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ciples" and not "dispirited with" his afflictions. He died in 1700, and was buried at the feet of Chaucer in Westminster Abbey.

Dryden's Work in Prose and Verse. In his strength and in his weakness Dryden is the representative of his time. His poetry is professional rather than personal, and occasional rather than spontaneous. Much of it, written in imitation of the manner of Vergil or of Horace, seems to be made from books and not from the intensity of his own feeling or from the depth of his experience. His lines do not carry to the heart, as do those of Milton, or Burns, or Wordsworth. He writes, not out of the fullness of profound emotion, as all the greatest poets have done, but in the strength of a clear, fertile, and active intellect. He is the greatest satirist in the range of English poetry. His verse has clearness, ease, and a vigor which at times is almost brutal; he can be smooth and swift, majestic and sonorous. But in reading Dryden we feel the spiritual limitations of his time; everything seems material and earthly, with no redeeming touch of the divine. He shows little love of Nature, little sense of beauty, little real religion: tenderness, pathos, compassion, and a sense of the "mystery of things" are almost entirely absent from his works. We admire his orderly mind, its perspicacity and balance; and his work may be called great literature, but hardly great poetry.

Dryden's prose is nearly if not quite as important as his verse. His great merit as a prose-writer was that he introduced a plainer style of writing, better adapted to the daily needs of our modern world than the more eloquent, poetical, and involved manner of some of his predecessors. Before this time, prose had been written for the learned first, and only incidentally for the people.

Much of it had been heavy with long Latin words, and with lengthy and tortuous periods, but Dryden chose more simple words and wrote shorter and clearer sentences. English prose thus gained something of the freedom of good talk, as Lowell remarked, and was prepared for the needs of the general reader. Dryden was great also as a literary critic. In a number of letters, essays, and prefaces he discussed the rules of poetry, and with a large grasp of critical principles developed a broad and scholarly criticism in an age that was constantly narrowing its intellectual sympathies.

These eminent qualities gave Dryden a supreme place in the contemporary world of letters and, together with his personality, made him the central figure in literary London. Amiable, modest, generous, learned, he attracted to him some of the best minds of the day. Tradition pictures him as sitting in his own great armchair in the sunny bow-window of Will's Coffee House, a red-faced, portly, gray-haired old man-"Glorious John" -the literary law-giver of the young wits and rising authors, who loved to gather around him and listen to his stories of the past. His death marks the end of the century and, in a sense, the end of a literary period, but the tradition of his greatness was handed on to the writers of the next century, and Dryden became to Pope and the men of his day a literary model and authority in subject-matter and in form.

Other Writers of the Restoration. Besides Dryden. there were many other writers in the period of the Restoration distinguished for their dramas or for prose works on philosophical or scientific themes. THOMAS OTWAY (1651-1685) and NATHANIEL LEE (1653-1691) wrote several important tragedies; and WILLIAM WYCHERLEY (1640-1715), WILLIAM CONGREVE (1670-1729), JOHN

VANBRUGH (1666–1726), and George FarquHAR (1678– 1708) were famous for their witty though frequently immoral comedies. JOHN LOCKE (1632-1704) developed a philosophy in which reason, experience, and observation were considered the surest guides to truth, and which discredited or denied the existence of any innate ideas of God or of morality. And SIR ISAAC NEWTON (1642-1727) contributed to the development of science by his profound studies in mathematics and physics.

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Absalom and Achitophel, Part I, the first of his satires .... 1681 Other dramatists: FARQUHAR, WYCHERLEY, CONGREVE, etc.

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Revolution of 1688; Declaration of Rights

Reign of WILLIAM AND MARY (House of Orange)

1685-1689

1689

1689-1702

JOHN LOCKE'S Essay on the Human Understanding
Abolition of the Censorship of the Press ...

1690

1695

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WE have seen in the preceding chapter how English literature with the gradual weakening of the splendid creative energy that marked the age of Elizabeth became, in the hands of Dryden and his contemporaries, less national, less imaginative, and less truly poetic. great in his command of the English language and in his power of versification, Dryden had neither the broad humanity and daring originality of Shakespeare, nor the majesty and profound sincerity of Milton. a worldly and prosaic age, he had written for the Court rather than for the nation, and had deliberately chosen for poetic treatment subjects that were more fit for prose.

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The Age of Queen Anne, or the first half of the eighteenth century, continued very largely the poetic traditions of the Restoration. Dryden, as we have seen, like Ben Jonson before him, had, by reason of his personal influence and by the brilliancy of his talk, wielded a wide-spread influence on his contemporaries. As the literary dictator of his age, he had set the standards of taste and of correct writing, and these proved to be so

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in harmony with the spirit of the time that for fifty years after his death they prevailed with even greater strength as the standards of his successors. The age of Pope, like that of Dryden, was an age of prose. Common sense, reason, conformity with the classic rules of composition, continued to prevail over imagination, passion, and independence in thought and style. On the theory that they could be made poetical by the outward adornments of rime and rhythm, the most commonplace and prosaic subjects were treated in verse. One poet discussed the raising of sheep, the treatment of their diseases, and the details of the manufacture of woolens; another the Art of Preserving Health; while another set forth the advantages of fresh air and exercise. And in this way the distinction between poetry and prose was too often lost. Even the greatest poet of the time confined himself almost entirely to satiric, moral, and didactic themes. Pope writes personal and political satires, critical and philosophical essays, and lengthy epistles in verse. He and his school seem to have believed that poetic excellence consists not in genuine and sincere poetic feeling and imagery, but in smooth versification, in elegance and propriety of language, and in the terse, pointed, and brilliant expression of thought, thought that they had taken usually at second hand. It was an age when less value was placed upon original matter than upon finished style; when poets were contented to write

"What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd."

As the result of this care for style, a manner of verse was elaborated which reflects with striking exactness the merits and the limitations of its careful builders. It is generally clear, fluent, and flexible, often clever,

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