and the old theologians into my note-books, and have found them useful even recently, in preparing compilations. Dryden and the eighteenth century poets generally did not interest me, though I tried to read them from a sense of duty. Pope was an exception, however. Aphorisms from the "Essay on Man" were in as common use among us as those from the Book ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... Dryden flagellates in his Mac-Flecknoe, and in the second part of Absalom and Achitophel, and whom Pope mentions in his Dunciad, wrote The Sullen Lovers, or the Impertinents, which was first performed in 1668 at the Duke of York's Theatre, ...
— The Bores • Moliere
... the rise of "satire", mediaeval England produced two great examples in Chaucer and Langland. They typify at the outset the two classes into which Dryden divided English satirists—the followers of Horace's way and the followers of Juvenal's—the men of the world, who assail the enemies of common-sense with the weapons of humour and sarcasm; and the prophets, ...
— English Satires • Various
... as Nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran. Dryden. ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... at poetical satire, which are sufficient to show that he lacked either the talent or the patience to write political verse. Compared with Dryden's or Pope's, his work is mere doggerel, enlivened by occasional ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... fifty years before. He asserted in brief that, as compared with Spenser, Shakspere, and Milton, Pope was a poet of the second order; that in his descriptions of nature he was inferior to Thomson and Cowper, and in lyrical poetry to Dryden and Gray; and that, except in his "Eloisa" and one or two other pieces, he was the poet of artificial manners and of didactic maxims, rather than of passions. Bowles' chief addition to Warton's criticism was the following paragraph, upon ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... question. Of the story that he was writing just before his death he is reported to have said that 'the goodness of it frightened him.' A goodness that frightened him will surely not be visible, like Banquo's ghost, to only one pair of eyes. His greatest was perhaps yet to come. Had Dryden died at his age, we should have had none of the great satires; had Scott died at his age, we should have had no Waverley Novels. Dying at the height of his power, and in the full tide of thought and activity, he seems almost to have fulfilled the aspiration and unconscious ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... Street. Drury Lane Theatre is at its N.E. corner. It early acquired no very enviable repute, e.g. In the Epilogue to Crowne's Sir Courtly Nice (1685) we have: 'Our Bridges Street is grown a strumpet fair'; and Dryden, in the Epilogue to King Arthur (1691), gave Mrs. Bracegirdle, who entered, her hands full of billets-doux, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... leaping out of the water; to this impartial and catholic-minded beef, all were equal—all similarly undeserving. Like old Timotheus, who "raised a mortal to the skies," was my Aunt Patience's cow; though, in the words of a later poet than Dryden, she did it "more harder and more frequently." It was pleasing to see her open a passage for herself through a populous barnyard. She would flash out, right and left, first with one hind-leg and then with the ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... at that period could endure. Those whom Ibsen designed to crush had not minced their own words. The press was violence itself, and was not tempered with justice; when the poet looked round he saw "afflicted virtue insolently stabbed with all manner of reproaches," as Dryden said. ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... in fame who has chosen a nobler course.... The experiment is successful, and though we must not now discuss the laws to which the structure of an ode should conform, we rank the poem in this respect as standing far above Dryden's celebrated composition, but below the Odes of Wordsworth on Immortality and of Milton on the Nativity, which still remain peerless and without ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... been observed) what 'Pastorals' we have are mostly written in what is called the heroic measure. But the reason is, I suppose, not far to seek. Dryden and Pope wrote 'heroics,' not from any sense of their fitness for bucolic poetry, but from a sense of their universal fitness: and their followers copied them. But probably no scholar would affirm that any poem, original or translated, ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... Writers. Milton. Bunyan. Dryden. Puritan and Cavalier Poets. George Herbert. Butler's Hudibras. The Prose Writers. Thomas Browne. Isaac Walton. Summary of the Period. ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... harmony: in the death of Hector, and the shipwreck of Ulysses, I tasted the new emotions of terror and pity; and seriously disputed with my aunt on the vices and virtues of the heroes of the Trojan war. From Pope's Homer to Dryden's Virgil was an easy transition; but I know not how, from some fault in the author, the translator, or the reader, the pious Aeneas did not so forcibly seize on my imagination; and I derived more pleasure from Ovid's Metamorphoses, especially in the ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... written by the intelligent and accomplished wife of John Adams to her husband: "Dignity, ease, and complacency, the gentleman and the soldier, look agreeably blended in him. Modesty marks every line and feature of his face. Those lines of Dryden instantly ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... word formed from pat, and particularly applied to the pulsations of the heart, when accelerated by emotion. Used by Ben Jonson and Dryden. Congreve ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... precious than the pistol and binoculars were his books, an oddly assorted library that included the child's pictorial history already mentioned, Dryden's translation of the Iliad, an imperfect copy of The Three Musketeers, and The Descent of Man. These, indeed, made up the full list of books belonging to the keep, and Constans had been permitted to appropriate ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... but when unkindness joins. But there's a fate in kindness, Still to be least returned where most 'tis given." —DRYDEN. ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... from the Greek and Latin poets have been admirably stated by Dryden in his Preface to the "Translations from Ovid's Epistles," and I do not wish to continue the endless discussion,—especially as our literature needs examples, not opinions. A recent expression, however, ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... theory upon which they are conceived. Ben Jonson had theories about poetry and the drama, and he was neither chary in talking of them nor in experimenting with them in his plays. This makes Jonson, like Dryden in his time, and Wordsworth much later, an author to reckon with; particularly when we remember that many of Jonson's notions came for a time definitely to prevail and to modify the whole trend of English poetry. First of all Jonson was a classicist, that is, he believed ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... of the old courtier's reminiscences flowed on—he stopped for breath, and Sir Charles took the word and proceeded to unfold before their dazzled eyes a gorgeous phantasmagoria. The King, the Duke, Sedley and Buckingham, Mesdames Castlemaine, Stuart and Gwynne, Dryden and Waller and Lely, the King's house, the Queen's chapel, the Queen's duennas, the Tityre Tus, Paul's Walk, the Russian Ambassador, astrologers, orange girls, balls, masques, pageants, duels, the court of Louis le Grand, the King's hunting parties, ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... movement was not indeed wholly dependent upon a reaction, but in its development it corresponds with the reaction against the continuance of a great tradition which had become merely a convention, when it had lost its vitality and sincerity. The best examples of this may perhaps be found in Dryden's attempt to carry on the heroic tradition in English tragedy, and in Voltaire's strenuous and meritorious efforts to continue the work of Racine and Corneille. They meant well, and their tragic dramas are not ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... deists; they talk about the Bible, because they do not wish to shock too severely public opinion, which is prevailingly Christian. They have a service on Sundays; I have been there. At it they read verses from Dryden or other English poets on the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. They deliver a discourse on some point of morality, and ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... best are perhaps those of Cowley, Dryden, and Pope. The very worst is, beyond all doubt, that ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Dryden defended or excused his own offences and those of his contemporaries by pleading the example of the earlier English dramatists; and Mr. Leigh Hunt seems to think that there is force in the plea. We altogether ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Dryden himself, in the Annus Mirabilis, had turned aside from his subject, the defeat of the Dutch and England's mastery of the seas, to pay a compliment to the Society, and to prophesy man's ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... Dryden, in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, represents this method as being characteristic of Greek tragedy as a whole. The tragic poet, he says, "set the audience, as it were, at the post where the race is ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... but his success has been triumphant, and alike honourable to his genius and enterprise. In short, looking at the present advanced state of the Colosseum, Mr. Hornor and his indefatigable coadjutors may almost exclaim in the words of Dryden, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 356, Saturday, February 14, 1829 • Various
