"Dryden" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unless we add, "Nor cease from recording whatsoever thing thou hast gathered therefrom,"—so ready is Oblivion with her fatal shears. The somewhat greasy heap of a literary rag-and-bone-picker, like Athenaeus, is turned to gold by time. Even the Virgilium vide tantum of Dryden about Milton, and of Pope again about Dryden, is worth having, and gives a pleasant fillip to the fancy. There is much of this quality in Mr. Edmund Quincy's book, enough to make us wish there were more. We get a glimpse of President Washington, in 1795, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... conquest you overcame the Channel. If England vanquished your country's arms, it was through you that France ferum victorem cepit, and restored the dynasty of Comedy to the land whence she had been driven. Ever since Dryden borrowed "L'Etourdi," our tardy apish nation has lived (in matters theatrical) on the spoils of the ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... mistaken, there is not a fellow of the Dunciad to whom he has not assigned a house. Nor is any man of deeper knowledge of the clubs and coffee-houses and taverns. One would say that he had sat at Will's with Dryden, and that he had gone to Button's arm in arm with Addison. Did Goldsmith journey to his tailor for a plum-colored suit, you may be sure that Timbs tagged him at the elbow. If Sam Johnson sat at the Mitre ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... 'It is Dryden. What a clever face, and what a modern type. Here is Walter Scott beside the door. How kindly and humorous his expression was! And see how high his head was from the ear to the crown. It was a great brain. There is Burns, the other famous Scot. Don't you ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... an individual work or an individual writer, the critic was apt to suppose that nothing further could reasonably be expected of him. The comparative method, foreshadowed but only foreshadowed by Dryden, had not been carried perceptibly further by Dryden's successors. The historical method was still more clearly in its infancy. The connection between the two, the unity of purpose which alone gives significance to either, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... criticism. In this branch Tom had a share, in the shape of verse. A ready faculty was his, but one seldom roused by immediate interest, and never by insight. It was not things themselves, but the reflection of things in the art of others, that moved him to produce. Coleridge, I think, says of Dryden, that he took fire with the running of his own wheels: so did Tom; but it was the running of the wheels of others that set his wheels running. He was like some young preachers who spend a part of the ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... of reading however my mind had strong contentions with itself: poetry, and the belles lettres, Homer, Horace, Virgil, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Tasso, Ariosto, Racine, Moliere, Congreve, with a long and countless et caetera, were continually tempting me to quit the barren pursuits of divinity and law, for the study of which I had come to Oxford. Yet a sense of duty so far prevailed that I went through ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... 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, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the only singer who has invested this wood with poetical associations. It is well known that Boccaccio laid his story of 'Honoria' in the pine-forest, and every student of English literature must be familiar with the noble tale in verse which Dryden has founded on this part of the 'Decameron.' We all of us have followed Theodore, and watched with him the tempest swelling in the grove, and seen the hapless ghost pursued by demon hounds and hunter down the glades. This story should be read while storms are gathering upon the distant sea, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... of struggle which he passed there. He saw the riots of '80; he canvassed, always more or less in vain, the booksellers and the peers; he spent three-and-sixpence of his last ten shillings on a copy of Dryden; he was much less disturbed about imminent starvation than by the delay of a letter from Mira ("my dearest Sally" she becomes with a pathetic lapse from convention, when the pinch is sorest) or by the doubt whether he had enough left to pay the postage of one. He writes ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... as tended to exalt in their eyes a country which had produced such a stalwart and gifted son. We may, indeed, apply to the feeling of pride which animates Scotchmen, and particularly Scotchmen in other lands, at the thought of Burns being their countryman, the famous lines of Dryden— ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... a poetaster himself, knew how to appreciate the higher genius of others. He loved to be surrounded by the finest spirits of his time. There is a pleasant anecdote of the company at his table agreeing to see which amongst them could produce the best impromptu. Dryden was appointed arbitrator. Dorset handed a slip of paper to Dryden, and when all the attempts were collected, Dryden decided without hesitation that Dorset's was the best. It ran thus: "I promise to pay Mr. John Dryden, on demand, ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... are both less distinctive than the "full and heightened" style, to which was largely due its popularity with readers and theatre-goers of its period, but which was afterwards to bring upon it such severe censure, when taste had changed. Dryden's onslaught in his Dedication to the Spanish Friar (1681) marks the full turn of the tide. The passage is familiar, but it must be ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... Here one may pause and suspect the reverend castigator of confusing several dislikes in one argument. It is done sometimes, even in our own day, by religious folk who polemise in politics. "Cards they played on the Sabbath. Plays they rehearsed too, by Shakespeare, Dryden, Congreve and others, whose names may guarantee their lewdness. . . . The woman, I have said, was fair; but of that sort their feet go down ever to Hell. . ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... Ben Jonson and Shakespeare 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, ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... Catherine 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 following ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... losing all relish for pure and simple pleasures, could only be roused by licentious arts of variety. What satisfaction could a woman of delicacy promise herself in a union with such a man, when the very artlessness of her affection might appear insipid? Thus does Dryden describe the situation: ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... DRYDEN. Not dearer to the scholar's eye than mine, (Albeit unlearned in ancient classic lore,) The daintie Poesie of days of yore— The choice old English rhyme—and over thine, Oh! "glorious John," delightedly I pore— Keen, vigorous, chaste, and full of harmony, Deep in the soil of our humanity ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... quite unworthy of the translator, who seeks to produce on his reader an impression similar or nearly similar to that produced by the original. To him the feeling should be more important than the exact word. He should remember Dryden's quaint admonition not to 'lacquey by the side of his author, but to mount up behind him.' (Dedication to the Aeneis.) He must carry in his mind a comprehensive view of the whole work, of what has preceded and of what is to follow,—as well as of the meaning of particular passages. ...
