With Dryden it was not so. With him we never fail to get an unbiassed
judgment; the judgment of one who did not crave for nature "to advantage
dressed", but trusted to the instinctive freshness of a mind, one of
the most alert and open that ever gave themselves to literature. It
is this that puts an impassable barrier between Dryden and the men of
his own day, or for a century to come. It is this that gives him a
place among the great critics of modern literature, and makes the
passage from him to the schoolmen of the next century so dreary a
descent.
Dryden's openness of mind was his own secret. The comparative method
was, in some measure, the common property of his generation. This, in
fact, was the chief conquest of the Restoration and Augustan critics.
It is the mark that serves to distinguish them most clearly from those
of the Elizabethan age. Not that the Elizabethans are without
comparisons; but that the parallels they saw were commonly of the
simplest, not to say of the most childish, cast. Every sentence of
Meres' critical effort--or, to be rigorously exact, every sentence but
one--is built on "as" and "so"; but it reads like a parody--a
schoolmaster's parody--of Touchstone's improvement on Orlando's verses
in praise of Rosalind.
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