of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.’
His own behaviour was in strict conformity with this belief. When his play, Irene, failed, ‘this great man,’ says Boswell, ‘instead of peevishly complaining of the bad taste of the town, submitted to its decision without a murmur. He had, indeed, upon all occasions, a great deference for the general opinion: “A man (said he) who writes a book thinks himself wiser or wittier than the rest of mankind; he supposes that he can instruct or amuse them, and the publick to whom he appeals, must, after all, be the judges of his pretensions.”’
I do not know where else to find an author in whom modesty and self-respect are so perfectly and equably blended. He is as he describes himself in the Prologue to Irene:
Studious to please, yet not asham’d to fail.
He pictures Milton suffering neglect, ‘calm and confident, little disappointed, not at all dejected;’ and where he finds evidence of irritation and rage in authors at the ill reception of their works it is one of the few things of which he is contemptuous. There are two of the English poets whom Johnson, in casual fashion, calls ‘poor’—‘poor Dryden’ and ‘poor Lyttelton.’ There would be nothing remarkable in the phrase ‘poor Dryden’ if Carlyle had used it—or indeed in ‘poor Dante,’ ‘poor Homer,’ or ‘poor Isaiah.’ A certain exercise of contempt was necessary to Carlyle’s mind, to keep it in health. But ‘poor Dryden’ from Johnson is remarkable. The epithet is provoked by Dryden’s agitation of mind when Settle’s Empress of Morocco met with public applause. ‘Dryden could not now repress those emo-