— Charmides • Plato
... an edition which he always called the Opus Magnum. This was a pleasant 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 number of ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... 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 ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... first knowledge of which I owe to you, my dear Mr. Boyd, as how much besides? And then comes the fourth paper, and I tremble to anticipate the possible—nay, the very probable—scolding I may have from you, upon my various heresies as to Dryden and Pope and Queen Anne's versificators. In the meantime you have breathing time, for Mr. Dilke, although very gracious and courteous to my offence of extending the two papers he asked for into four,[65] yet could find no room in the 'Athenaeum' last week for me, and only hopes for it ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... industrious student of the law, and the knowledge thus acquired was of great service to him throughout his eventful career. He was well read in the standard English authors—Shakespeare, Milton, Addison, Pope, Johnson, Goldsmith, Dryden, Hume, Gibbon, and the early English novelists. He was a constant reader of the best foreign and American periodicals and the leading newspapers of the day. He was of the opinion that wars would never cease, and therefore took ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... disturbed the Church's peaceful reign; And we can point each period of the time When they began and who begat the crime; Can calculate how long th' eclipse endured; Who interposed; what digits were obscured; Of all which are already passed away We knew the rise, the progress, and decay. DRYDEN, Hind ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... in this passage is infinitely pleasing; and the recapitulation of each particular image, with a little varying of the expression, makes one of the finest turns of words that I have ever seen: which I rather mention because Mr. Dryden has said, in his preface to Juvenal, that he could meet with no turn ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... to "our Pindarick madness" is well known. The "first and obvious defect" of Dryden's Threnodia "is the irregularity of its metre." The "lax and lawless versification" of this type of poetry, he wrote in the Life of Cowley, "concealed the deficiencies of the barren, and flattered the laziness of the idle." One cannot but wonder therefore at his praise of Morrison's ode. ...
— A Pindarick Ode on Painting - Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq. • Thomas Morrison
... 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 other, and would sometimes, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... a letter 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 occurred ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... 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 ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... and handsome, you'll agree. Solid in sense as Dryden at his best, And smooth as Waller, but with something more,— That touch of grace, that airier elegance Which only rank can give. 'Tis very sad That one so nobly praised should—well, no matter!— ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... mistress of the abode. Parravicin gazed curiously round, as if anxious to gather from what he saw some idea of the person he so soon expected to encounter. Everything betokened a refined and luxurious taste. A few French romances, the last plays of Etherege, Dryden, and Shadwell, a volume of Cowley, and some amorous songs, lay on the table; and not far from them were a loomask, pulvil purse, a pair of scented gloves, a richly-laced mouchoir, a manteau girdle, palatine tags, and a golden bodkin ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... o'er the 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
... suppose, that poetic translations of Horace are rarely read, save by scholars, and the verdict is almost always unkind. Yet an excellent anthology could be compiled by selecting the happiest renderings of the most talented translators. Dryden's paraphrase of III., 29, has been uniformly praised, and was a great favourite of Thackeray's. Cowper's nimble wit and classic taste are seen in his translation of II., 10, an ode beautifully rendered also by Mr. William Watson. Sir Theodore Martin and Connington are always readable, Francis ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... legend about the windy Piazza del Gesu, where their principal church stands, adjoining what was once their convent, or monastery, as people say nowadays, though Doctor Johnson admits no distinction between the words, and Dryden called a nunnery by the latter name. The story is this. One day the Devil and the Wind were walking together in the streets of Rome, conversing pleasantly according to their habit. When they came to the Piazza del Gesu, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... sit in small arbours, and "be regaled with cheesecakes, syllabubs, and wine sweetened with sugar." In this form the place was extremely popular, and is often mentioned in contemporary literature. Dryden came there to eat tarts with "Mrs." Anne Reeve, and doubtless Evelyn and Pepys often strolled about in the gay crowd, a crowd much gayer than it would now be—in the matter of costume, at all events. The scene of "The Mulberry ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... comedy of the "Lancashire Witches" was levelled more immediately at the papists, but interspersed with most gross and scurrilous reflections upon the English divines of the high church party. Otway, Lee, and Dryden were the formidable antagonists, whom the court opposed to the whig poets. Thus arrayed and confronted, the stage absolutely foamed with politics; the prologues and epilogues, in particular formed channels, through which the tenets of the opposite parties were frequently ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... "Autobiographic Sketches."] dressing-room, her ladyship having something special to communicate, which related (as I understood her) to one Simon. "What Simon? Simon Peter?"