Dryden's prose essays.

"Pilgrim's Progress."

edged and regretted. Milton's "soul was like a star and dwelt apart," but Dryden wrote for the trampling multitude. He had a coarseness of moral fiber, but was not malignant in his satire, being of a large, careless, and forgetting nature. He had that masculine, enduring cast of mind which gathers heat and clearness from motion, and grows better with age. His "Fables" -modernizations from Chaucer and translations from Boccaccio, written the year before he died-are among his best works.

Dryden is also our first critic of any importance. His critical essays were mostly written as prefaces or dedications to his poems and plays. But his "Essay of Dramatic Poesie," which Dr. Johnson called our “first regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing,' was in the shape of a Platonic dialogue. When not misled by the French classicism of his day, Dryden was an admirable critic, full of penetration and sound sense. He was the earliest writer, too, of modern literary prose. If the imitation of French models was an injury to poetry it was a benefit to prose. The best modern prose is French, and it was the essayists of the Gallicized Restoration age-Cowley, Sir William Temple, and, above all, Dryden-who gave modern English prose that simplicity, directness, and colloquial air which mark it off from the more artificial diction of Milton, Taylor, and Browne.

A few books whose shaping influences lay in the past belong by their date to this period. John Bunyan, a poor tinker, whose reading was almost wholly in the Bible and Fox's "Book of Martyrs," imprisoned for twelve years in Bedford jail for preaching at conventicles, wrote and, in 1678, published his "Pilgrim's Progress," the greatest of religious allegories. Bunyan's

spiritual experiences were so real to him that they took visible concrete shape in his imagination as men, women, cities, landscapes. It is the simplest, the most transparent of allegories. Unlike "The Faerie Queene," the story of "Pilgrim's Progress" has no reason for existing apart from its inner meaning, and yet its reality is so vivid that children read of Vanity Fair and the Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle and the Valley of the Shadow of Death with the same belief with which they read of Crusoe's cave or Aladdin's palace.

Dryden.

It is a long step from the Bedford tinker to the cultivated poet of "Paradise Lost." They represent the poles of the Puritan party. Yet it may admit of a doubt whether the Puritan epic is, in essentials, as vital and original a work as the Puritan allegory. They both came out quietly and made little noise at first. But "The Pilgrim's Progress" got at once into circu- Milton and lation, and hardly a single copy of the first edition remains. Milton, too-who received ten pounds for the copyright of "Paradise Lost"-seemingly found that "fit audience though few" for which he prayed, as his poem reached its second impression in five years (1672). Dryden visited him in his retirement and asked leave to turn it into rime and put it on the stage as an opera. "Ay," said Milton, good-humoredly, "you may tag my verses." And accordingly they appeared, duly tagged, in Dryden's operatic masque, "The State of Innocence.” In this startling conjunction we have the two ages in a nutshell: the Commonwealth was an epic, the Restoration an opera.

The literary period covered by the life of Pope (1688-1744) is marked off by no distinct line from the generation before it. Taste continued to be governed Queen Anne.

The age of

party politics.

by the precepts of Boileau and the French classical school. Poetry remained chiefly didactic and satirical, and satire in Pope's hands was more personal even than in Dryden's, and addressed itself less to public issues. The literature of the "Augustan age" of Queen Anne (1702-1714) was still more a literature of the town and of fashionable society than that of the Restoration had been. It was also closely involved with party struggles of Whig and Tory, and the ablest pens on either side were taken into alliance by the political leaders. Swift was in high favor with the Literature and Tory ministers, Oxford and Bolingbroke, and his pamphlets, "The Public Spirit of the Whigs" and "The Conduct of the Allies," were rewarded with the deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin. Addison became secretary of state under a Whig government. Prior was in the diplomatic service. Daniel Defoe, the author of "Robinson Crusoe," 1719, was a prolific political writer, conducted his "Review" in the interest of the Whigs, and was imprisoned and pilloried for his ironical pamphlet, "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters." Steele, who was a violent writer on the Whig side, held various public offices, such as Commissioner of Stamps and Commissioner for Forfeited Estates, and sat in Parliament.

Manners and morals in English

society.

After the Revolution of 1688 the manners and morals of English society were somewhat on the mend. The court of William and Mary, and of their successor, Queen Anne, set no such example of open profligacy as that of Charles II. But there was much hard drinking, gambling, dueling, and intrigue in London, and vice was fashionable till Addison partly preached and partly laughed it down in the Spectator. The women were mostly frivolous and uneducated, and not unfre

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