“My household curse, my lawful plague, the spy
  Of Jove’s designs, his other squinting eye.”

The ambrosial feast of Olympus concludes like a tavern revel:—­

  “Drunken at last, and drowsy, they depart
  Each to his house, adored with laboured art
  Of the lame architect.  The thundering God,
  Even he, withdrew to rest, and had his load;
  His swimming head to needful sleep applied,
  And Juno lay unheeded by his side.”

There is reason indeed to think, that, after the Revolution, Dryden’s taste was improved in this, as in some other respects.  In his translation of Juvenal, for example, the satire against women, coarse as it is, is considerably refined and softened from the grossness of the Latin poet; who has, however, been lately favoured by a still more elegant, and (excepting perhaps one or two passages) an equally spirited translation, by Mr. Gifford of London.  Yet, admitting this apology for Dryden as fully as we dare, from the numerous specimens of indelicacy even in his later translations, we are induced to judge it fortunate that Homer was reserved for a poet who had not known the age of Charles II.; and whose inaccuracies and injudicious decorations may be pardoned, even by the scholar, when he considers the probability, that Dryden might have slipped into the opposite extreme, by converting rude simplicity into indecency or vulgarity.  The AEneid, on the other hand, if it restrained Dryden’s poetry to a correct, steady, and even flight, if it damped his energy by its regularity, and fettered his excursive imagination by the sobriety of its decorum, had the corresponding advantage of holding forth to the translator no temptation to licence, and no apology for negligence.  Where the fervency of genius is required, Dryden has usually equalled his original; where peculiar elegance and exact propriety is demanded, his version may be sometimes found flat and inaccurate, but the mastering spirit of Virgil prevails, and it is never disgusting or indelicate.  Of all the classical translations we can boast, none is so acceptable to the class of readers, to whom the learned languages are a clasped book and a sealed fountain.  And surely it is no moderate praise to say, that a work is universally pleasing to those for whose use it is principally intended, and to whom only it is absolutely indispensable.

The prose of Dryden may rank with the best in the English language.  It is no less of his own formation than his versification, is equally spirited, and equally harmonious.  Without the lengthened and pedantic sentences of Clarendon, it is dignified where dignity is becoming, and is lively without the accumulation of strained and absurd allusions and metaphors, which were unfortunately mistaken for wit by many of the author’s contemporaries.  Dryden has been accused of unnecessarily larding his style with Gallicisms.  It must be owned that, to comply probably with the humour of Charles, or from an affectation of the fashionable