—O, no, you irreverend boy, no Simon at all with an S, but Cymon with a C,—Dryden's Cymon,— ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... quality of this comedy is in its personages and in the 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, ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... verse; and of Beaumont, who had caught an echo of Shakespeare's sweetness if not his power; and of sturdy Ben Jonson, held in his own day a not unworthy rival of Shakespeare's self; and of "glorious" and most masculine John Dryden. From his monument Shakespeare looks upon the place with his kindly eyes, and Addison too, and Goldsmith; and one can almost imagine a smile of fellowship upon the marble faces of those later dead—Burns, Coleridge, Southey, ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... Craigmyle, is known in a sphere where few Scotsmen had entered. He was a courtier of that remarkable little court of the Electress Sophia of Hanover, where he became the friend of the philosopher Leibnitz, correspondent of the poet Dryden, and his letters are full of curious gossip on the most various subjects—theology, philosophy, literature, including poetry and the small talk of the day. He was greatly employed and trusted by the Electress Sophia. His son George was noted as an agriculturist, ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... beginning of a 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 ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... begin to choose your poets. Going back to Hazlitt, you will see that he deals with, among others, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Chatterton, Burns, and the Lake School. You might select one of these, and read under his guidance. Said Wordsworth: "I was impressed by the conviction that there were four English poets whom I must have continually before me ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... in any reasonable measure cultivated and developed, or, again, where an individual knows what pleases himself. By all means, if it happens that he does not admire Shakespeare and Bacon, Sydney and Jonson, Dryden and Pope, Byron and Shelley, Scott's novels or Lamb's Elia, let him leave them alone, and make his own free choice, even if it be to go in for John Buncle, the Adventures of a Guinea, or Luttrell's Letters to Julia. There is ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... seemingly secure position. His regular work as comptroller (of which a few scattered documentary vestiges are preserved) scarcely offers more points for the imagination to exercise itself upon than Burns's excisemanship or Wordsworth's collectorship of stamps (It is a curious circumstance that Dryden should have received as a reward for his political services as a satirist, an office almost identical with Chaucer's. But he held it for little more than a year.), though doubtless it must have brought ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... a doctor of physic as well as a doctor of divinity, and Dryden, we are told, took his physic whenever he wanted to borrow his inspiration. A dramatic writer of the present day writes tragedy in a helmet facing a mirror. Ever while you live encourage the imagination! My faith in Shakspeare ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... a good thing to laugh, at any rate," said Dryden, the poet, "and if a straw can tickle a man, it is an ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... attention to his rights in Shakespeare on the eve of the passage of the copyright law which went into effect in April, 1710.[2] Certainly Tonson must have felt that he was adding to the prestige which his publishing house had gained by the publication of Milton and Dryden's Virgil. ...
— Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) • Nicholas Rowe
... moment. For, be it remembered, after all, that any provisional adjudication—one growing out of the fashion or taste of a single era—could not, at any rate, be binding for a different era. A judgment which met the approbation of Spenser could hardly have satisfied Dryden; nor another which satisfied Pope, have been recognised as authentic by us of the year 1838. It is the normal or exemplary condition of the human mind, its ideal condition, not its abnormal condition, as seen in the transitory modes and fashions ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... rock, It ruddied all the copse-wood glen; 'Twas seen from Dryden's groves of oak, And seen ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... answered Phil. "Joe first showed up at Prescott about four years ago with a man by the name of Dryden, who claimed that Joe was his son. They camped just outside of town, in some dirty old tents, and lived by picking up whatever was lying around loose. Dryden wouldn't work, and, naturally, no one would have Joe. Finally Dryden was sent up for robbing a store, and Joe nearly ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... was a humbug to him. Brown had real talents for the thing. You must recognize, in reading Brown, many of those arguments with which I have so often reduced you to silence in metaphysical discussions. Your discovery of Brown is amusing. Go on! You will detect Dryden if you persevere; bring to light John Milton, and drag William ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... English Opposition Mordaunt proposes to William a Descent on England William rejects the Advice Discontent in England after the Fall of the Hydes Conversions to Popery; Peterborough; Salisbury Wycherley; Tindal; Haines Dryden The Hind and Panther Change in the Policy of the Court towards the Puritans Partial Toleration granted in Scotland Closeting It is unsuccessful Admiral Herbert Declaration of Indulgence Feeling of the Protestant Dissenters Feeling of the Church of England The Court and the Church Letter ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Complete Contents of the Five Volumes • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... somewhere waiting, who can dance but that one poem. Certainly those poems 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 meaning are ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... replied in verse,—I think he said 'Twas verses the ingenious Dryden made, And trust 'twill save me from entire disgrace To cite 'em in his foolish Prologue's place. Yet, scattered here and there, I some behold, Who can discern the tinsel from the gold; To these ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... time. The tragedians, Lucretius and others, adopted a different fable to account for the stoppage at Aulis, and seem to have found the sacrifice of Iphigena better suited to form the subject of a tragedy. Compare Dryden's "AEneid," ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... "Sanity of True Genius" Elia set out to controvert the idea expressed by Dryden in ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... literature, divides itself roughly into three periods. The first is the period of the Elizabethans and of Milton; the second is from the Restoration to the French Revolution; the third from the Revolution to the present day. The typical critic of the first period is Sidney; Dryden opens and Johnson closes the second; the third, a period of far more varied tendencies than either of the others, is perhaps most fitly represented by Lamb, Hazlitt, and Carlyle. It will be the aim of the following pages to sketch the broader outlines of ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... literature is studied, John Dryden is recognized as the author of some of the greatest political satires in the language. Until recently the fact has been overlooked that before he wrote the first of these satires, Absalom and Achitophel, he had entered the political arena with the prose tract here reproduced. The ...
