Palamon and Arcite | Page 6

straightforward sentences, musically arranged in well-ordered periods. This was the vehicle in which he introduced literary criticism, and he continued it in prefaces to most of his plays and subsequent poems.
At this same time he not only discussed the drama, but indulged in its production; and for a score of years from the early sixties he devoted himself almost exclusively to the stage. It was the most popular and the most profitable mode of expression. He began with a comedy, the _Wild Gallant_, in 1662. It was a poor play and was incontinently condemned. He then developed a curious series of plays, of which the _Indian Emperor_, the Conquest of Grenada_, and _Aurengzebe are examples. He professedly followed French methods, observed the unities, and used the rhymed couplet. But they were not French; they were a nondescript incubation by Dryden himself, and were called heroic dramas. They were ridiculed in the Duke of Buckingham's farce, the Rehearsal; but their popularity was scarcely impaired.
In 1678 Dryden showed a return to common sense and to blank verse in All for Love, and, though it necessarily suffers from its comparison with the original, Shakspere's Antony and Cleopatra, it nevertheless possesses enough dramatic power to make it his best play. He had preceded this by rewriting Milton's Paradise Lost as an opera, in the State of Innocence, and he followed it in 1681 with perhaps his best comedy, the Spanish Friar.
Dryden was now far the most prominent man of letters in London. In 1670 he had been appointed Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal with a salary of two hundred pounds and a butt of sack. His connection with the stage had been a decided financial success, and he was in receipt of an income of about seven hundred pounds, which at modern values would approximate $15,000. His house on Gerard Street, Soho, backed upon Leicester's gardens. There he spent his days in writing, but the evening found him at Will's Coffee House. In this famous resort of the wits and writers of the day the literary dictator of his generation held his court. Seated in his particular armchair, on the balcony in summer, by the fire in winter, he discoursed on topics current in the literary world, pronounced his verdict of praise or condemnation, and woe to the unfortunate upon whom the latter fell. A week before Christmas, in 1679, as Dryden was walking home from an evening of this sort, he was waylaid by masked ruffians in Rose Alley and was beaten to unconsciousness. The attack was supposed to have been incited by Rochester, who smarted under an anonymous satire mistakenly attributed to Dryden.
Though wrongly accused of this particular satire, it was not long before he did turn his attention to that department of verse. It was the time of the restless dissent of the Whigs from the succession of James; and in 1681 Dryden launched Absalom and Achitophel, one of the most brilliant satires in our language, against Shaftesbury and his adherents, who were inciting Monmouth to revolt. He found an admirable parallel in Absalom's revolt from his father David, and he sustained the comparison. The Scriptural names concealed living characters, and Shaftesbury masked as Achitophel, the evil counsellor, and Buckingham as Zimri. Feeling ran high. Shaftesbury was arrested and tried, but was acquitted, and his friends struck off a medal in commemoration. In 1682, therefore, came Dryden's second satire, the Medal. These two political satires called forth in the fevered state of the times a host of replies, two of the most scurrilous from the pens of Shadwell and Settle. Of these two poor Whigs the first was drawn and quartered in MacFlecnoe, while the two were yoked for castigation in Part II. of Absalom and Achitophel, which appeared in 1682. Dryden possessed pre?minently the faculty for satire. He did not devote himself exclusively to an abstract treatment, nor, like Pope, to bitter personalities; he blends and combines the two methods most effectively. Every one of his brisk, nervous couplets carries a sting; every distich is a sound box on the ear.
We reach now a most interesting period in Dryden's career and one that has provoked much controversy. In 1681 he published a long argument in verse, entitled Religio Laici (the Religion of a Layman), in which he states his religious faith and his adherence to the Church of England. When King James came to the throne in 1685 he made an immediate attempt to establish the Roman Catholic faith; and now Dryden, too, turned Romanist, and in 1687 supported his new faith in the long poetical allegory, the Hind and the Panther. Of course his enemies cried turncoat; and it certainly looked like it. Dryden was well into manhood before the religious instinct stirred in him, and then, once waking,