... Essay was first published at the close of 1668; and the writing of it, Dryden tells us, in a dedication, many years afterwards, to the Earl of Dorset, "served as an amusement to me in the country, when the violence of the last plague had driven me from the town. Seeing, then, our theatres shut up, I was engaged in these kind of thoughts with the same delight with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... had finished up the stereotyped sights of Gibraltar and had thrown overboard a New Jersey insurance agent for criminally mentioning "Dryden's Hole," that bewhiskered "chestnut," in connection with the time-honored "Rock," we steamed across the Mediterranean to Algiers, some four hundred and ten miles away. Algeria has a water front of six hundred miles, and extends back two hundred and fifty from the shore. It was ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... he owned to Dryden in later years that "Spenser was his original," and in some of his earliest lines at Horton he dwells lovingly on "the sage and solemn tones" of the "Faerie Queen," its "forests and enchantments drear, where ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... of Theodore and Honoria, which Dryden has so admirably transplanted from Boccaccio, (Giornata iii. novell. viii.,) was acted in the wood of Chiassi, a corrupt word from Classis, the naval station which, with the intermediate road, or suburb the Via Caesaris, constituted ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... to the ancient superstitions about ghosts and fairies, Dryden, the poet, has some lines which may ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... Reynolds's 'The Call of Samuel,' and others. But the pictures in which we are most interested are the portraits of literary, scientific, and other worthies—an excellent collection, including Shakespeare, John Locke, Hobbes, Sir Richard Steele, Sir William Temple, Dean Swift, Dryden, Betterton, Pope, Gay, Thomson, Sir Hugh Middleton, Martin Luther, and ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... essays, however, were as yet strangers to his pen. His ambition was to be a poet, and while still under twenty-two, he produced and printed some complimentary verses to Dryden, then declining in years, and fallen into comparative neglect. The old poet was pleased with the homage of the young aspirant, which was as graceful in expression as it was generous in purpose. For instance, alluding to Dryden's projected translation of "Ovid," he says, ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... perpetual 'nineteenth-centuryism'—a vile phrase, by the way—we only wish that more of our English novelists studied our age and its society than do so at present. However, In the Golden Days must not be judged by its foolish preface. It is really a very charming book, and though Dryden, Betterton, and Wills's Coffee-House are dragged in rather a propos de bottes, still the picture of the time is well painted. Joyce, the little Puritan maiden, is an exquisite creation, and Hugo Wharncliffe, her lover, makes a fine hero. The sketch of Algernon Sidney is rather colourless, but Charles ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... in Elizabeth's time very much the same place as was held by the drama at the Restoration; it was an essentially aristocratic entertainment, and the same pitfall waylaid both, the pitfall of artificiality. Dryden's audiences and the readers of Euphues both sought for better bread than is made of wheat; both were supplied with what satisfied them in an ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... of special publications by the Society will be a volume including Elkanah Settle's The Empress of Morocco (1673) with five plates; Notes and Observations on the Empress of Morocco (1674) by John Dryden, John Crowne and Thomas Shadwell; Notes and Observations on the Empress of Morocco Revised (1674) by Elkanah Settle; and The Empress of Morocco. A Farce (1674) by Thomas Duffet, with an Introduction by Maximillian E. Novak. Already ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... rumbling wind: Yet still they heaved for vent, and heaving still, Enlarged the concave and shot up the hill, As breath extends a bladder, or the skins Of goats are blown t'inclose the hoarded wines; The mountain yet retains a mountain's face, And gathered rubbish heads the hollow space." 