— His Majesties Declaration Defended • John Dryden
... Constitution sanctions, other than are compatible with a just equality of civil rights, or with the necessary restraints of social obligations; of some of whom it may be said, in the language which Dryden puts into the mouth of one of the most ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... early displayed itself; for when little more than fifteen, he wrote a Greek poem, which must have some merit, because his father has prefixed it to the second edition of his Sylva. In Mr. Nicoll's Collection of Poems, are some by him. There are two poems of his in Dryden's Miscellany. He translated Plutarch's Life of Alexander from the Greek; and the History of Two Grand Viziers, from the French. When only nineteen, he translated from the Latin, Rapin on Gardens. He died in 1698. The Quarterly Review, in its review of Mr. Bray's Memoirs of Evelyn, ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... transmute themselves into the yearly rent-roll, and reverting to the energy and merchant instincts of his Dutch ancestors, had been conducted skillfully for the thirty years preceding the disaster by Price's uncle, Dryden Ruyler. But the earthquake and fire in which so many uninsured millions had vanished, had also wrecked men past the rebounding age, and Dryden Ruyler was one of them. He might have borne the destruction of the old business ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... William Wycherley. Dryden and his critics. To Joseph Addison. A few thoughts from a rambling head. To Jonathan Swift. Friends to posterity. To the same. A farming friend, and The Dunciad. To the same. An invitation ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... they choose. The writings of Lord Clarendon cannot be had in an American edition; your importation is taxed, because at some future day it may be convenient for some one to get up the whole in one volume. The same is the case with the whole works of Milton, of Dryden, and many others quite as essential to libraries: but the case is still more provoking with the better class of modern works, such, for instance, as Alison's "History of Europe." Under a copyright law, it could be published ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... mark of honour has no doubt arisen that of garlanding guests. This is not confined to India but obtained in Rome and probably in other countries. The word 'chaplet' [166] originally meant a garland or wreath to be worn on the head; and a garland of leaves with four flowers at equal distances. Dryden says, 'With chaplets green upon their foreheads placed.' The word mala originally meant a garland, and subsequently a rosary or string of beads. From this it seems a legitimate deduction that rosaries or strings of beads of a sacred wood were substituted for flower-garlands ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... former in the struggle of Arminians and Calvinists in the Puritan controversy; the latter in the revolution supposed to be caused in our literature by the influence of Dryden. ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... 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 addresses ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Pythagoras. He rejudged the characters of all the principal authors, who had died within a century of the present time; and, in this revision, paid no sort of regard to the reputation they had acquired — Milton was harsh and prosaic; Dryden, languid and verbose; Butler and Swift without humour; Congreve, without wit; and Pope destitute of any sort of poetical merit — As for his contemporaries, he could not bear to hear one of them mentioned with any degree of applause — They were all dunces, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... such as it is, was not adopted without a purpose, and that the English I have called "old-fashioned," was not in the remotest degree intended to be modelled upon the diction of Swift, or Pope, or Addison, or Steele, or Dryden, or Defoe, or even Nash or Howel. Such a feat of elegant pedantry has already been accomplished by Mr. Thackeray in his noble story of Esmond; and I had no wish to follow up a dignified imitation by a sorry caricature. I simply endeavoured to make Captain Dangerous ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... and well into the last century was heated by a great charcoal brazier in the centre. The fumes found their way into every corner of the hall before reaching their outlet in the lantern. Among the numerous portraits on the walls there are several of famous men. Among them we find Dryden, Vaughan, Thompson (by Herkomer), the Duke of Gloucester (by Sir Joshua Reynolds), Coke (the great lawyer), Thackeray, Tennyson (by G.F. Watts), Cowley and Bentley. On the other side of the entrance passage are the kitchens with the combination rooms above, ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... fashion to compare the style of Addison and Johnson, and to depreciate, I think very unjustly, the style of Addison as nerveless and feeble[661], because it has not the strength and energy of that of Johnson. Their prose may be balanced like the poetry of Dryden and Pope. Both are excellent, though in different ways. Addison writes with the ease of a gentleman. His readers fancy that a wise and accomplished companion is talking to them; so that he insinuates his sentiments and taste into their minds by an imperceptible influence. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... of time which has elapsed since the production of Dryden's translation, you will recollect with a sigh, as I do, his own expression: "What Virgil wrote in the vigor of age, in plenty and at ease, I have undertaken to translate," says Dryden, "in my declining years, struggling with want, oppressed with sickness, curbed in my genius, liable to be misunderstood ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire
... 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)
