Excerpt: ...and incidents. Oldham, who flourished in Drydens time, and enjoyed his friendship, wrote his satires in the crabbed tone of Cleveland and Donne. Dryden, in the copy of verses dedicated to his memory, alludes to this deficiency, and seems to admit the subject as an apology: - "O early ripe to thy abundant store What could advancing age have added more It might (what nature never gives the young) Have taught the numbers of thy native tongue. But satire needs not those, and wit will shine Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line." Yet the apology which he admitted for Oldham, Dryden disdained to make use of himself. He did not, as has been said of Horace, wilfully untune his harp when he commenced satirist. Aware that a wound may be given more deeply with a burnished than with a rusty blade, he bestowed upon the versification of his satires the same pains which he had given to his rhyming plays and serious poems. He did not indeed, for that would have been pains misapplied, attempt to smooth his verses into the harmony of those in which he occasionally celebrates female beauty; but he gave them varied tone, correct rhyme, and masculine energy, all which had hitherto been strangers to the English satire. Thus, while Drydens style resembled that of Juvenal rather than Horace, he may claim a superiority, for uniform and undeviating dignity, over the Roman satirist. The age, whose appetite for scandal had been profusely fed by lampoons and libels, now learned, that there was a more elevated kind of satire, in which poignancy might be united with elegance, and energy of thought with harmony of versification. The example seems to have produced a strong effect. No poet, not even Settle (for even the worst artist will improve from beholding a masterpiece), afterwards conceived he had sufficiently accomplished his task by presenting to the public, thoughts, however witty or caustic he might deem them, clothed in the hobbling...