A History of English Literature

nation became afraid of another civil war, and the king was enabled to have
Shaftesbury arrested on the charge of treason. Hereupon Dryden, at the
suggestion, it is said, of the king, and with the purpose of securing
Shaftesbury's conviction, put forth the First Part of 'Absalom and
Achitophel,' a masterly satire of Shaftesbury, Monmouth, and their
associates in the allegorical disguise of the (somewhat altered) Biblical
story of David and Absalom. [Footnote: The subsequent history of the affair
was as follows: Shaftesbury was acquitted by the jury, and his enthusiastic
friends struck a medal in his honor, which drew from Dryden a short and
less important satire, 'The Medal.' To this in turn a minor poet named
Shadwell replied, and Dryden retorted with 'Mac Flecknoe.' The name means
'Son of Flecknoe,' and Dryden represented Shadwell as having inherited the
stupidity of an obscure Irish rimester named Flecknoe, recently deceased.
The piece is interesting chiefly because it suggested Pope's 'Dunciad.'
Now, in 1682, the political tide again turned against Shaftesbury, and he
fled from England. His death followed shortly, but meanwhile appeared the
Second Part of 'Absalom and Achitophel,' chiefly a commonplace production
written by Nahum Tate (joint author of Tate and Brady's paraphrase of the
Psalms into English hymn-form), but with some passages by Dryden.]
In 1685 Charles died and James succeeded him. At about the same time Dryden
became a Catholic, a change which laid him open to the suspicion of
truckling for royal favor, though in fact he had nothing to gain by it and
its chief effect was to identify him with a highly unpopular minority. He
had already, in 1682, written a didactic poem, 'Religio Laici' (A Layman's
Religion), in which he set forth his reasons for adhering to the English
Church. Now, in 1687, he published the much longer allegorical 'Hind and
the Panther,' a defense of the Catholic Church and an attack on the English
Church and the Dissenters. The next year, King James was driven from the
throne, his daughter Mary and her husband, William, Prince of Orange,
succeeded him, and the supremacy of the Church of England was again
assured. Dryden remained constant to Catholicism and his refusal to take
the oath of allegiance to the new rulers cost him all his public offices
and reduced him for the rest of his life to comparative poverty. He had the
further mortification of seeing the very Shadwell whom he had so
unsparingly ridiculed replace him as poet laureate. These reverses,
however, he met with his characteristic manly fortitude, and of his
position as the acknowledged head of English letters he could not be
deprived; his chair at 'Will's' coffee-house was the throne of an
unquestioned monarch. His industry, also, stimulated by necessity, was
unabated to the end. Among other work he continued, in accordance with the
taste of the age, to make verse translations from the chief Latin poets,
and in 1697 he brought out a version of all the poems of Vergil. He died in
1700, and his death may conveniently be taken, with substantial accuracy,
as marking the end of the Restoration period.
Variety, fluency, and not ungraceful strength are perhaps the chief
qualities of Dryden's work, displayed alike in his verse and in his prose.
Since he was primarily a poet it is natural to speak first of his verse;
and we must begin with a glance at the history of the rimed pentameter
couplet, which he carried to the highest point of effectiveness thus far
attained. This form had been introduced into English, probably from French,
by Chaucer, who used it in many thousand lines of the 'Canterbury Tales.'
It was employed to some extent by the Elizabethans, especially in scattered
passages of their dramas, and in some poems of the early seventeenth
century. Up to that time it generally had a free form, with frequent
'running-on' of the sense from one line to the next and marked irregularity
of pauses. The process of developing it into the representative
pseudo-classical measure of Dryden and Pope consisted in making the lines,