"Not one bolt Shall err from Thebes, but more be called for, more, _New-moulded thunder of a larger size!_"
This play was written in conjunction with Lee, of whom Dryden relates[25] that, when some one said to him, "It is easy enough to write like a madman," he replied, "No, it is hard to write like a madman, but easy enough to write like a fool,"--perhaps the most compendious lecture on poetry ever delivered. The splendid bit of eloquence, which has so much the sheet-iron clang of impeachment thunder (I hope that Dryden is not in the Library of Congress!) is perhaps Lee's. The following passage almost certainly is his:--
"Sure 'tis the end of all things! Fate has torn The lock of Time off, and his head is now The ghastly ball of round Eternity!"
But the next, in which the soul is likened to the pocket of an indignant housemaid charged with theft, is wholly in Dryden's manner:--
"No; I dare challenge heaven to turn me outward, And shake my soul quite empty in your sight."
In the same style, he makes his Don Sebastian (1690) say that he is as much astonished as "drowsy mortals" at the last trump,
"When, called in haste, _they fumble for their limbs_,"
and propose to take upon himself the whole of a crime shared with another by asking Heaven _to charge the bill_ on him. And in "King Arthur," written ten years after the Preface from which I have quoted his confession about Dubartas, we have a passage precisely of the kind he condemned:--
"Ah for the many souls as but this morn Were clothed with flesh and warmed with vital blood, But naked now, or _shirted_ but with air."
Dryden too often violated his own admirable rule, that "an author is not to write all he can, but only all he ought."[26] In his worst images, however, there is often a vividness that half excuses them. But it is a grotesque vividness, as from the flare of a bonfire. They do not flash into sudden lustre, as in the great poets, where the imaginations of poet and reader leap toward each other and meet half-way.