ary man, no support and no encouragement, except upon the royalist and Roman Catholic side, and Dryden, being primarily a man of letters, went where he could "get work," where he could find a reading public and live by its patronage.

Periods of his works. Dryden passed through various phases, or periods, in his literary work. He began, with poetry which was lyric and "occasional," that is to say, written for the celebration of specific times and events. A large share of this poetry is rubbish to us.

Next, Dryden turned to play writing. The theaters had been closed at the beginning of the Civil War between Charles I and the Cromwellians, at which time ended the greatest period. in the history of drama. At the Restoration, the theaters were opened again by Charles II, and a new dramatic school arose. Now, in his second period, to meet the public demand, Dryden for fourteen years gave himself to writing for the theater. Only three of his plays were particularly successful: The Indian Emperor, All for Love, and The Spanish Friar. All for Love has the same subject matter as Antony and Cleopatra, and is the only one of his dramas which, Dryden said, he wrote to please himself.

During the third period of his work there came from his pen a series of poems which were satirical and didactic. The chief among them was a satire, the topmost in quality of all the satires in English verse. It is called Absalom and Achitophel. English verse is full of powerful passages of terrific satire, most of it political, much of it too lengthy to be effective in modern times, and a great deal of it downright brutal. Of many British satirists Coleridge's lines may well be employed,

Swans sing before they die: 'twere no bad thing
Did certain persons die before they sing.

But Dryden's fierce and powerful political satire is eminently worth the reading. He saw a close likeness between some of the politicians of that time and those of the reign of David, King of Israel, during the time of the rebellion of David's son, Absolom; and he was keen enough to see that a Scripture parallel would, most readily of all things, appeal to the people of his period, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic.

During this third phase of his work Dryden wrote also, in 1682, a poem entitled Religio Laici, which was practically a brief for the Church of England. Then in 1687 he wrote one entitled The Hind and the Panther, which was an argument between a milk-white Hind, intended to be thought typical of Catholicism, and a Panther, whose spots were meant to indicate the many heresies and divisions of Protestantism. The Hind and the Panther has been called by even a hostile Protestant a model of melodious reasoning." As a matter of fact the two poems are not so inconsistent as they seem to one who observes superficially, for in the earlier poem, Religio Laici, Dryden had already urged the unity of faith and obedience to authority which is characteristic of the Roman Catholic Church, as the following lines will attest,

after hearing what the Church can say,
If still our reason runs another way,
That private Reason 'tis more just to curb
Than by disputes the public peace disturb.
For points obscure are of small use to learn:
But common quiet is mankind's concern.

Upon It has

In 1687, too, was published a Song for St. Cecilia's Day. this poem Dryden's fame as a lyrical singer rests secure. been praised by the most exacting of critics, including that great militant thinker of Germany, Lessing. Together with Alexander's Feast (1697), it can be read with as much of ease and

pleasure to-day as if it had been written by one of the most popular of our contemporaries, a statement which cannot be made of many of the products of the seventeenth century. It should be said also, that within the plays of Dryden are scattered some very exquisite lyrics.

His fourth period came during the last ten years of his life (he died in 1700). Now Dryden again turned occasionally to play writing; but none of the plays written at this time is very much worth the attention of the general reader. It was during this last, or fourth period, of his labors, that he wrote the famous Fables and the chief of his translations. The Fables also he called "translations." They were made from Ovid, Homer, Boccaccio, and Chaucer. It is better to call them paraphrases. The best of his real translations are: (1) those from the works of Juvenal, the Roman satirist, to whom Dryden was akin in spirit, and (2) the Art of Painting of Du Fresnoy, the Frenchman.

Criticism. Most of the critical writing of Dryden was in the form of prefaces to his plays, and hence was spread over several of these four periods of his work. The best of his critical writings is what is known as the Essay on Dramatic Poesy. It is one of the ablest treatments of the subject which its title suggests, in any language.

Dryden's style. It will now be seen that Dryden was a most prolific, untiring, and versatile genius. There are times when, as one traverses the pathways of his work, one is inclined, from being impressed with the variety and vastness of what he was accomplishing, to cry with Hamlet, "Rest, rest, perturb'd spirit." No greater gift was presented to the English-writing race by Dryden than the clearness, plainness, and homeliness of his prose sentences. His sentences are excellent, as compared with those of any other writer of either the

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seventeenth or the eighteenth centuries, in spite of his tendency to elongate them "joint by joint as fresh thoughts recur" to him. This" jointing " is always a tendency upon the part of the writer who thinks while he writes.

About the only regret we can have in connection with Dryden is that he did not carry out the project of an Arthurian epic, which he as well as Milton and Spenser had contemplated.

In the great bulk of the prose literature of the world, it is a refreshment to turn to the sturdy prose pages of John Dryden, though he is not a pastime for the frivolous and indolent.

IV. LATER CONTEMPORARIES OF MILTON AND DRYDEN

Scientists. It is not until one has come to the seventeenth century that he can speak of a literature of science in Great Britain. Bacon had proposed for science what we now call the inductive method, that is, the examination of actual details of fact and the drawing of conclusions from that examination and from it alone. In 1662 came the founding of the Royal Society of London; and one man's name became immortal at once, for he was the first to state the theory of gravitation as the formula covering the relation of the parts of the universe to each other, or, we may say, of the " system of the universe." That man was Sir Isaac Newton. Under the stimulus of the Royal Society many sciences came to be formally and systematically studied for the first time. Among these sciences were chemistry, mineralogy, zoology, botany, and medicine, and even astrology passed over into the science of astronomy. Newton had presented his Theory of Light to the Royal Society in 1671. In 1687, the Principia, which contained the statement of the theory of gravitation, inaugurated a revolution in human thought beside

which the English political Revolution of 1688 is insignificance itself.

Philosophers. In political philosophy two writers were prominent during this century, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Thomas Hobbes published in 1651 a treatise under the heavy title of Leviathan, in which he maintained two things: first, that the origin of all power is in the people, and, second, that the legitimate purpose of all exercise of power is the common good of all the people. None could say after this that kings ruled by right conferred upon them by divine authority alone, though Hobbes denied the value of the modern doctrine of "recall," for he declared that power once delegated by the people to rulers could not be taken away even by the people who had delegated it.

John Locke, following in the footsteps of Bacon, published in 1690 a book entitled an Essay on Human Understanding. In this book Locke elaborated the idea that all real knowledge is derived from experience. He said that the human mind is, at the birth of the individual, like a clean sheet of white paper; that upon this sheet there come to be written, as it were, the experiences we have through sensation and our reflection upon sensation, and that the "human understanding" is composed of an infinite number of complex ideas which have grown from this reflection upon sensation. He failed, however, to tell anything of very great value about this power of reflection which we possess. In this same year, 1690, Locke published another book, this time upon Civil Government. This book, it will be seen, was published but two years after the Revolution which occurred under the leadership of William of Orange, while Hobbes's books had come out during the rule of Cromwell. Each book, then, was a timely one, and each justified the reigning practice of its day. Locke's was a decided advance upon that of Hobbes,