The Annus Mirabilis is a tedious performance; it is a tissue of far-fetched, heavy, lumbering conceits, and in the worst style of what has been denominated metaphysical poetry.  His Odes in general are of the same stamp; they are the hard-strained offspring of a meagre, meretricious fancy.  The famous Ode on St. Cecilia deserves its reputation; for, as piece of poetical mechanism to be set to music, or recited in alternate strophe and antistrophe, with classical allusions, and flowing verse, nothing can be better.  It is equally fit to be said or sung; it is not equally good to read.  It is lyrical, without being epic or dramatic.  For instance, the description of Bacchus,

      “The jolly god in triumph comes,
      Sound the trumpets, beat the drums;
      Flush’d with a purple grace,
      He shews his honest face”—­

does not answer, as it ought, to our idea of the God, returning from the conquest of India, with satyrs and wild beasts, that he had tamed, following in his train; crowned with vine leaves, and riding in a chariot drawn by leopards—­such as we have seen him painted by Titian or Rubens!  Lyrical poetry, of all others, bears the nearest resemblance to painting:  it deals in hieroglyphics and passing figures, which depend for effect, not on the working out, but on the selection.  It is the dance and pantomime of poetry.  In variety and rapidity of movement, the Alexander’s Feast has all that can be required in this respect; it only wants loftiness and truth of character.

Dryden’s plays are better than Pope could have written; for though he does not go out of himself by the force of imagination, he goes out of himself by the force of common-places and rhetorical dialogue.  On the other hand, they are not so good as Shakspeare’s; but he has left the best character of Shakspeare that has ever been written. [5]

His alterations from Chaucer and Boccaccio shew a greater knowledge of the taste of his readers and power of pleasing them, than acquaintance with the genius of his authors.  He ekes out the lameness of the verse in the former, and breaks the force of the passion in both.  The Tancred and Sigismunda is the only general exception, in which, I think, he has fully retained, if not improved upon, the impassioned declamation of the original.  The Honoria has none of the bewildered, dreary, preternatural effect of Boccaccio’s story.  Nor has the Flower and the Leaf any thing of the enchanting simplicity and concentrated feeling of Chaucer’s romantic fiction.  Dryden, however, sometimes seemed to indulge himself as well as his readers, as in keeping entire that noble line in Palamon’s address to Venus: 

      “Thou gladder of the mount of Cithaeron!”

His Tales have been, upon the whole, the most popular of his works; and I should think that a translation of some of the other serious tales in Boccaccio and Chaucer, as that of Isabella, the Falcon, of Constance, the Prioress’s Tale, and others, if executed with taste and spirit, could not fail to succeed in the present day.