This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1876 edition. Excerpt: ..." Kings and preests are in a manner hound, For reverence sake, to be close hypocrites." How did this ethical weakness in Dryden affect him in art? He is admitted to have possessed fine powers. Passages of striking beauty are found in his works; but they are thinly scattered, and do not cluster anywhere ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1876 edition. Excerpt: ..." Kings and preests are in a manner hound, For reverence sake, to be close hypocrites." How did this ethical weakness in Dryden affect him in art? He is admitted to have possessed fine powers. Passages of striking beauty are found in his works; but they are thinly scattered, and do not cluster anywhere in such number or order as to constitute one great work. His plays are so polluted, that we no more covet their wit than the garments that smoulder with buried kings. He wrote them avowedly under the mean, mercantile inspiration of the sentiment, "He who lives to please, must please to live." Falling by these words of shrewd concession from the heights of the moral world, there happened to lie under him, for his reception, nothing but the sensuality of a court society, just passing out of life by spontaneous decay. Here, at this altar of lust, he ministered, and his plays have perished with it. In his ruling sentiment, just given, he struck the key-note of dissolution in the English drama, of its sad dissolving melody. Ceasing to be filled with its own life, and anxious only for immediate gains, it has sunk from an art to an;avocation; and its composers, from artists to playwrights. Only great actors enable it for a brief period to return to the tragedies of Shakespeare. His poems are largely satirical, didactic, polemic. The excellencies that lie on this low grade, he attained; eonciseness of thought, aptness of expression, pomp and majesty of language, an occasional beautiful image, critical prefaces rivalling in interest the poems that follow them, lively versions, vigorous translations, and an increasing mastery of the formal conditions of verse. Against these attainments lie the facts, that his works as a whole...
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