lue Protestant poet,"
Thomas Shadwell, a political and literary foe of Dryden. Flecknoe, an
{177} obscure Irish poetaster, being about to retire from the throne of
duncedom, resolved to settle the succession upon his son, Shadwell,
whose claims to the inheritance are vigorously asserted.

"The rest to some faint meaning make pretense,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense. . . .
The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull
With this prophetic blessing--Be thou dull."

Dryden is our first great satirist. The formal satire had been written
in the reign of Elisabeth by Donne, and by Joseph Hall, Bishop of
Exeter, and subsequently by Marston, the dramatist, by Wither, Marvell,
and others; but all of these failed through an over violence of
language, and a purpose too pronouncedly moral. They had no lightness
of touch, no irony and mischief. They bore down too hard, imitated
Juvenal, and lashed English society in terms befitting the corruption
of Imperial Rome. They denounced, instructed, preached, did every
thing but satirize. The satirist must raise a laugh. Donne and Hall
abused men in classes: priests were worldly, lawyers greedy, courtiers
obsequious, etc. But the easy scorn of Dryden and the delightful
malice of Pope gave a pungent personal interest to their sarcasm,
infinitely more effective than these commonplaces of satire. Dryden
was as happy in controversy as in satire, and is unexcelled in the
power to reason in verse. His _Religio Laici_, 1682, was a poem in
defense of the {178} English Church. But when James II. came to the
throne Dryden turned Catholic and wrote the _Hind and Panther_, 1687,
to vindicate his new belief. Dryden had the misfortune to be dependent
upon royal patronage and upon a corrupt stage. He sold his pen to the
court, and in his comedies he was heavily and deliberately lewd, a sin
which he afterward acknowledged 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