[From Points of View, Vintage Classics, 2000 [1958], “Prose and Dr Tillotson”, p. 103:]

No one has written better English than these three distinguished authors, Dryden, Swift and Addison…

[From Traveller’s Library, Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1933, pp. 10-11:]

I think if I were starting over again I should devote myself to the study of Dryden. It was he who first gave the English prose its form. He released the language from the ponderous eloquence that had overwhelmed it and made it the lovely, supple instrument which at its best it is. He had the straightforwardness and the limpidity of Swift; but a melodious variety and a conversational ease that Swift never attained. He had a happy charm of which the Dean was incapable. Swift’s English flows like the water in a canal shaded by neat poplars, but Dryden’s like a great river under the open sky. I know none more delightful. Of course a living language changes and it would absurd for anyone to try to write like Dryden now. But his excellencies are still the excellencies of English prose.

[From The Summing Up, The Literary Guild of America, 1938; x, 28-29; xii, 35:]

I think if I had my time over again I would give to the prose of Dryden the close study I gave to that of Swift. I did not come across it till I had lost the inclination to take so much pains. The prose of Dryden is delicious. It has not the perfection of Swift nor the easy elegance of Addison, but it has a springtime gaiety, a conversational ease, a blithe spontaneousness that are enchanting. Dryden was a very good poet, but it is not the general opinion that he had a lyrical quality; it is strange that it is just this that sings in his softly sparkling prose. Prose had never been written in England like that before; It has seldom been written like that since. Dryden flourished at a happy moment. He had in his bones the sonorous periods and the baroque massiveness of Jacobean language and under the influence of the nimble and well-bred felicity that he learnt from the French he turned it into an instrument that was fit not only for solemn themes but also to express the light thought of the passing moment. He was the first of the rococo artists. If Swift reminds you of a French canal Dryden recalls an English river winding its cheerful way round hills, through quietly busy towns and by nestling villages, pausing now in a noble reach and then running powerfully through a woodland country. It Is alive, varied, windswept; and it has the pleasant open-air smell of England.

[…]

[Dr Johnson] knew good English when he saw it. No critic has praised Dryden's prose more aptly. He said of him that he appeared to have no art other than that of expressing with clearness what he thought with vigour.