... 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 hundred ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... older edifice, an ancient description running, "The old Chappel of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Pateley Brigg in Nidderdale." We climbed the hill, and on our way came to an old well on which was inscribed the following translation by Dryden from the Latin ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... translation he had made of The Tale of a Tub: the proposal was soon followed by a folio, and a letter of three sides, to press me seriously to revise it. You shall judge of my scholar's competence. He translates L'Estrange, Dryden, and others, l''etrange Dryden, etc.(593) Then in the description of the tailor as an idol, and his goose as the symbol; he says in a note, that the goose means the dove, and is a concealed satire on the Holy Ghost. It put me in mind of the Dane, who, talking of orders to ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... the tombs of Anthony Woodhead, 1678, who was in his day, the great champion of the Roman Catholic religion, and was reputed to have written the Whole Duty of Man; Lady Slingsby, whose name occurs as an actress in Dryden and Lee's plays, from 1681 to 1689; Jeremy Collier, 1726, the pertinacious non-juror, who repressed the immoralities of the stage; Ned Ward, author of the London Spy, 1731; Leoni, the architect, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 546, May 12, 1832 • Various
... doctrine! All things come to him who works. Walter Scott working tirelessly in the attic while his companions below carouse the night away; Thoreau banishing himself into the lonely forest that he might prepare for larger usefulness; Dryden, "thinking on for a fortnight in a perfect frenzy;" Heyne, the German scholar, allowing himself "no more than two nights of weekly rest" for six months, that he might finish a course in Greek; Reynolds, the greatest portrait ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... exclusiveness. He admits of nothing below, scarcely of any thing above himself. It is fine to hear him talk of the way in which certain subjects should have been treated by eminent poets, according to his notions of the art. Thus he finds fault with Dryden's description of Bacchus in the Alexander's Feast, as if he were a mere good-looking youth, or ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... a noble presage of the talents of its illustrious author. The piece is known to English readers by a translation entitled "Sir Martin Marplot," made originally by the celebrated Duke of Newcastle, and adapted to the stage by the pen of Dryden. The piece turns upon the schemes formed by a clever and intriguing valet to facilitate the union betwixt his master and the heroine of the scene, all of which are successively baffled and disconcerted by the bustling interference of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... courtin'est places in the world.' I begin to think he was right, and it is not always the superficial flirting and love-making which is a part of your coeducational schools,—a thing simply trivial and naughty,—but often tragic passion instead, quite in harmony with the title of Dryden's play, 'All for Love, or the ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... tell me at last, but I knew all about the butcher's bill, for Mr. Dryden had been up to the house asking to see you, as he wanted his account settled. You were out when he called, but I never saw Miss Etta in such a fright: she had a fit of hysterics in her own room after he had left ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... dissemination of the dying speeches and confessions of criminals. It is prominent in the history of literature because, particularly during the later part of the 17th century, several important poems, by Dryden, Butler and others, originally appeared printed on the "broad side" of a sheet. The term is also used of the simultaneous discharge of the guns on one side of a ship ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... writers of this age remain monuments of genius, perverted by indecency and bad taste; and none more than Dryden, both by reason of the greatness of his talents and the gross abuse which he made of them. His plays, excepting a few scenes, are utterly disfigured by vice or folly, or both. His translations appear too much the offspring of haste and hunger: even his fables are ill-chosen tales, conveyed in an ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... Spenserian; 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 more is meant than meets ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... themselves an enduring place in the history of English literature. South, Tillotson, and Barrow among theologians, Newton in mathematical science, Locke and Bentley in philosophy and classical learning, Clarendon and Burnet in history, L'Estrange, Butler, Marvell and Dryden in miscellaneous prose, and Temple as an essayist, have all made their mark by prose writings which will endure for all time. But the names which stand out most prominently in popular estimation as ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... The age of Dryden and Pope was an age of wit, but there were few who could explain precisely what they meant by the term. A thing so multiform and. Protean escaped the bonds of logic and definition. In his sermon "Against ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... tragedy is, that it is not to be understood; which granted (as I think it must be), it will necessarily follow that the only way to avoid this is by being too high or too low for the understanding, which will comprehend everything within its reach. Those two extremities of stile Mr Dryden illustrates by the familiar image of two inns, which I shall term the aerial and ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... So sings Dryden, paraphrasing Horace, but each of them with their knowledge of the world, cross-questioned in prose, could have told us how the stings of fortune really are felt. The truth is, that fortune is not exactly a distinct isolated thing which ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... 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 the ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... "Proof!" Dryden exclaimed. "My God—proof! Who tipped your people off to have you drop in there this afternoon? I did, didn't I? Do you think I'd do that without knowing what I was about! Didn't I tell you that there was nothing but the office fixtures ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... preparation of a 'Standard Dictionary' of the English tongue. The language had now attained a high degree of literary perfection; a perfect prose style, always a characteristic of maturity, had been created; a brilliant galaxy of dramatists and essayists—Dryden, Pope, Addison, Steele, Swift, Defoe—had demonstrated that English was capable of expressing clearly and elegantly everything that needed to be expressed in language. The age of Queen Anne was compared to the Ciceronian age of Latin, or the age of Aristotle and Plato in Greek. ...
