mensely popular. The next year Dryden followed it with a second blow at Shaftesbury in The Medal. Then he turned aside in MacFlecknoe to attack a rival poet, Shadwell, who had been employed by the Whigs to reply to The Medal. In this year, also, Dryden extended his range into the field of religious controversy, with Religio Laici ("The Religion of a Layman"), a very temperate statement of a layman's faith in the Church of England. Three years after this confession of faith Dryden became a Roman Catholic, and in 1687 he published a political defence of the Church of Rome called The Hind and the Panther.

Dryden's Later Life. This political and religious writing brought Dryden distinction and a modest income. In 1670 he was made Historiographer Royal and Poet Laureate, with a salary of two hundred pounds a year. Later he received a pension of a hundred pounds a year, and in 1683 he was made Collector of the Port of London. All these honors and emoluments he lost in consequence of the Revolution of 1688. He was obliged to betake himself again to the stage as the most lucrative department of literature, to accept aid from private patrons in place of the royal bounty, to contract with Tonson, the book-seller, to produce and deliver ten thousand lines of verse for three hundred guineas, and to undertake various jobs of translation for the same employer. In short, in his old age Dryden was compelled to attempt almost all the methods by which a literary man could live. Nevertheless, his production in these years added much to his fame. Whatever may be thought of his poetical qualities, at least his literary energy lasted well. His work of this time includes his translation of Virgil, and his renderings into modern English verse of stories from Chaucer, among which the Palamon and Arcite is best known. These twice-told tales were published in 1700, in a volume of Fables, which contained also his best lyrical poem, "Alexander's Feast."

Dryden as a Literary Dictator.-During these last years Dryden lived constantly in London. The coffee-house of that day was the chief place of resort for literary men, much as the tavern had been in Elizabeth's time. At Will's or Button's the wits gathered for exchange of courtesies or for

combat; there their admirers or patrons met them; and thence went forth the criticism that made or marred the fortunes of rising men. Dryden frequented Will's, where he was as much a monarch as Ben Jonson had been at the Mermaid, or as, a century later, Samuel Johnson was at the Literary Club. At Will's he is pictured for us by tradition, sitting in his arm-chair on the balcony in summer, and before the fire in winter, burly of figure, shrewd and kindly of feature, altogether a sound, stalwart, wholesome man. It was to Will's that young Pope was brought to gaze on greatness and be inspired; and it was there also that Dryden dismissed his youthful relative with the pitying words, "Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet." In an age when the form of poetry was all but rigidly fixed, the acknowledged master of that form could be as much of a despot as he chose.

Dryden's Character. The life of Dryden seems at first sight to have been an unheroic, and in some ways an ignoble one. His changes of side from Cromwellian to Royalist, from Protestant to Romanist, stand out in unfavorable contrast to the devotion of men like More and Milton. His concern with the details of party strife is sharply opposed to the ideal morality of Sidney and of Spenser. His indifference in matters of belief seems tame and watery after the flame-like faith of Bunyan. But we must not let such comparisons carry us too far. Dryden illustrates the change from the virtues of Elizabethan chivalry and Cromwellian fanaticism, to the sober commonplace ethics of an era of reason. His tendency to shift his influence to the winning side was in part the patriotism of a sensible man who argued that it mattered comparatively little whether the country was ruled by Protector or King, whether it worshipped according to Anglican or Catholic rites, so long as it was at peace under institutions which were strong enough to curb individual ambition.

Dryden's Poetry. There is also a temptation to extend the first harsh judgment of Dryden's life, to his poetry. It, too, lacks elevation, and the subject-matter of much of it, the affairs of church and state, is remote from what we regard as poetic. But in his writing also Dryden responded

to the demands of his age. In the days of Charles II. men were weary of revolution. To them the kingship and the church, Anglican or Catholic, were interesting and beautiful because they represented, for the mass of the nation, an ideal of order and restraint; just as to an earlier time the boundless self-assertion of Faustus and Tamburlaine had been interesting and beautiful for the opposite reason.

Not only the substance, but the form of Dryden's verse has been a ground for detraction from his fame. Few poets of the modern world have maintained such strict uniformity. With the exception of the lyrics in his dramas, of several odes, and of two early poems in the heroic stanza, Dryden cultivated steadily the heroic couplet. This kind of verse appealed with irresistible force to an age which desired, above all, uniformity and regularity. When at the close of Religio Laici Dryden says,

"And this unpolished rugged verse I chose
As fittest for discourse, and nearest prose,"

his second line may be taken as referring to his poems in general. In them we look for the virtues of prose rather than for those of poetry; for the useful qualities, exactness, clearness, energy, rather than for imagination and suggestion; for epigram in place of metaphor; for boldly marked rhythm instead of elusive harmony.

Dryden as Prose Writer.-Dryden was not only the foremost poet, but also the most copious dramatist, and the chief critic, of his time. The age of the Restoration was a period of criticism rather than of creation, a time when men were interested in testing the product of earlier ages, and in winnowing the good from the bad. This interest accounts for the fact that to many of his works Dryden prefixed one or more critical essays in the form of dedications or prefaces, in which he discussed the leading artistic questions of the day. Among these essays the most important are "An Essay of Dramatic Poesy" (1668), the "Essay on Satire" (1693), and the Preface to the "Fables" (1700). In these essays Dryden set a model for simple, practical

prose style. By his adoption of the modern sentence in place of the unit of great and unequal length used by Raleigh and Milton, he carried out in prose a change exactly analogous to that accomplished in verse by his adoption of the couplet in place of the stanza. In short, he did for prose what he did for poetry; he reduced the unit of treatment to manageable size; he set an example of correctness; and finally, by his authority, he did much to establish such a standard of taste as should render henceforth impossible the eccentricities to which the preceding century had been indulgent.

III. SAMUEL BUTLER (1612–1680), SAMUEL PEPYS (16331703), AND THE DRAMATISTS

Butler's "Hudibras."-Like Elizabeth and Charles I., Charles II. held in some sort a literary court, of which lyric poetry and satire were the language. The courtly poets of the time, the successors of the Cavaliers, caught from the king an attitude of moral indifference. In their circles the most popular work was a fierce and scurrilous satire upon the Puritan, Samuel Butler's Hudibras. Butler was doubtless meditating his attack during the years of the Protectorate, when he was acting as private secretary to a Puritan nobleman. Three years after the accession of Charles II., he published three cantos of a poem in which the vices of the Puritan period, hypocrisy, sanctimoniousness, and intolerance, are presented with savage exaggeration in the person of Sir Hudibras. This knight, with his squire Ralpho, passes through a series of quixotic adventures, which are continued in further instalments of the poem, published in 1664 and 1678.

Pepys's Diary. While Butler and the Cavalier poets were embodying the mood of the aristocracy, Bunyan was writing his Pilgrim's Progress for the serious lower class, where Puritanism still survived. Between these extremes, however, we have an order that was to make its presence felt increasingly from this time on, the upper-middle class; and as it