Every reader of Dryden's critical essays must recall his concern with the sound as well as the sense of poetry. In the “Original and Progress of Satire,” for example, he says that “versification and meter are the greatest pleasures of poetry. … When there is anything deficient in numbers, and sound, the reader is uneasy, and dissatisfied; he wants something of his complement; desires somewhat which he finds not.” We can be sure, therefore, that Dryden more than some other poets paid close attention to the fabric of his verse. But it is another question whether the regularity or “correctness” which he aimed at, and which he achieved for his translation of Virgil, is generally admired today. If it is admired, it is admired only as one admires an antique. The taste of most modern poets is not for regularity but for liberty bordering on license. In this respect they are like the late Elizabethans and Jacobeans who wrote—to use the phrase which Dryden took from the French —prose mesurée.