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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 a small estate. When, in 1657, he finally left the university, he attached himself to his uncle, Sir Gilbert Pickering, a general of the Commonwealth. In 1658 he wrote Heroic Stanzas on Cromwell's Death; but shortly thereafter he went to London, threw himself into the life of literary Bohemia, and at the Restoration, in 1660, wrote his Astroea Redux, as enthusiastically as the veriest royalist of them all. This sudden transformation of the eulogist of Cromwell to the panegyrist of Charles won for Dryden in some quarters the name of a political turncoat; but such criticism was unjust. He was by birth and early training a Puritan; add to this a poet's admiration for a truly great character, and the lines on Cromwell are explained; but during his London life he rubbed elbows with the world, early prejudices vanished, his true nature asserted itself, and it was John Dryden himself, not merely the son of his father, who celebrated Charles' return.