— The evolution of English lexicography • James Augustus Henry Murray
... think (but I cannot just now find it) a small portion of the 'Troilus and Cressida'. You ask my opinion about that poem. Speaking from a recollection only, of many years past, I should say it would be found too long and probably tedious. 'The Knight's Tale' is also very long; but, though Dryden has executed it, in his own way observe, with great spirit and harmony, he has suffered so much of the simplicity, and with that of the beauty and occasional pathos of the original to escape, that I should be pleased to hear that a new version ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... this has been the case. Cellini's Memoirs, written in the height of pagan Renaissance, well express the aversion which a Florentine or Roman felt for the inhospitable wildernesses of Switzerland.[2] Dryden, in his dedication to 'The Indian Emperor,' says, 'High objects, it is true, attract the sight; but it looks up with pain on craggy rocks and barren mountains, and continues not intent on any object which is wanting in shades and green to ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... 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 ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... the answer as the girl entered. "Everett wants us to go in his party to the Dryden fair. Would ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... benefit of a University education, and in this little essay I endeavour to hold up the mirror to their ill-nature—the fault to which I am unduly attached. Writers besides Richardson have referred to it. I might quote many eloquent tributes from Dryden to Wordsworth and Byron, all Cambridge men, who have felt the charm and acknowledged a weakness for the step-sister University. Cambridge has never been fortunate in having the compliment reciprocated. Neither Oxford men nor her own sons have been over-generous ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... approach to theatrical artifice. Not so the others I have mentioned; they all read cleverly and agreeably, but with the decided trickery of stage recitation. To them he usually gave the book when it was a comedy, or, indeed, any other drama than Shakespeare's or Joanna Baillie's. Dryden's Fables, Johnson's two Satires, and certain detached scenes of Beaumont and Fletcher, especially that in The Lover's Progress, where the ghost of the musical innkeeper makes his appearance, were frequently selected. Of the poets, his contemporaries, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... imperfect perception of the truth out of the question, surely nothing can be easier than to believe that for the belief in which we have so many precedents. How many beauties, lost upon Dryden, were perceived by Johnson; How many, hidden to Johnson and his cotemporaries, have been brought to light ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... rate acquired a wide knowledge of English poetry. Waller, Spenser, and Dryden were, he says, his great favourites in the order named, till he was twelve. Like so many other poets, he took infinite delight in the Faery Queen; but Dryden, the great poetical luminary of his own day, naturally ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... another, almost lost among my life's early shadows, this youth was the most angelic adolescent my eyes ever beheld. Remembering what well-filtered blood it was that ran in the veins of the race from which he was descended, those who knew him in life might well say with Dryden,— ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... songs—Peacock was that writer's name; there was Borrow's "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"; ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... to a person walking the distance of two sides of a triangle to reach the objective point. For instance in the quotation: "Pope professed to have learned his poetry from Dryden, whom, whenever an opportunity was presented, he praised through the whole period of his existence with unvaried liberality; and perhaps his character may receive some illustration, of a comparison he instituted between him and ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... his religious faith. The work just named, in which he expressed the attempt to bring religious truth under the grasp of the intellect, was one of some merit as a literary production, and written with that clearness which the influence of the French models studied by Dryden had introduced into English literature. Yet it is difficult to understand why a single work of an unknown student should attract so much public notice. The grand jury of Middlesex was induced at once to present it as a nuisance, and the example was followed ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... may be extant) and confer them with the literary product of the said ages. Professor Wilson has begun something of the kind apparently, in his initiatory paper of the last Blackwood number on critics, beginning with Dryden—but he seems to have no design in his notice—it is a mere critique on the critic. And then, he should have begun earlier than Dryden—earlier even than Sir Philip Sydney, who in the noble 'Discourse on Poetry,' ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... John Richard Green comes to deal with it, he says: "As a mere literary monument the English version of the Bible remains the noblest language of the English tongue, while its perpetual use made of it from the instant of its appearance the standard of our language."[1] And in Macaulay's essay on Dryden, while he is deploring the deterioration of English style, he yet says that in the period when the English language was imperiled there appeared "the English Bible, a book which if everything else in our ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... describes the golden age to which Vergil looked forward as consequent upon the birth of a marvellous infant, perhaps some offspring of the marriages of Antonius and Octavianus, celebrated in solemnization of the treaty. The poem achieved considerable fame, which lasted as late as the time of Dryden, owing to the belief that it contained a prophecy of the birth of Christ drawn from the Sibylline books, and won for Vergil throughout the middle ages the title of prophet and magician. Whether this belief was well founded or not may be left to those whom it may interest to inquire; it is sufficient ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... The Abbe Resnel says,—"L'illustre Dryden l'a porte comme Poete du Roy," which rather reduces its academic dignity; and adds, "Le Sieur Cyber, comedien de profession, est actuellement en possession du titre de Poete Laureate, et qu'il jouit en meme tems de deux cens livres sterling de pension, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 32, June 8, 1850 • Various
... fancies, devoid of fears, Of mothers' talks and mothers' lays, Of grandmothers' comforts—quiet ways. Of gossip, perhaps—still and yet— What of Johnson? Would we forget The pictured cup; those merry times, When round the board, with ready rhymes Waller, Dryden, and Addison—Young, Grave Pope to Gay, when Cowper sung? Sydney Smith, too; gentle Lamb brew, Tennyson, Dickens, Doctor Holmes knew. The cup that cheered, those sober souls, And tiny tea-trays, samovars, and bowls. . . . So here's a toast to the queen of plants, ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... exercise. Johnson's manner, {177} then, as a critic was against him with the nineteenth century. But so also was his matter. The poetry he really believed in was that of what the nineteenth century came to regard as the age of prose. Of his three great Lives we feel that those of Dryden and Pope express the pleasure he spontaneously and unconsciously felt, while that of Milton is a reluctant tribute extorted from him by a genius he could not resist. Among the few poets in his long list for whom the nineteenth century cared much are Gray and Collins; and of Collins ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... "Men of Genius," quite a list—Corneille, Descartes, Virgil, Addison, La Fontaine, Dryden, Manzoni, and Newton—of those who could not express themselves in public. Whatever part self-consciousness played in the individual case, we must class the peculiarity among the defects, not signs, of genius. "A tender heel ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... 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 ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... perfectly satisfactory to me. As for my convictions, which are, I thank God, vivid and strong, I think they spring from a species of intuition, mercifully granted to those who have a natural incapacity for reasoning, i.e. the whole female sect. And, talking of them, I do not like Dryden, though I exclaim with delight at the glorious beauty and philosophical truth of some of his poetry; but oh! he has nasty notions about women. Did you ever see Correggio's picture of the Gismonda? It is a wonderful portrait of grief. Even Guercino's "Hagar" is inferior to it in the mere ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... 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 be imagined, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... 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 ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... terrably worried, because my father is my best friend, having always understood me. I cannot endure to think that he is in danger. Alas, how true are the words of Dryden: ...