'Dryden's Translation'. [footnote continues] This description of a dome-shaped elevation on the continent is of great importance in a geognostical point of view, and coincides to a remarkable degree with Aristotle's account ('Meteor.', ii., 89, 17-19) of the upheaval of islands of ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... classic may make this volume useful in school and college courses, while it is not too much like a textbook to repel the average reader. I am indebted to Professor Catterall of Cornell and to Professor Cross of Yale, and to my brother the Rev. Dryden W. Phelps, for some assistance in locating references. W.L.P., YALE ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would be most successful in games, where the tone color is so close to the meaning that any exaggeration of that color by dancing and chanting only makes the story clearer. The writer would like to see some one try Dryden's Alexander's Feast, or Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon. Certainly in those poems the decorative rhythm and the ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... which can be traced back to the swift privateers which were built during the War of 1812. In this type of vessel the shipyards of Chesapeake Bay excelled and their handiwork was known as the "Baltimore clipper," the name suggested by the old English verb which Dryden uses to describe the flight of the falcon that "clips it down the wind." The essential difference between the clipper ship and other kinds of merchant craft was that speed and not capacity became the chief consideration. This ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... always a reason for such deviations from the sound as represented by the spelling, may we not suspect two sources of derivation, and find an ancestor for kercher in couverture rather than in couvrechef? And what greater phonetic vagary (which Dryden, by the way, called fegary) in our lingua rustica than this ker for couvre? I copy from the fly-leaves of my books, where I have noted them from time to time, a few examples of pronunciation and phrase which will show that the Yankee often has antiquity and very ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... of the people, and the lowering of the aristocracy, have both been effected through the medium of the press. The position of authors has been much altered. Formerly we behold such men as Dryden, Otway, and many others (giants in their days), humbling themselves for bread. Now we have seldom a dedication, and of those few we have the flattery is delicate. The authors look to the public as their patrons, and the aristocracy are considered but as a part and portion ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... illuminating as Walter Pater's. The essay on Gray is not as well ordered as Arnold's. The essay on Thoreau is quite as unsatisfactory as Stevenson's. It is true that the famous longer essays on Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dryden, Milton, are full of irrelevant matter, of facile delightful talk which often leads nowhere in particular. It is true, finally, that a deeper interest in philosophy and science might have made Lowell's criticism more fruitful; that he blazed no new paths in critical method; that he ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... doubtless true, as Blackwood remarked, with what we may call Blackwood courtesy, when Mr. Lowell was American minister in England, that Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Addison, Pope, and so many more "will not be replaced by Mr. Washington Irving and Mr. Lowell". But it is equally true that, since Swift, Blackwood cannot find in English literature political satire more trenchant, humorous, forcible, and effective than the Biglow Papers, ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... back to Trim he was desirous of at once resuming his former pursuits. He would not eat his breakfast till his uncle had heard him his Hebrew, and he comments on the importance of proper pronunciation. At five he was taken to see a friend, to whom he repeated long passages from Dryden. A gentleman present, who was not unnaturally sceptical about Willie's attainments, desired to test him in Greek, and took down a copy of Homer which happened to have the contracted type, and to his amazement Willie went ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... English, as itself a document or standard, in the matter of prose style. The essential difference between poetry and prose—"that other beauty of prose"—in the words of the motto he has chosen from Dryden, the first master of the sort of prose he prefers:—that is Mr. Saintsbury's burden. It is a consideration, undoubtedly, of great importance both for the writer and the critic; in England especially, where, although (as Mr. Saintsbury rightly points out, in correction ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... Plan, and have ended happily; as indeed most of the good Tragedies which have been written since the starting of the above-mentioned Criticism, have taken this turn: As The Mourning Bride, Tamerlane[38], Ulysses, Phaedra and Hippolytus, with most of Mr. Dryden's. I must also allow, that many of Shakespeare's, and several of the celebrated Tragedies of Antiquity, are cast in the same form. I do not therefore dispute against this way of writing Tragedies; but against the Criticism that would establish This ...
— Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript • Samuel Richardson
... we owe the Table-Talk of Selden, the Conversation between Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden, Spence's Anecdotes of Pope, and other valuable remains in our own language. How delighted should we have been, if thus introduced into the company of Shakespeare and of Dryden, of whom we know scarcely anything but their admirable writings! What pleasure would it have given us, to have known their petty habits, their characteristick manners, their modes of composition, and their genuine opinion of preceding writers and ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... made to himself. But the idea that Virgil in the following lines refers to the manner in which Cicero soothed the multitude who rose to destroy the theatre when the knights took their front seats in accordance with Otho's law, does not originate with me. I give the lines as translated by Dryden, with ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... hymn used by the Catholic Church to commemorate solemn occasions. Dryden's translation: "Creator Spirit, by whose aid / The world's foundations first were laid, / Come visit every pious mind, Come pour Thy joys ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... Tom Dove. A well-known bear so named and exhibited at the Bear Garden. Besides this passage there are four other allusions to him to be found. Dryden's Epilogue to the King and Queen at the Union of ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... "Lavengro"; an odd theme, purporting to be a translation of something, called a "Ruba'iyat," which the Head said was a poem not yet come to its own; there were hundreds of volumes of verse—-Crashaw; Dryden; Alexander Smith; L. E. L.; Lydia Sigourney; Fletcher and a purple island; Donne; Marlowe's "Faust "; and—this made McTurk (to whom Beetle conveyed it) sheer drunk for three days—Ossian; "The Earthly Paradise"; "Atalanta in Calydon"; and Rossetti—to name only a few. Then the Head, drifting ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... This was the literary work of eight years, during which he had the duties of his Sheriffship, and, after he gave up his practice as a barrister, the duties of his Deputy Clerkship of Session to discharge regularly. The editing of Dryden alone would have seemed to most men of leisure a pretty full occupation for these eight years, and though I do not know that Scott edited with the anxious care with which that sort of work is often ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... on the counter smoking his pipe and reading an old tattered copy of Dryden's translation of Virgil. He lifted his clear blue eyes in astonishment, put down his pipe, and, slowly swinging his long legs over the counter, caught Jane by the waist, put both his ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... agricultural interests, including the president and ex-president of the Agricultural and Arts Association, Professor William Brown of the Agricultural College, the master of the Dominion Grange, the president of the Entomological Society, and two members of the legislature, Thomas Ballantyne and John Dryden. In 1913 there were but two survivors of this important commission, J. B. Aylesworth of Newburgh, Ont., and Dr William Saunders, who, after over twenty years' service as director of the Dominion Experimental Farms, had resigned office ...
— History of Farming in Ontario • C. C. James
... very unfamiliar sound, nor much flavour of archaism about them. And there are many more, surprisingly free from conceits or other oddities, if we reflect that the book was written before Dryden was born, or modern prose with its precision and balance ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... said; and as," &c? In none I am confident. This latter is a form of expression in heroick poetry, that Pope has frequently made use of in his Homer (from whence Chatterton undoubtedly copiedit), and was sometimes employed by Dryden and Cowley; but I believe it will not be easy to trace it to Harrington or Spenser; most assuredly it cannot be traced up to the fifteenth century. ——In what English poem of that age will he find similies dressed in the ...
— Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782) • Edmond Malone
... to undertake the new and untried in literature was the same spirit that moved John Smith and his cavaliers to invade the Virginia wilderness, and the Pilgrim Fathers to found a commonwealth for freedom's sake on a stern and rock-bound coast. It was the day of Milton, Dryden, and Bunyan, the day of the Protectorate with its fanatical defenders, the day of the rise and fall of British Puritanism, the day of the Revolution of 1688 which forever doomed the theory of the divine rights of monarchs, the day of the bloody Thirty Years' War with its consequent downfall of ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... The amount of physical and mental work which he undertook during these years was more than any ordinary mortal could stand; but it was to him a labour of love, and he did not stay his hand until an enfeebled and broken-down constitution warned him that the laws of nature had been transgressed. Dryden ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... but there is so much dry stuff in it, that it makes my grog go too fast; but," added he, "'Dry' is put under that part, so you can skip over it." Now, reader, the most beautiful passages of this neglected book were from Dryden. The mate, happy, ignorant man, imagined, in his wisdom, that where the abridgment of this poet's name was placed, it was to indicate to the reader that the poetry was dry and not worth reading. Oh, Ignorance, thou ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... Spenser onward, found Chaucer distressingly archaic. When Sir Francis Kynaston, temp. Charles I., translated "Troilus and Criseyde," Cartwright congratulated him that he had at length made it possible to read Chaucer without a dictionary. And from Dryden's time to Wordsworth's he was an "uncouthe unkiste" barbarian, full of wit, but only tolerable in polite paraphrase. Chaucer himself seems to have foreboded this, towards the close of his "Troilus and Criseyde," when he ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 333., is certainly well worth perusal, as the writer, "KUSTER," has examined the question with considerable care, and proves, by many curious instances, that most of those whom we have been taught to look up to as the greatest authorities in English writing—Dryden, Swift, Pope, Johnson, and others—seem to have had no fixed rule on the subject, but to have used "a" or "an" before the same words with the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 25. Saturday, April 20, 1850 • Various
... unwilling fingers tries his Pen; Some peevish quarrel straight he tries to pick, His Quill writes double, or his Ink's too thick; Infuse more Water; now 'tis grown too thin, It sinks, nor can the characters be seen." —Persius, translated by Dryden. ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... that Homer, or Pindar, or Shakespeare, or Dryden, or Walter Scott, were accustomed to aim at diction for its own sake, instead of being inspired with their subject, and pouring forth beautiful words because they had beautiful thoughts? this is surely too great a paradox to be borne. Rather, it is the fire within ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... persons, whose political prejudices were of a quite different complexion, were under the same delusion. The unanimous votes of the two houses of parliament, and the names, as well as the number of those who pronounced Lord Strafford to be guilty, seem to put this beyond a doubt. Dryden, writing soon after the time, says, in his "Absalom and ...
