“tamen me
  Cum magnis vixisse, invita falebitur usque
  Invidia.”

It followed, that Dryden could not struggle against the tide into which he was launched, and that, although it might be expected from his talents that he should ameliorate the reigning taste, or at least carry those compositions which it approved to their utmost pitch of perfection, it could not be hoped that he should altogether escape being perverted by it, or should soar so superior to all its prejudices as at once to admit the super-eminent excellence of a poem which ran counter to these in so many particulars.  The versification of Milton, according to the taste of the times, was ignoble, from its supposed facility.  Dryden was, we have seen, so much possessed with this prejudice, as to pronounce blank verse unfit even for a fugitive paper of verses.  Even in his later and riper judgment he affirms, that, whatever pretext Milton might allege for the use of blank verse, “his own particular reason is plainly this,—­that rhyme was not his talent; he had neither the ease of doing it, nor the graces of it:  which is manifest in his ‘Juvenilia,’ or verses written in his youth, where his rhyme is always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost every man a rhymer, though not a poet.”

The want of the dignity of rhyme was therefore, according to his idea, an essential deficiency in the “Paradise Lost.”  According to Aubrey, Dryden communicated to Milton his intention of adding this grace to his poem; to which the venerable bard gave a contemptuous consent, in these words:  “Ay, you may tag my verses if you will.”  Perhaps few have read so far into the “State of Innocence” as to discover that Dryden did not use this licence to the uttermost and that several of the scenes are not tagg’d with rhyme.

Dryden at this period engaged in a research recommended to him by “a noble wit of Scotland,” as he terms Sir George Mackenzie, the issue of which, in his apprehension, pointed out further room for improving upon the epic of Milton.  This was an inquiry into the “turn of words and thoughts” requisite in heroic poetry.  These “turns,” according to the definition and examples which Dryden has given us, differ from the points of wit, and quirks of epigram, common in the metaphysical poets, and consist in a happy, and at the same time a natural, recurrence of the same form of expression, melodiously varied.  Having failed in his search after these beauties in Cowley, the darling of his youth, “I consulted,” says Dryden, “a greater genius (without offence to the manes of that noble author), I mean—­Milton; but as he endeavours everywhere to express Homer, whose age had not arrived to that fineness, I found in him a true sublimity, lofty thoughts, which were clothed with admirable Grecisms, and ancient words, which he had been digging from the mines of