— Bab: A Sub-Deb • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... happy season to achieve them. To take familiar instances, here were the untold tales of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims; the unwritten cantos of the Fairy Queen; the conclusion of Coleridge's Christabel; and the whole of Dryden's projected epic on the subject of King Arthur. The shelves were crowded; for it would not be too much to affirm that every author has imagined and shaped out in his thought more and far better works than those which actually proceeded ...
— A Select Party (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... compared. Look at 'Johnson's Lives.' Who can read the book, and the specimens it glorifies, without rejoicing in his prose, and thoroughly despising their poetry?—With a few brilliant exceptions, of course, (for ill-used Milton, Pope—and shall we in the same sentence put Dryden?—are there,) a more wretched set of halfpenny-a-liners never stormed mob-trodden Parnassus. The poetry of Queen Anne's time and thereabouts, I judge to have been at the lowest bathos of badness; all satyrs, and swains, fulsome ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... excellent translations of the AEneid into English. In this book we make numerous quotations from the translation by the English poet Dryden, and from the later work by the eminent Latin ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... playgoers of the Restoration we have abundant information from the poet Dryden, and the diarist Pepys. For some eighteen years the theatres had been absolutely closed, and during that interval very great changes had occurred. England, under Charles II., seemed as a new and different country to the ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... never been for good to our literature, at least. Thence its chief aim grew to be a desirable trimness of speech and logical arrangement of matter—good external qualities purchased at a fearful price with the loss of all that makes poetry precious. The poets of England, with John Dryden at their head, ceased almost for a time to deal with the truths of humanity, and gave themselves to the facts and relations of society. The nation which could recall the family of the Stuarts must necessarily ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... high in power and 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 a rival."—Congregationalist, ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... pieces, there is the mark of greatness, of grasp, of comprehension. In all its varieties Burke's style is noble, earnest, deep-flowing, because his sentiment was lofty and fervid, and went with sincerity and ardent disciplined travail of judgment. Fox told Francis Horner that Dryden's prose was Burke's great favourite, and that Burke imitated him more than any one else. We may well believe that he was attracted by Dryden's ease, his copiousness, his gaiety, his manliness of style, but there can hardly have been any conscious attempt at ...
— Burke • John Morley
... beneath the yoke. To this came next in course the Brazen Age: A warlike offspring, prompt to bloody rage, Not impious yet! . . . . . Hard Steel succeeded then; And stubborn as the metal were the men." Ovid's Metam, Book I. Dryden's Translation. ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... pieces of fine woolen cloth so that the sounds should not wake the family. Michael Angelo neglected school to copy drawings which he dared not carry home. Murillo filled the margin of his school-book with drawings. Dryden read Polybius before he was ten years old. Le Brum, when a boy, drew with a piece of charcoal on the walls of the house. Pope wrote excellent verses at fourteen. Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, composed at sixteen a tract on ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... who received their education within those walls; old Westminsters, whose fame will last as long as old England's records, and who shall doubt 85that will be to the end of time? Here grew into manhood and renown the Lord Burleigh, King, Bishop of London, the poet Cowley, the great Dryden, Charles Montague, Earl of Halifax, Dr. South, Matthew Prior, the tragedian Rowe, Bishop Hooper, Kennet, Bishop of Peterborough, Dr. Friend, the physician, King, Archbishop of Dublin, the philosopher Locke, Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, Bourne, the Latin poet, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... protectors of the intended academy, a circumstance that was of the most fatal consequence to polite literature. The members of this academy would have had a very great advantage over those who first formed that of the French, for Swift, Prior, Congreve, Dryden, Pope, Addison, &c. had fixed the English tongue by their writings; whereas Chapelain, Colletet, Cassaigne, Faret, Perrin, Cotin, our first academicians, were a disgrace to their country; and so much ridicule is now attached ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... to fixed canons, during which scholarly efforts are made to purify style and impose laws on taste. The ensuing period of sense is also marked by profounder inquiries into nature and more exact analysis of mental operations. The correct school of poets, culminating in Dryden and Pope, holds sway in England; while Newton, Locke, and Bentley extend the sphere of science. In France the age of Rabelais and Montaigne yields place to the age of Racine and Descartes. Germany was so distracted by religious wars, Spain ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... the Lord Chamberlain's players. In the dramas of Shakespeare the popular note is still audible, but only as an undertone, furnishing comic relief to the romantic amours of courtly lovers or the tragic fall of Princes; with Beaumont and Fletcher, and still more with Dryden and the Restoration dramatists, the popular element in the drama passes away, and the triumph of the court is complete. The Elizabethan court could find no use for the popular ballad, but, like other forms of literature, ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... 