nd put it on the stage as an opera. "Ay,"
said Milton, good humoredly, "you may tag my verses." And accordingly
they appeared, duly tagged, in Dryden's operatic masque, the _State of
Innocence_. In this startling conjunction we have the two ages in a
nut-shell: the Commonwealth was an epic, the Restoration an opera.

The literary period covered by the life of Pope, 1688-1744, is marked
off by no distinct line from the generation before it. Taste continued
to be governed by the precepts of Boileau and the French classical
school. Poetry remained chiefly didactic and satirical, and satire in
Pope's hands was more personal even than in Dryden's, and addressed
itself less to public issues. The literature of the "Augustan age" of
Queen Anne (1702-1714) was still more a literature of the town and of
fashionable society than that of the Restoration had been. It was also
closely involved with party struggles of Whig and Tory, and the ablest
pens on either side were taken into alliance by the political leaders.
Swift was in high favor with the Tory ministers, Oxford and
Bolingbroke, and his pamphlets, the _Public Spirit of the Whigs_ and
the {181} _Conduct of the Allies_, were rewarded with the deanery of
St. Patrick's, Dublin. Addison became Secretary of State under a Whig
government. Prior was in the diplomatic service. Daniel De Foe, the
author of _Robinson Crusoe_, 1719, was a prolific political writer,
conducted his _Review_ in the interest of the Whigs and was imprisoned
and pilloried for his ironical pamphlet, _The Shortest Way with the
Dissenters_. Steele, who was a violent writer on the Whig side, held
various public offices, such as Commissioner of Stamps and Commissioner
for Forfeited Estates, and sat in Parliament. After the Revolution of
1688 the manners and morals of English society were somewhat on the
mend. The court of William and Mary, and of their successor, Queen
Anne, set no such example of open profligacy as that of Charles II.
But there was much hard drinking, gambling, dueling, and intrigue in
London, and vice was fashionable till Addison partly preached and
partly laughed it down in the _Spectator_. The women were mostly
frivolous and uneducated, and not unfrequently fast. They are spoken
of with systematic disrespect by nearly every writer of the time,
except Steele. "Every woman," wrote Pope, "is at heart a rake." The
reading public had now become large enough to make letters a
profess