Its antithesis made it an incomparable
vehicle for satire, its rapidity for narrative. Outside its limits we
have hardly any even passable satirical verse; within them there are
half-a-dozen works of the highest excellence in this kind. And if we
except Chaucer, there is no one else in the whole range of English
poetry who have the narrative gift so completely as the classic poets.
Bentleys will always exist who will assure us with civility that Pope's
_Homer_, though "very pretty," bears little relation to the Greek, and
that Dryden's _Vergil_, though vigorous and virile, is a poor
representation of its original. The truth remains that for a reader who
knows no ancient languages either of those translations will probably
give a better idea of their originals than any other rendering in
English that we possess. The foundation of their method has been
vindicated in the best modern translations from the Greek.
(2)
The term "eighteenth century" in the vocabulary of the literary
historian is commonly as vaguely used as the term Elizabethan. It
borrows as much as forty years from the seventeenth and gives away ten
to the nineteenth. The whole of the work of Dryden, whom we must count
as the first of the "classic" school, was accomplished before
chronologically it had begun.
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