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, but Tonson refused upon the grounds that the poet's overdraft already exceeded the ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... English poetry. Chaucer, living at the dawn almost of English civilization; Shakspeare, whose varied and marvellous dramas might well have exhausted any vitality; Milton, struggling with domestic infelicity, with political hatred, and with blindness; Dryden, Pope, Swift: none of these burning and shining lights of English literature went out at mid-day. The result is not altered, if you come nearer our own time. That galaxy of talent and genius which shone with such brilliancy in the Scottish capital at the beginning of the century,—Sydney ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... the Mediterranean, and opened for Englishmen a commerce in the true intellectual mart of Europe. I shall attempt to heap proof on you that whatever the agency—whether through Wyat or Spenser, Marlowe or Shakespeare, or Donne, or Milton, or Dryden, or Pope, or Johnson, or even Wordsworth—always our literature has obeyed, however unconsciously, the precept Antiquam exquirite matrem, 'Seek back to the ancient mother'; always it has recreated itself, ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... human kind desires and what they shun, Rage, passion, pleasure, impotence of will, Shall this satirical collection fill. DRYDEN. ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... some stipulation about the quality of the coin in which he was to be paid. The price of the necessaries of life, of shoes, of ale, of oatmeal, rose fast. The bit of metal called a shilling the labourer found would not go so far as sixpence. One day Tonson sends forty brass shillings to Dryden, to say nothing of clipped money. The great poet sends them all back and demands in their place good guineas. "I expect," he says, "good silver, not such as I had formerly." Meanwhile, at every session of the Old ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... fashion prevailed, and was put to a variety of uses. Frequently there was no interlining between the right and wrong sides. At Canons Ashby there are now preserved some handsome quilted curtains of this type, belonging to Sir Alfred Dryden, Baronet. ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... up to by his gang of blackguards. Alexander himself was not much better,—a foolish, fiery young madcap. How often is he mentioned except as a warning? His best record is that he served to point a moral as 'Macedonian's madman.' He made a figure, it is true, in Dryden's great Ode, but what kind of a figure? He got drunk,—in very bad company, too,—and then turned fire-bug. He had one redeeming point,—he did value his Homer, and slept with the Iliad under his pillow. A poet like Homer seems to me worth a dozen ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the opinion of Sir Walter Scott may be interesting. He too, not being a classical scholar par excellence, may be better equipped for sound judgment. In the introduction to Dryden's Amphitryon he says: "Plautus ... left us a play on the subject of Amphitryon which has had the honour to be deemed worthy of imitation by Moliere and Dryden. It cannot be expected that the plain, blunt and inartificial ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... of Essex. Mrs Barry is said to have created over 100 parts, and she was particularly successful in the plays of Thomas Otway. Betterton says that her acting gave "success to plays that would disgust the most patient reader." Dryden pronounced her "always excellent." Cibber is authority for the statement that it was on her behalf that benefits, which up to that time were reserved for authors, were first established for actors by command of James II. Mrs Barry had a ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... permitted, in concluding this subject, to add the testimony of my own experience on the beneficent influence of the confessional; for, like my brethren in the ministry, I am, in the language of Dryden, ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... the "Summer Islands." The practice of running the lines into one another, severely condemned by Johnson, and systematically shunned by Waller, has often been practised with success by poets far greater than either—such as Shelley and Coleridge. It is remarkable that Dryden, while he praised, did not copy our poet's manner, but gave himself freer scope. Pope, on the other hand, pushed his love of uniform tinkle and unmitigated softness to excess, and transferred this kind of luscious verse from small poems, where it is often a merit, to large ones, where ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... magnificent, could conciliate his praise as long as it was clothed in English, but present him with the most trivial commonplaces in Greek, and he unaffectedly fancied them divine." Hence he ridiculed Milton, Dryden, Locke, and Shakespeare. How much time and money have been spent in colleges to produce this pedantic perversion of the mind, to create that love of the ignorance of antiquity and indifference to modern enlightenment which are so common ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... alteration of that celebrated drama, in which almost every original beauty is either awkwardly disguised or arbitrarily omitted." Another critic, who cites this passage from Steevens, pursues the hypothesis as follows: "In fifty years after his death, Dryden mentions that he was then become a little obsolete. In the beginning of the last century, Lord Shaftesbury complains of his rude unpolished style, and his antiquated phrase and wit. It is certain that, for nearly a hundred years after his death, partly owing ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... himself up in austere and mysterious solitude: a poet must come 'eating and drinking.' Thus came Shakspeare, Dryden, Burns, Scott, Goethe; and thus have come in our day, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 203, September 17, 1853 • Various
... found in them the first successful solution of one of the great problems of literature,—Can poetry pass from one language into another without losing its distinctive characteristics of form and expression? Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Sotheby, had answered no for Greek and Latin, Coleridge for German, Fairfax and Rose and Cary for Italian. But if Mr. Longfellow could translate the whole of the Divina Commedia as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... hell stands open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to return, and view the upper skies— In this the toil, in this the labour lies.—Dryden. ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake |
