JOHN DRYDEN was born August 9th, 1631, in Northamptonshire. His father, Sir Erasmus Dryden, was a Republican who went to prison rather than pay Charles I. an illegal tax. His mother’s family were stanch Puritans, and it is probable that Dryden was sindere in the admiration he expressed for Cromwell. His education at Cambridge had made him a master of stenciled heroics and elegiacs, but even had he learned from Ovid the utmost grace of the Augustan age, it would have poorly compensated him for the loss of that which the unpolished Harrison showed as he explained to the spectators around the gallows that the shaking of his hands was due to hardship in the wars—not to fear of dying for his cause. But such things were dismissed with a jest in the literary circles of London when Dryden began his career as a court poet. Having demonstrated his wit to the satisfaction of Nell Gwyn and other arbiters of the elegancies, he was made laureate with a pension of £300 a year and a butt of Canary wine. Under James II. he changed his religion and held the laureateship; but when under William and Mary another change took place in the quality of court piety, it is always to be remembered that he sacrificed the laureateship, pension, Canary wine, wreath of bays, and all, rather than abjure again. When William and Mary named the ignominious Shadwell in his stead as the greatest poet of England, Dryden surely had revenge upon them so ample that posterity could add nothing to it to make justice complete against them. From that time until his death, May 1st, 1700, Dryden, neglected by the great and thrown on his own resources, earned a manly living as “a publisher’s hack,” but adversity overtook him too late to change him from the greatest wit, satirist, and critic, to the greatest poet of his generation.

  Dryden was professionally a poet, but he is really at his best in his satires and prefaces. He has been called the inventor of modern English prose; and though this is too much to say of him, it is certainly true that he did much to perfect prose-rhythm, and to make it clear that the writing of good prose is scarcely less a fine art than the writing of good verse. Although his prose consists so largely of prefaces and such other casual productions as generally fall stillborn if only for the lack of a vitalizing purpose, his strength as a prose writer was recognized at once, and as far back as 1733 we find Swift giving such advice as is still given to those who are in training for a career of criticism:—