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 morning a flea that had feasted during the night on his wife and himself, he was overcome by its poetic possibilities, and wrote:
"This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed and temple is;
Tho' parents frown, and you, we're met
And cloister'd in these living walls of jet."
To strain after conceits, to strive for quaintness of thought and expression, was the striking characteristic of all the poets of the generation, to whom Dr. Johnson gave the title Metaphysical, and who are now known as the Marinists. There were Quarles, with his Dutch Emblems; Vaughan, Sandys, Crashaw, and pure-souled George Herbert, with his Temple. There were Carew, with the Rapture; Wither and his "Shall I wasting in despair"; the two dashing Cavaliers Suckling and Lovelace, the latter the only man who ever received an M.A. for his personal beauty. There was Herrick, the dispossessed Devonshire rector, with Hesperides and Noble Numbers, freer than were the others from the beauty-marring conceits of the time. There, too, were to be found the gallant love-maker Waller, Cowley, the queen's secretary during her exile, and Marvell, Milton's assistant Secretary of State. But these three men were to pledge allegiance to a new sovereignty in English verse.
In the civil strife, Waller had at first sided with Parliament, had later engaged in a plot against it, and after a year's imprisonment was exiled to France. At this time the Academy, organized to introduce form and method in the French language and literature, held full sway. Malherbe was inculcating its principles, Corneille and Molière were practicing its tenets in their plays, and Boileau was following its rules in his satires, when Waller and his associates came in contact with this influence. The tendency was distinctly toward formality and conventionality. Surfeited with the eccentricities and far-fetched conceits of the Marinists, the exiled Englishmen welcomed the change; they espoused the French principles; and when at the Restoration they returned to England with their king, whose taste had been trained in the same school, they began at once to formalize and conventionalize English poetry. The writers of the past, even the greatest writers of the past, were regarded as men of genius, but without art; and English poetry was thenceforth, in Dryden's own words, to start with Waller.
Under the newly adopted canons of French taste, narrative and didactic verse, or satire, took first place. Blank verse was tabooed as too prose-like; so, too, were the enjambed rhymes. A succession of rhymed pentameter couplets, with the sense complete in each couplet, was set forth as the proper vehicle for poetry; and this unenjambed distich fettered English verse for three-quarters of a century. In the drama the characters must be noble, the language dignified; the metrical form must be the rhymed couplet, and the unities of time, place, and action must be observed.
Such, in brief, were the principles of French Classicism as applied to English poetry, principles of which Dryden was the first great exponent, and which Pope in the next generation carried to absolute perfection. Waller, Marvell, and Cowley all tried their pens in the new method, Cowley with least success; and they were the poets in vogue when Dryden himself first attracted attention. Denham quite caught the favor of the critics with his mild conventionalities; the Earl of Roscommon delighted them with his rhymed Essay on Translated Verse; the brilliant court wits, Rochester, Dorset, and Sedley, who were writing for pleasure and not for publication, still clung to the frivolous lyric; but the most-read and worst-treated poet of the Restoration was Butler. He published his Hudibras, a sharp satire on the extreme Puritans, in 1663. Every one read the book, laughed uproariously, and left the author to starve in a garret. Of Dryden's contemporaries in prose, there were Sir William Temple, later the patron of Swift, John Locke who contributed to philosophy his Essay Concerning the Human Understanding, the two diarists Evelyn and Pepys, and the critics Rymer and Langbaine; there was Isaac Newton, who expounded in his Principia, 1687, the laws of gravitation; and there was the preaching tinker, who, confined in Bedford jail, gave to the world in 1678 one of its greatest allegories, Pilgrim's Progress.
Dryden was nearly thirty before the production of the drama was resumed in England. Parliament had closed the theaters in 1642, and that was an extinguisher of dramatic genius. Davenant had vainly tried to elude the law, and finally succeeded in evading it by setting his Siege of Rhodes to music, and producing the first English opera. At the Restoration, when the theaters were reopened, the dramas then produced reflected most vividly the looseness and immorality of the times. Their worst feature was that "they possessed not wit enough to keep the mass of moral putrefaction sweet."
Davenant was prolific, Crowne wallowed in tragedy, Tate remodeled Shakspere; so did Shadwell, who was later to measure swords with Dryden, and receive for his rashness an unmerciful castigation. But by all odds the strongest name in tragedy was Thomas Otway, who smacks of true Elizabethan genius in the Orphan and Venice Preserved. In comedy we receive the brilliant work of Etheridge, the vigor of Wycherley, and, as the century drew near its close, the dashing wit of Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar. This burst of brilliancy, in which the Restoration drama closes, was the prelude to the Augustan Age of Queen Anne and the first Georges, the period wherein flourished that group of self-satisfied, exceptionally clever, ultra-classical wits who added a peculiar zest and charm to our literature. As Dryden grew to old age, these younger men were already beginning to make themselves heard, though none had done great work. In poetry there were Prior, Gay, and Pope, while in prose we find names that stand high in the roll of fame—the story-teller Defoe, the bitter Swift, the rollicking Dick Steele, and delightful Addison.
This is the background in politics, society, and letters on which the life of Dryden was laid during the last half of the seventeenth century. There were conditions in his environment which materially modified his life and affected his literary form, and without a knowledge of these conditions no study of the man or his works can be effective or satisfactory. Dryden was preëminently a man of his times.
LIFE OF DRYDEN.
John Dryden was born at the vicarage of Aldwinkle, All Saints, in Northamptonshire, August 9, 1631. His father, Erasmus Dryden, was the third son of Sir Erasmus Dryden of Cannons Ashby. The estate descended to Dryden's uncle, John, and is still in the family. His mother was Mary Pickering. Both the Drydens and Pickerings were Puritans, and were ranged on the side of Parliament in its struggle with Charles I. As a boy Dryden received his elementary education at Tichmarsh, and went thence to Westminster School, where he studied under the famous Dr. Busby. Here he first appeared in print with an elegiac poem on the death of a schoolfellow, Lord Hastings. It possesses the peculiarities of the extreme Marinists. The boy had died from smallpox, and Dryden writes:
"Each little pimple had a tear in it To wail the fault its rising did commit."
He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, May 18, 1650, took his B.A. in 1654, and then, though he received no fellowship, lingered at the university for three years. Tradition tells us that he had no fondness for his Alma Mater, and certainly his verse contains compliments only for Oxford.
His father had died in 1654 and had bequeathed him
