But its hold on the men
of Dryden's day was in great measure due to the influence of the French
critics, and to the narrow lines which criticism had taken in France.
No one can read Boileau's _Art Poetique_, no one can compare it with
the corresponding _Essay_ of Pope, without feeling that the purely
personal element had eaten into the heart of French criticism to a
degree which could never have been natural in England, and which, even
in the darkest days of English literature, has seldom been approached.
But at the same time it will be felt that never has England come nearer
to a merely personal treatment of artistic questions than in the century
between Dryden and Johnson; and that it was here, rather than in the
adoption of any specific form of literature--rather, for instance,
than in the growth of the heroic drama--that the influence of France
is to be traced.
Side by side, however, with the baser sort of comparisons, we find in
the Restoration critics no small use of the kind that profits and
delights. Rymer's _Remarks on the Tragedies of the Former Age_ are an
instance of the comparative method, in its just sense, as employed by
a man of talent.
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