— A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second • Charles James Fox
... to his Book, thus giving formal expression to his heresy. 'The greatest wit, though not the best poet of our nation,' Dryden called him; the greatest intellect, that is, which had expressed itself in poetry. Dryden himself was not always careful to distinguish between what material was fit and what unfit for verse; so that we can now enjoy his masterly prose with more equable pleasure than his verse. But ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Johnson says of Dryden, "His known wealth was so great, he might borrow without any impeachment ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... is his very high praise of Dryden, "a Man for Learning and universal Writing in Poetry, perhaps the greatest that England has produc'd" [p. l5], and his comment upon the critical detraction from which he suffered. He compares Pope, interestingly enough, with Dryden, remarking that ...
— A Vindication of the Press • Daniel Defoe
... Understanding, perception. 'True wit consists in the resemblance of ideas' when that resemblance is 'such an one that gives delight and surprise to the reader.' (Dryden.) Cf. Shakespeare, ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... produced by all the combined elements in the English lines answers in any degree to that produced by the Latin. Often and often, while engaged on this translation, I have been reminded of Johnson's words in his Life of Dryden: "It is not by comparing line with line that the merit of works is to be estimated, but by their general effects and ultimate result. It is easy to note a weak line and write one more vigorous in its place, to find a happiness of expression ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... expectations: for example, in the age of Catullus Terence and Lucretius, and that of Statius or Claudian, and in our own country, in the age of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher, and that of Donne and Cowley, or Dryden, or Pope. I will not take upon me to determine the exact import of the promise which by the act of writing in verse an Author in the present day makes to his Reader; but I am certain it will appear ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... of musical and imaginative sweetness, such as the English language had never attained to, since the days of him, who was to the age of Spenser, what Shakespere and Milton are to ours, the pattern and fount of poetry, Chaucer. Dryden is not afraid to class Spenser with Theocritus and Virgil, and to write that the Shepherd's Calendar is not to be matched in any language.[46:4] And this was at once recognized. The authorship of it, as has been said, was not formally acknowledged. Indeed, Mr. Collier ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... occurrence, by way of simile, describes a dove haunting the cavern of a rock in such engaging numbers, that I cannot refrain from quoting the passage: and John Dryden has rendered it so happily in our language, that without farther excuse I shall add ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... At sixty-three Dryden began the translation of the "Aeneid." Robert Hall learned Italian when past sixty, that he might read Dante in the original. Noah Webster studied seventeen languages after he was fifty. Cicero said well that men are like wine: age sours the bad and ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... in the part of Monimia established her reputation. From her performance in this character, in that of Belvidera, and of Isabella, in the Fatal Marriage, Downes says she acquired the name of the famous Mrs. Barry, both at court and in the city. "Mrs. Barry," says Dryden, in his Preface to Cleomenes, "always excellent, has in this tragedy excelled herself, and gained a reputation beyond any woman I have ever seen on the theatre." "In characters of greatness," says Cibber, "Mrs. Barry had a presence of elevated dignity; her mien and motion superb, ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... nutritive; peptic; alexipharmic[obs3], alexiteric[obs3]; remediable, curable. phr. aux grands maux les grands remedes[Fr]; Dios que da la llaga da la medicina[Sp]; para todo hay remedio sino para la muerte[Sp]; temporis ars medicina fere est [Lat][Ovid]; " the remedy is worse than the disease " [Dryden]; " throw physic to the dogs, I'll none ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... and frequent untrained flights of imagination, have occasional fire and tenderness, are generally based on classical subjects. The principal are The Rival Queens, Theodosius, and Mithridates. He also wrote a few comedies, and collaborated with Dryden in an adaptation of Oedipus, and in The Duke ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... this uncouth Scotch lawyer to have accomplished! He knew he had done a great thing; but even he did not know