But the powers of observation and of deduction are not the only qualities essential to the poetical character.  The philosopher may indeed prosecute his experimental researches into the arcana of nature, and announce them to the public through the medium of a friendly redacteur, as the legislator of Israel obtained permission to speak to the people by the voice of Aaron; but the poet has no such privilege; nay, his doom is so far capricious, that, though he may be possessed of the primary quality of poetical conception to the highest possible extent, it is but like a lute without its strings, unless he has the subordinate, though equally essential, power of expressing what he feels and conceives, in appropriate and harmonious language.  With this power Dryden’s poetry was gifted in a degree, surpassing in modulated harmony that of all who had preceded him, and inferior to none that has since written English verse.  He first showed that the English language was capable of uniting smoothness and strength.  The hobbling verses of his predecessors were abandoned even by the lowest versifiers; and by the force of his precept and example, the meanest lampooners of the year seventeen hundred wrote smoother lines than Donne and Cowley, the chief poets of the earlier half of the seventeenth century.  What was said of Rome adorned by Augustus, has been, by Johnson, applied to English poetry improved by Dryden; that he found it of brick, and left it of marble.  This reformation was not merely the effect of an excellent ear, and a superlative command of gratifying it by sounding language; it was, we have seen, the effect of close, accurate, and continued study of the power of the English tongue.  Upon what principles he adopted and continued his system of versification, he long meditated to communicate in his projected prosody of English poetry.  The work, however, might have been more curious than useful, as there would have been some danger of its diverting the attention, and misguiding the efforts of poetical adventurers; for as it is more easy to be masons than architects, we may deprecate an art which might teach the world to value those who can build rhymes, without attending to the more essential qualities of poetry.  Strict attention might no doubt discover the principle of Dryden’s versification; but it seems no more essential to the analysing his poetry, than the principles of mathematics to understanding music, although the art necessarily depends on them.  The extent in which Dryden reformed our poetry, is most readily proved by an appeal to the ear; and Dr. Johnson has forcibly stated, that “he knew how to choose the flowing and the sonorous words; to vary the pauses and adjust the accents; to diversify the cadence, and yet preserve the smoothness of the metre.”  To vary the English hexameter, he established the use of the triplet and Alexandrine.  Though ridiculed by Swift, who vainly thought he had exploded them for ever, their force is still acknowledged in classical poetry.