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R.EUBEN A. BROWER
orders of experience and value. At times the "order of charity" seemS
to be taken as the pattern that the best works will certainly embody:
they are best because they do
in
fact embody it. The strain
is
less
evident when the model is most clearly regarded as defining a historical
context, as in the chapters on Dryden and Swift, both of whom were
schooled in seventeenth-century religious thought. They were also
nearer in time and nearer in their interests to Pascal and his con–
temporaries than most of the writers treated in
To the Palace of
Wisdom.
It would be impossible
to
read
Religio Laici
and
A Tale of a
Tub
without reference to rival religious, moral, and intellectual tradi–
tions of the seventeenth century. Dryden is of all English poets the
most obviously dialectical, and Mr. Price analyzes clearly and well
the conflicts he presents and the resolution he reaches. He is a poet of
"Augustan balance," of faith in "the order of mind," who arrives at a
"quiet" compromise between "private Reason" and the authority of
the Roman church. But as we read more sentences in which Pascal's
"orders" are used as classifying devices, we begin to feel how un–
Pascalian Dryden was. For example: "And if the Catholic Church
shows us the order of the flesh usurping charity through rational cun-
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