The fifty years of Dryden's literary production just fill the last half of the seventeenth century. It was a period bristling with violent political and religious prejudices, provocative of strife that amounted to revolution. Its social life ran the gamut from the severity of the Commonwealth Puritan to the unbridled debauchery of the Restoration Courtier. In literature it experienced a remarkable transformation in poetry, and developed modern prose, watched the production of the greatest English epics, smarted under the lash of the greatest English satires, blushed at the brilliant wit of unspeakable comedies, and applauded the beginnings of English criticism.

When the period began, England was a Commonwealth. Charles I., by obstinate insistence upon absolutism, by fickleness and faithlessness, had increased and strengthened his enemies. Parliament had seized the reins of government in 1642, had completely established its authority at Naseby in 1645, and had beheaded the king in front of his own palace in 1649. The army had accomplished these results, and the army proposed to enjoy the reward. Cromwell, the idolized commander of the Ironsides, was placed at the head of the new-formed state with the title of Lord Protector; and for five years he ruled England, as she had been ruled by no sovereign since Elizabeth. He suppressed Parliamentary dissensions and royalist uprisings, humbled the Dutch, took vengeance on the Spaniard, and made England indisputably mistress of the ocean. He was succeeded, at his death in 1658, by his son Richard; but the father's strong instinct for government had not been inherited by the son. The nation, homesick for monarchy, was tiring of dissension and bickering, and by the Restoration of 1660 the son of Charles I became Charles II of England.

Scarcely had the demonstrations of joy at the Restoration subsided when London was visited by the devouring plague of 1665. All who could fled from the stricken city where thousands died in a day. In 1666 came the great fire which swept from the Tower to the Temple; but, while it destroyed a vast deal of property, it prevented by its violent purification a recurrence of the plague, and made possible the rebuilding of the city with great sanitary and architectural improvements.

Charles possessed some of the virtues of the Stuarts and most of their faults. His arbitrary irresponsibility shook the confidence of the nation in his sincerity. Two parties, the Whigs and the Tories, came into being, and party spirit and party strife ran high. The question at issue was chiefly one of religion. The rank and file of Protestant England was determined against the revival of Romanism, which a continuation of the Stuart line seemed to threaten. Charles was a Protestant only from expediency, and on his deathbed accepted the Roman Catholic faith; his brother James, Duke of York, the heir apparent, was a professed Romanist.

Such an outlook incited the Whigs, under the leadership of Shaftesbury, to support the claims of Charles' eldest illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, who, on the death of his father in 1685, landed in England; but the promised uprising was scarcely more than a rabble of peasantry, and was easily suppressed. Then came the vengeance of James, as foolish as it was tyrannical. Judge Jeffries and his bloody assizes sent scores of Protestants to the block or to the gallows, till England would endure no more. William, Prince of Orange, who had married Mary, the eldest daughter of James, was invited to accept the English crown. He landed at Torbay, was joined by Churchill, the commander of the king's forces, and, on the precipitate flight of James, mounted the throne of England. This event stands in history as the Protestant Revolution of 1688.

During William's reign, which terminated in 1702, Stuart uprisings were successfully suppressed, English liberties were guaranteed by the famous Bill of Rights, Protestant succession was assured, and liberal toleration was extended to the various dissenting sects.

Society had passed through quite as great variations as had politics during this half-century. The roistering Cavalier of the first Charles, with his flowing locks and plumed hat, with his maypoles and morrice dances, with his stage plays and bear-baitings, with his carousals and gallantries, had given way to the Puritan Roundhead. It was a serious, sober-minded England in which the youth Dryden found himself. If the Puritan differed from the Cavalier in political principles, they were even more diametrically opposed in mode of life. An Act of Parliament closed the theaters in 1642. Amusements of all kinds were frowned upon as frivolous, and many were suppressed by law. The old English feasts at Michaelmas, Christmas, Twelfth Night, and Candlemas were regarded as relics of popery and were condemned. The Puritan took his religion seriously, so seriously that it overpowered him. The energy and fervor of his religious life were illustrated in the work performed by Cromwell's chaplain, John Howe, on any one of the countless fast days. "He began with his flock at nine in the morning, prayed during a quarter of an hour for blessing upon the day's work, then read and explained a chapter for three-quarters of an hour, then prayed for an hour, preached for an hour, and prayed again for a half an hour, then retired for a quarter of an hour's refreshment—the people singing all the while—returned to his pulpit, prayed for another hour, preached for another hour, and finished at four P.M."

