following striking and forcible observations, though expressed in language somewhat quaint.  “I cannot pass by that admirable English poet, without endeavouring to make his country sensible of the obligations they have to his Muse.  Whether they consider the flowing grace of his versification, the vigorous sallies of his fancy, or the peculiar delicacy of his periods, they all discover excellencies never to be enough admired.  If they trace him from the first productions of his youth to the last performances of his age, they will find, that as the tyranny of rhyme never imposed on the perspicuity of sense, so a languid sense never wanted to be set off by the harmony of rhyme.  And, as his early works wanted no maturity, so his latter wanted no force or spirit.  The falling off of his hair had no other consequence than to make his laurels be seen the more.

“As a translator, he was just; as an inventor, he was rich.  His versions of some parts of Lucretius, Horace, Homer, and Virgil, throughout gave him a just pretence to that compliment which was made to Monsieur d’Ablancourt, a celebrated French translator. It is uncertain who have the greatest obligation to him, the dead or the living.

“With all these wondrous talents, he was libelled, in his lifetime, by the very men who had no other excellencies but as they were his imitators Where he was allowed to have sentiments superior to all others, they charged him with theft.  But how did he steal? no otherwise than like those who steal beggars’ children, only to clothe them the better.”

In this reign Dryden wrote the first Ode to St. Cecilia, for her festival, in 1687.  This and the Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew, a performance much in the manner of Cowley, and which has been admired perhaps fully as much as it merits, were the only pieces of general poetry which he produced between the accession of James and the Revolution.  It was, however, about this time, that the poet became acquainted with the simple and beautiful hymns of the Catholic ritual, the only pieces of uninspired sacred poetry which are worthy of the purpose to which they are dedicated.  It is impossible to hear the “Dies Irae;” or the “Stabat Mater dolorosa,” without feeling, that the stately simplicity of the language, differing almost as widely from classical poetry as from that of modern nations, awes the congregation, like the architecture of the Gothic cathedrals in which they are chanted.  The ornaments which are wanting to these striking effusions of devotion, are precisely such as would diminish their grand and solemn effect; and nothing but the cogent and irresistible propriety of addressing the Divinity in a language understood by the whole worshipping assembly, could have justified the discarding these magnificent hymns from the reformed worship.  We must suppose that Dryden, as a poet, was interested in the poetical part of the religion which he had chosen; and his translation of “Veni,