Palamon and Arcite | Page 3

conveniences
appalls. The post left London once a week. A journey to the country
must be made in your own lumbering carriage, or on the snail-slow
stagecoach over miserable roads, beset with highwaymen. The narrow,
ill-lighted streets, even of London, could not be traversed safely at
night; and ladies, borne to routs and levees in their sedan chairs, were
lighted by link-boys, and were carried by stalwart, broad-shouldered
bearers who could wield well the staves in a street fight. Such were the
conditions of life and society which Dryden found in the last fifty years
of the seventeenth century.
Strong as were the contrasts in politics and manners during Dryden's
lifetime, they were paralleled by contrasts in literature no less marked.
Dryden was born in 1631; he died in 1700. In the year of his birth died
John Donne, the father of the Metaphysical bards, or Marinists; in the
year of his death was born James Thomson, who was to give the first
real start to the Romantic movement; while between these two dates
lies the period devoted to the development of French Classicism in
English literature.
At Dryden's birth Ben Jonson was the only one of the great Elizabethan
dramatists still living, and of the lesser stars in the same galaxy,
Chapman, Massinger, Ford, Webster, and Heywood all died during his
boyhood and youth, while Shirley, the last of his line, lingered till 1667.
Of the older writers in prose, Selden alone remained; but as Dryden
grew to manhood, he had at hand, fresh from the printers, the whole
wealth of Commonwealth prose, still somewhat clumsy with Latinism

or tainted with Euphuism, but working steadily toward that simple
strength and graceful fluency with which he was himself to mark the
beginning of modern English prose.
Clarendon, with his magnificently involved style, began his famous
History of the Great Rebellion in 1641. Ten years later Hobbes
published the Leviathan, a sketch of an ideal commonwealth. Baxter,
with his Saints' Everlasting Rest sent a book of religious consolation
into every household. In 1642 Dr. Thomas Browne, with the simplicity
of a child and a quaintness that fascinates, published his _Religio
Medici_; and in 1653 dear old simple-hearted Isaak Walton told us in
his Compleat Angler how to catch, dress, and cook fish. Thomas Fuller,
born a score or more of years before Dryden, in the same town,
Aldwinkle, published in 1642 his Holy and Profane State, a collection
of brief and brisk character sketches, which come nearer modern prose
than anything of that time; while for inspired thought and purity of
diction the Holy Living_, 1650, and the _Holy Dying, 1651, of Jeremy
Taylor, a gifted young divine, rank preëminent in the prose of the
Commonwealth.
But without question the ablest prose of the period came from the pen
of Cromwell's Latin Secretary of State, John Milton. Milton stands in
his own time a peculiarly isolated figure. We never in thought associate
him with his contemporaries. Dryden had become the leading literary
figure in London before Milton wrote his great epic; yet, were it not for
definite chronology, we should scarcely realize that they worked in the
same century. While, therefore, no sketch of seventeenth-century
literature can exclude Milton, he must be taken by himself, without
relation to the development, forms, and spirit of his age, and must be
regarded, rather, as a late-born Elizabethan.
When Dryden was born, Milton at twenty-three was just completing his
seven years at Cambridge, and as the younger poet grew through
boyhood, the elder was enriching English verse with his Juvenilia.
Then came the twenty years of strife. As Secretary of the
Commonwealth, he threw himself into controversial prose. His
Iconoclast_, the _Divorce pamphlets, the Smectymnuus_ tracts, and the

_Areopagitica date from this period. A strong partisan of the
Commonwealth, he was in emphatic disfavor at the Restoration. Blind
and in hiding, deserted by one-time friends, out of sympathy with his
age, he fulfilled the promise of his youth: he turned again to poetry; and
in Paradise Lost_, Paradise Regained_, and Samson Agonistes he has
left us "something so written that the world shall not willingly let it
die."
I have said that Milton's poetry differed distinctly from the poetry of his
age. The verse that Dryden was reading as a schoolboy was quite other
than L'Allegro_ and _Lycidas. In the closing years of the preceding
century, John Donne had traveled in Italy. There the poet Marino was
developing fantastic eccentricities in verse. Donne under similar
influences adopted similar methods.
To seize upon the quaintest possible thought and then to express it in as
quaint a manner as possible became the chief aim of English poets
during the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century. Donne had
encountered trouble in obtaining his wife from her father. Finding one