At the Restoration the pendulum swung back again. From the strained morality of the Puritans there was a sudden leap to the most extravagant license and the grossest immorality, with the king and the court in the van. The theaters were thrown wide open, women for the first time went upon the stage, and they acted in plays whose moral tone is so low that they cannot now be presented on the stage or read in the drawing-room. Of course they voiced the social conditions of the time. Marriage ties were lightly regarded; no gallant but boasted his amours. Revelry ran riot; drunkenness became a habit and gambling a craze. The court scintillated with brilliant wits, conscienceless libertines, and scoffing atheists. It was an age of debauchery and disbelief.

The splendor of this life sometimes dazzles, the lack of conveniences appalls. The post left London once a week. A journey to the country must be made in your own lumbering carriage, or on the snail-slow stagecoach over miserable roads, beset with highwaymen. The narrow, ill-lighted streets, even of London, could not be traversed safely at night; and ladies, borne to routs and levees in their sedan chairs, were lighted by link-boys, and were carried by stalwart, broad-shouldered bearers who could wield well the staves in a street fight. Such were the conditions of life and society which Dryden found in the last fifty years of the seventeenth century.

Strong as were the contrasts in politics and manners during Dryden's lifetime, they were paralleled by contrasts in literature no less marked. Dryden was born in 1631; he died in 1700. In the year of his birth died John Donne, the father of the Metaphysical bards, or Marinists; in the year of his death was born James Thomson, who was to give the first real start to the Romantic movement; while between these two dates lies the period devoted to the development of French Classicism in English literature.

At Dryden's birth Ben Jonson was the only one of the great Elizabethan dramatists still living, and of the lesser stars in the same galaxy, Chapman, Massinger, Ford, Webster, and Heywood all died during his boyhood and youth, while Shirley, the last of his line, lingered till 1667. Of the older writers in prose, Selden alone remained; but as Dryden grew to manhood, he had at hand, fresh from the printers, the whole wealth of Commonwealth prose, still somewhat clumsy with Latinism or tainted with Euphuism, but working steadily toward that simple strength and graceful fluency with which he was himself to mark the beginning of modern English prose.

Clarendon, with his magnificently involved style, began his famous History of the Great Rebellion in 1641. Ten years later Hobbes published the Leviathan, a sketch of an ideal commonwealth. Baxter, with his Saints' Everlasting Rest sent a book of religious consolation into every household. In 1642 Dr. Thomas Browne, with the simplicity of a child and a quaintness that fascinates, published his Religio Medici; and in 1653 dear old simple-hearted Isaak Walton told us in his Compleat Angler how to catch, dress, and cook fish. Thomas Fuller, born a score or more of years before Dryden, in the same town, Aldwinkle, published in 1642 his Holy and Profane State, a collection of brief and brisk character sketches, which come nearer modern prose than anything of that time; while for inspired thought and purity of diction the Holy Living, 1650, and the Holy Dying, 1651, of Jeremy Taylor, a gifted young divine, rank preËminent in the prose of the Commonwealth.

But without question the ablest prose of the period came from the pen of Cromwell's Latin Secretary of State, John Milton. Milton stands in his own time a peculiarly isolated figure. We never in thought associate him with his contemporaries. Dryden had become the leading literary figure in London before Milton wrote his great epic; yet, were it not for definite chronology, we should scarcely realize that they worked in the same century. While, therefore, no sketch of seventeenth-century literature can exclude Milton, he must be taken by himself, without relation to the development, forms, and spirit of his age, and must be regarded, rather, as a late-born Elizabethan.

When Dryden was born, Milton at twenty-three was just completing his seven years at Cambridge, and as the younger poet grew through boyhood, the elder was enriching English verse with his Juvenilia. Then came the twenty years of strife. As Secretary of the Commonwealth, he threw himself into controversial prose. His Iconoclast, the Divorce pamphlets, the Smectymnuus tracts, and the Areopagitica date from this period. A strong partisan of the Commonwealth, he was in emphatic disfavor at the Restoration. Blind and in hiding, deserted by one-time friends, out of sympathy with his age, he fulfilled the promise of his youth: he turned again to poetry; and in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes he has left us "something so written that the world shall not willingly let it die."

