were mostly written as prefaces or dedications to his poems and plays.
But his _Essay on Dramatic Poesie_, which Dr. Johnson called our "first
regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing," was in the shape
of a Platonic dialogue. When not misled by the French classicism of
his day, Dryden was an admirable critic, full of penetration and sound
sense. He was the earliest writer, too, of modern literary prose. If
the imitation of French models was an injury to poetry it was a benefit
to prose. The best modern prose is French, and it was the essayists of
the {179} Gallicised Restoration age--Cowley, Sir William Temple, and,
above all, Dryden--who gave modern English prose that simplicity,
directness, and colloquial air, which marks it off from the more
artificial diction of Milton, Taylor, and Browne.

A few books whose shaping influences lay in the past belong by their
date to this period. John Bunyan, a poor tinker, whose reading was
almost wholly in the Bible and Fox's _Book of Martyrs_, imprisoned for
twelve years in Bedford jail for preaching at conventicles, wrote and,
in 1678, published his _Pilgrim's Progress_, the greatest of religious
allegories. Bunyan's spiritual experiences were so real to him that
they took visible concrete shape in his imagination as men, women,
cities, landscapes. It is the simplest, the most transparent of
allegories. Unlike the _Faery Queene_, the story of _Pilgrim's
Progress_ has no reason for existing apart from its inner meaning, and
yet its reality is so vivid that children read of Vanity Fair and the
Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle and the Valley of the Shadow of
Death with the same belief with which they read of Crusoe's cave or
Aladdin's palace.

It is a long step from the Bedford tinker to the cultivated poet of
_Paradise Lost_. They represent the poles of the Puritan party. Yet
it may admit of a doubt, whether the Puritan epic is, in essentials, as
vital and original a work as the Puritan allegory. They both came out
quietly and made little noise at first. But the _Pilgrim's Progress_
got at once {180} into circulation, and not even a single copy of the
first edition remains. Milton, too--who received 10 pounds for the
copyright of _Paradise Lost_--seemingly found that "fit audience though
few" for which he prayed, as his poem reached its second impression in
five years (1672). Dryden visited him in his retirement and asked
leave to turn it into rime a