of it in the following terms: "Few lines are highly poetical, and some sink to the level of a drinking song. It has the defects, as well as the merits, of that poetry which is written for musical entertainment." It was very differently esteemed in Dryden's day, and we hope Mr. Hallam is in a minority now. Dryden himself writes to Tonson: "I am glad to hear from all hands that my Ode is esteemed the best of all my poetry by all the town. I thought so myself when I writ it; but being old, I mistrusted my own judgment." He went, it is said, on one occasion, even farther than this; for, on a young Templar[1] venturing at Will's Coffee-House to speak of its merit and success, Dryden replied: "You are right, young gentleman: a nobler ode never was produced, nor ever will." Here Sir Walter Scott, with wonted generosity and kindness of heart, remarks: "This singularly strong expression cannot be placed to the score of vanity. It was an inward consciousness of merit, which burst forth, probably almost involuntarily, and, I fear, must be admitted as prophetic." Take it as a whole, we cannot in ours, or perhaps in any literature, find its equal. We shall in Gray and Collins seek it in vain. The odes which in merit most nearly approach it are Coleridge's "On the Departed Year," and that sublime and magnificent poem of Wordsworth, "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Childhood." But they are so unlike, that it is impossible to compare them. Some inaccurate stories have been told of Dryden's finishing it at a sitting; and it is said that Lord Bolingbroke (then Mr. St. John) found him in the morning, trembling with agitation after the long vigil, and exhausted by the intellectual agony with which he had produced this splendid lyric. The probable state of the case, as his biographers have agreed, is, that while the fine frenzy of imagination was on him, he penned the rough draft, and
- ↑ The father of Lord Chief Justice Marlay. See Scott and Malone.
