Dryden dealt in the same incomprehensible way with Milton as with Shakspeare. In that famous falsifying epigram, the poet of _Paradise Lost_ is greater than Homer and Virgil rolled into one; and his name is frequently mentioned with seeming reverence in those off-hand Prefaces. Yet even in such critical passages there is no just approbation of his genius. Thus, in the preface to "The State of Innocence," he says--"The original being undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced." _This age! One of the greatest_, &c.! The age of Charles II.! And what has become of the _other_ great, noble, and sublime, poems which that age has produced? These wavering words were written the year Milton died; and Dennis, or some one else, tells us that, twenty years after, Dryden confessed that he had not then been sensible of half the extent of his excellence. But what, twenty years after, does he say?--
"As for Mr Milton, whom we all admire with so much justice, his subject is not of an heroic poem, properly so called. His design is the losing of our happiness; his event is not prosperous like that of all other epic works; his heavenly machines are many, and human persons are but two. But I will not take Mr Rhymer's work out of his hands; he has promised the world a critique on that author, wherein, though he will not allow his poem for heroic, I hope he will grant us that his thoughts are elevated, his words sounding, and that no man has so happily copied the manner of Homer, or so copiously translated his Grecisms, and the Latin elegancies of Virgil. It is true he runs into a flat of thoughts, sometimes for a hundred lines together, but it is when he has got into a track of Scripture. His antiquated words were his choice, not his necessity; for therein he imitated Spenser, as Spenser did Chaucer. And though, perhaps, the love of their master may have transported both too far in the frequent use of them, yet, in my opinion, obsolete words may there be laudably revived, when either they are more sounding or more significant than those in practice; and when their obscurity is taken away, by joining other words to them which clear the sense, according to the rule of Horace, for the admission of new words. But, in both cases, a moderation is to be observed in the use of them: for unnecessary coinage, as well as unnecessary revival, runs into affectation; a fault to be avoided on either hand. Neither will I justify Milton for his blank verse, though I may excuse him, by the example of Hannibal Caro, and other Italians, who have used it; for whatever causes he alleges for the abolishing of rhyme, (which I have not now the leisure to examine,) his own particular reason is plainly this, that rhyme was not his talent; he had neither the ease of doing it, nor the graces of it; which is manifest in his 'Juvenilia,' or verses written in his youth, where his rhyme is always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost every man a rhymer though not a poet."