I have said that Milton's poetry differed distinctly from the poetry of his age. The verse that Dryden was reading as a schoolboy was quite other than L'Allegro and Lycidas. In the closing years of the preceding century, John Donne had traveled in Italy. There the poet Marino was developing fantastic eccentricities in verse. Donne under similar influences adopted similar methods.

To seize upon the quaintest possible thought and then to express it in as quaint a manner as possible became the chief aim of English poets during the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century. Donne had encountered trouble in obtaining his wife from her father. Finding one morning a flea that had feasted during the night on his wife and himself, he was overcome by its poetic possibilities, and wrote:

To strain after conceits, to strive for quaintness of thought and expression, was the striking characteristic of all the poets of the generation, to whom Dr. Johnson gave the title Metaphysical, and who are now known as the Marinists. There were Quarles, with his Dutch Emblems; Vaughan, Sandys, Crashaw, and pure-souled George Herbert, with his Temple. There were Carew, with the Rapture; Wither and his "Shall I wasting in despair"; the two dashing Cavaliers Suckling and Lovelace, the latter the only man who ever received an M.A. for his personal beauty. There was Herrick, the dispossessed Devonshire rector, with Hesperides and Noble Numbers, freer than were the others from the beauty-marring conceits of the time. There, too, were to be found the gallant love-maker Waller, Cowley, the queen's secretary during her exile, and Marvell, Milton's assistant Secretary of State. But these three men were to pledge allegiance to a new sovereignty in English verse.

In the civil strife, Waller had at first sided with Parliament, had later engaged in a plot against it, and after a year's imprisonment was exiled to France. At this time the Academy, organized to introduce form and method in the French language and literature, held full sway. Malherbe was inculcating its principles, Corneille and MoliÈre were practicing its tenets in their plays, and Boileau was following its rules in his satires, when Waller and his associates came in contact with this influence. The tendency was distinctly toward formality and conventionality. Surfeited with the eccentricities and far-fetched conceits of the Marinists, the exiled Englishmen welcomed the change; they espoused the French principles; and when at the Restoration they returned to England with their king, whose taste had been trained in the same school, they began at once to formalize and conventionalize English poetry. The writers of the past, even the greatest writers of the past, were regarded as men of genius, but without art; and English poetry was thenceforth, in Dryden's own words, to start with Waller.

Under the newly adopted canons of French taste, narrative and didactic verse, or satire, took first place. Blank verse was tabooed as too prose-like; so, too, were the enjambed rhymes. A succession of rhymed pentameter couplets, with the sense complete in each couplet, was set forth as the proper vehicle for poetry; and this unenjambed distich fettered English verse for three-quarters of a century. In the drama the characters must be noble, the language dignified; the metrical form must be the rhymed couplet, and the unities of time, place, and action must be observed.

Such, in brief, were the principles of French Classicism as applied to English poetry, principles of which Dryden was the first great exponent, and which Pope in the next generation carried to absolute perfection. Waller, Marvell, and Cowley all tried their pens in the new method, Cowley with least success; and they were the poets in vogue when Dryden himself first attracted attention. Denham quite caught the favor of the critics with his mild conventionalities; the Earl of Roscommon delighted them with his rhymed Essay on Translated Verse; the brilliant court wits, Rochester, Dorset, and Sedley, who were writing for pleasure and not for publication, still clung to the frivolous lyric; but the most-read and worst-treated poet of the Restoration was Butler. He published his Hudibras, a sharp satire on the extreme Puritans, in 1663. Every one read the book, laughed uproariously, and left the author to starve in a garret. Of Dryden's contemporaries in prose, there were Sir William Temple, later the patron of Swift, John Locke who contributed to philosophy his Essay Concerning the Human Understanding, the two diarists Evelyn and Pepys, and the critics Rymer and Langbaine; there was Isaac Newton, who expounded in his Principia, 1687, the laws of gravitation; and there was the preaching tinker, who, confined in Bedford jail, gave to the world in 1678 one of its greatest allegories, Pilgrim's Progress.

Dryden was nearly thirty before the production of the drama was resumed in England. Parliament had closed the theaters in 1642, and that was an extinguisher of dramatic genius. Davenant had vainly tried to elude the law, and finally succeeded in evading it by setting his Siege of Rhodes to music, and producing the first English opera. At the Restoration, when the theaters were reopened, the dramas 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.