HKB
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.
On December 1, 1663, he married Lady Elizabeth Howard, eldest daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, and the sister of a literary intimate. Tradition has pronounced the marriage an unhappy one, but facts do not bear out tradition. He nowhere referred other than affectionately to his wife, and always displayed a father's warm affection for his sons, John, Charles, and Erasmus. Lady Elizabeth outlived her husband and eventually died insane.
During the great plague in London, 1665, Dryden fled with his wife to Charleton. He lived there for two years, and during that time wrote three productions that illustrate the three departments of literature to which he devoted himself: Annus Mirabilis, a narrative and descriptive poem on the fire of 1666 and the sea fight with the Dutch, the Essay on Dramatic Poesy, his first attempt at literary criticism in prose, and the Maiden Queen, a drama. In Annus Mirabilis we find the best work yet done by him. Marinist quaintness still clings here and there, and he has temporarily deserted the classical distich for a quatrain stanza; but here, for the first time, we taste the Dryden of the Satires and the Fables. His Essay on Dramatic Poesy started modern prose. Hitherto English prose had suffered from long sentences, from involved sentences, and from clumsy Latinisms or too bald vernacular. Dryden happily united simplicity with grace, and gave us plain, 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.