how great a thing. Had he known he might have answered as proudly as Dryden answered when some one said to him that his Ode to St. Cecilia was the finest that had ever been written. "Or ever will be," said the poet. Dryden's ode has been eclipsed more than once since it was written; ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... several pieces. The composers have tried their hands on Dryden's Ode; on the meeting of Hector and Andromache (Pope's "Homer"); on two short ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... the Titan (Prometheus) fastened with a better clay. (Juvenal, Sat. xiv. 35). Dryden translated the ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... ornament, and every grace of a style which people have learned to like and which he has made his own, need not be said. The Tennysonian beauties are all there. The work takes its place in literature, obscuring the Arthurian work of Dryden, as Milton's achievement of Paradise Lost obscured the Italian work on the same subject which preceded it. The story is told, and the things of the Round Table can hardly be related again in English, any more than the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... powerful cause co-operated, if a cause more powerful can be imagined. Dryden had a dream of an early age, 'when wild in woods the noble savage ran;' but 'when lone in woods the cringing savage crept' would have been more like all we know of that early, bare, painful period. Not only had they no comfort, no convenience, not the very beginnings of an epicurean life, ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... what Johnson, at a subsequent period, said of him both as a writer and an editor: 'Sir, I have often said, that if Derrick's letters had been written by one of a more established name, they would have been thought very pretty letters.' And, 'I sent Derrick to Dryden's relations to gather materials for his life; and I believe he got all that I myself should ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... have been resented by the father as crimes quite inexpiable. One of Richard's sisters now and then visited Harrow, and well do I remember that, in the house where I lodged, she triumphantly repeated Dryden's Ode upon St. Cecilia's Day, according to the instruction given to her by ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... British Parliament by which the abolition was decreed." After viewing minutely the profile of this able defender of the negro's rights, which was finely chiselled on the tablet, I took a hasty glance at Shakspeare, on the one side, and Dryden on the other, and then passed on, and was soon in the north aisle, looking upon the mementoes placed in honor of genius. There stood a grand and expressive monument to Sir Isaac Newton, which was in every way worthy of the great man ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... Aqua mirabilis, a well-known invigorating cordial, cf. Dryden's Marriage a la Mode (1672), III, i: 'The country gentlewoman ... who ... opens her dear bottle of Mirabilis beside, for a gill ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... obedience to some law that we do not understand. I know a man to whose character not an ancestor since the seventeenth century has contributed an element. Intellectually he is a contemporary of John Dryden, whom naturally he reveres as the greatest of poets. I know another who has inherited his handwriting from his great-grandfather, although he has been trained to the Spencerian system and tried hard to ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... partly, if not mainly, achieved by another—the novelty of style. Chateaubriand had set out to give—has, indeed, as far as his intention goes, maintained throughout—an effort at le style noble, the already familiar rhetoric, of which, in French, Corneille had been the Dryden and Racine the Pope, while it had, in his own youth, sunk to the artifice of Delille in verse and the "emphasis" of Thomas in prose. He has sometimes achieved the best, and not seldom something that is by no means ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... quibbles and quirks. "With periods, points, and tropes, he slurs his crimes; He robb'd not, but he borrowed from the poor."—Dryden. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... copied from a celebrated tragic writer among the English. It is Dryden, a poet in the reign of Charles II.—a writer whose genius was too exuberant, and not accompanied with judgment enough. Had he written only a tenth part of the works he left behind him, his character would have been conspicuous in every part; but his great fault is his having endeavoured ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us ever with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer,[33] of Marvell,[34] of Dryden,[35] with the most modern joy,—with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson |
