Note 485 — Chapter IV · DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
Reading edition
He has practically given us nothing but a slight apology for sacred verse (common in his time and natural from the author of the Davideis); with a slighter seasoning of the also familiar defence of poetry from being mere “lying,” in the Preface to the folio edition of his Poems; some still slighter remarks on Comedy in that to Cutter of Coleman Street; and hardly more than a glance at literary education in his Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy. In this last we may feel a sort of gust of the same spirit which appears in his disciple Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (v. infra).