They represent also Dryden himself with a riper mind
covering a larger field of thought, and showing abundantly the
strength and independence of his own critical judgment, while he
cites familiarly and frequently the critics, little remembered and
less cared for now, who then passed for the arbiters of taste.
If English literature were really taught in schools, and the eldest
boys had received training that brought them in their last school-
year to a knowledge of the changes of intellectual fashion that set
their outward mark upon successive periods, there is no prose
writing of Dryden that could be used by a teacher more instructively
than these Discourses on Satire and on Epic Poetry. They illustrate
abundantly both Dryden and his time, and give continuous occasion
for discussion of first principles, whether in disagreement or
agreement with the text. Dryden was on his own ground as a critic
of satire; and the ideal of an epic that the times, and perhaps also
the different bent of his own genius, would not allow him to work
out, at least finds such expression as might be expected from a man
who had high aspirations, and whose place, in times unfavourable to
his highest aims, was still among the master-poets of the world.
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