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Updated: June 20, 2025
Elizabethan prose, all too chaotic in the beauty and force which overflowed into it from Elizabethan poetry, and incorrect with an incorrectness which leaves it scarcely legitimate prose at all: then, in reaction against that, the correctness of Dryden, and his followers through the eighteenth century, determining the standard of a prose in the proper sense, not inferior to the prose of the Augustan age in Latin, or of the "great age in France": and, again in reaction against this, the wild mixture of poetry and prose, in our wild nineteenth century, under the influence of such writers as Dickens and Carlyle: such are the three periods into which the story of our prose literature divides itself.
His most successful play was the 'Rival Queens', or the Death of Alexander the Great, produced in 1677. Next to it in success, and superior in merit, was his 'Theodosius', or the Force of Love, produced in 1680. He took part with Dryden in writing the very successful adaptation of 'OEdipus', produced in 1679, as an English Tragedy based upon Sophocles and Seneca. No. 40. Monday, April 16, 1711.
In the case of Dryden there is nothing to countervail this presumption. His theological writings abundantly prove that he had never sought with diligence and anxiety to learn the truth, and that his knowledge both of the Church which he quitted and of the Church which he entered was of the most superficial kind.
"That's true, wise Antoine. 'Take the goods the gods provide thee whilst the lovely Thaïs sits beside thee, as Mr. Dryden said." "Who is Mr. Dryden? Must I infer, sir, from his name, that he is one of our brave English allies?" "Doubtless he would be if he were living, but he has been dead some time, Antoine." "Alas, sir, the way of all flesh!"
His last days were miserable, and he lingered a long while in hopeless and melancholy idiocy. Pope properly belongs to a succeeding age, though his first writings attracted considerable attention during the life of Addison, who first raised him from obscurity. He is the greatest, after Dryden, of all the second class poets of his country.
Supposing, therefore, as we do suppose, that Mr. Bromley's school in London was the scene of his disgrace, it would appear on this argument that his parents were then living in Windsor Forest. And this hypothesis falls in with another anecdote in Pope's life, which we know partly upon his own authority. He tells Wycherley that he had seen Dryden, and barely seen him. Virgilium vidi tantum.
A step or so downwards, from a few passages in "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained," an inevitable drop in the derivation, a depression such as is human, and everything, from Dryden to "The Vanity of Human Wishes," follows, without violence and perhaps without wilful misappreciation. The poet Milton fathered, legitimately enough, an unpoetic posterity.
See ante, iii. 186. Dryden employed his mornings in writing; dined en famille; and then went to Wills's; only he came home earlier a'nights' Mr.
The ephemeral and now forgotten lights of the British stage the blasting indecencies of Beaumont and Fletcher; the vigorous ribaldry of Dryden; the shocking extravagances of the recent French and Spanish stage; the Tour de Nesle, and other elevating pieces, which adorn the modern Parisian theatre, and train to virtuous and generous feeling the present youth of France.
Shadwell has been illustrious, for nothing so much as the quarrel which subsisted between him and Dryden, who held him in the greatest contempt. We cannot discover what was the cause of Mr. Dryden's aversion to Shadwell, or how this quarrel began, unless it was occasioned by the vacant Laurel being bellowed on Mr.
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