and we can seldom read far in “Hudibras” without feeling more fatigue than pleasure.  His fancy is employed with the profusion of a spendthrift, by whose eternal round of banqueting his guests are at length rather wearied out than regaled.  Dryden was destined to correct this, among other errors of his age; to show the difference between burlesque and satire; and to teach his successors in that species of assault, rather to thrust than to flourish with their weapon.  For this purpose he avoided the unvaried and unrelieved style of grotesque description and combination, which had been fashionable since the satires of Cleveland and Butler.  To render the objects of his satire hateful and contemptible, he thought it necessary to preserve the lighter shades of character, if not for the purpose of softening the portrait, at least for that of preserving the likeness.  While Dryden seized, and dwelt upon, and aggravated, all the evil features of his subject, he carefully retained just as much of its laudable traits as preserved him from the charge of want of candour, and fixed down the resemblance upon the party.  And thus, instead of unmeaning caricatures, he presents portraits which cannot be mistaken, however unfavourable ideas they may convey of the originals.  The character of Shaftesbury, both as Achitophel, and as drawn in “The Medal,” bears peculiar witness to this assertion.  While other court poets endeavoured to turn the obnoxious statesman into ridicule on account of his personal infirmities and extravagances, Dryden boldly confers upon him all the praise for talent and for genius that his friends could have claimed, and trusts to the force of his satirical expression for working up even these admirable attributes with such a mixture of evil propensities and dangerous qualities, that the whole character shall appear dreadful, and even hateful, but not contemptible.  But where a character of less note, a Shadwell or a Settle, crossed his path, the satirist did not lay himself under these restraints, but wrote in the language of bitter irony and immeasurable contempt:  even then, however, we are less called on to admire the wit of the author, than the force and energy of his poetical philippic.  These are the verses which are made by indignation, and, no more than theatrical scenes of real passion, admit of refined and protracted turns of wit, or even the lighter sallies of humour.  These last ornaments are proper in that Horatian satire, which rather ridicules the follies of the age, than stigmatises the vices of individuals; but in this style Dryden has made few essays.  He entered the field as champion of a political party, or as defender of his own reputation; discriminated his antagonists, and applied the scourge with all the vehemence of Juvenal.  As he has himself said of that satirist, “his provocations were great, and he has revenged them tragically.”  This is the more worthy of notice, as, in the Essay on Satire, Dryden gives a decided preference to those