art--the essays and prefaces in the composition of
which he amused the leisure left in the busy life of a dramatist and a
poet of officialdom--that his most charming and delicate work is to be
found. In a way they begin modern English prose; earlier writing
furnishes no equal to their colloquial ease and the grace of their
expression. And they contain some of the most acute criticism in our
language--"classical" in its tone (_i.e._, with a preference for
conformity) but with its respect for order and tradition always tempered
by good sense and wit, and informed and guided throughout by a taste
whose catholicity and sureness was unmatched in the England of his time.
The preface to his _Fables_ contains some excellent notes on Chaucer.
They may be read as a sample of the breadth and perspicuity of his
critical perceptions.

His chief poetical works were most of them occasional--designed either
to celebrate some remarkable event or to take a side and interpret a
policy in the conflict, political or religious, of the time.
_Absalom and Achitophel_ and _The Medal_ were levelled at the
Shaftesbury-Monmouth intrigues in the closing years of Charles II.
_Religio Laici_ celebrated the excellence of the Church of England in
its character of _via media_ between the opposite extravagances of
Papacy and Presbyterianism. _The Hind and the Panther_ found this
perfection spotted. The Church of England has become the Panther, whose
coat is a varied pattern of heresy and truth beside the spotless purity
of the Hind, the Church of Rome. _Astrea Reddux_ welcomed the returning
Charles; _Annus Mirabilis_ commemorated a year of fire and victories,
Besides these he wrote many dramas in verse, a number of translations,
and some shorter poems, of which the odes are the most remarkable.

His qualities as a poet fitted very exactly the work he set himself to
do. His work is always plain and easily understood; he had a fine
faculty for narration, and the vigorous rapidity and point of his style
enabled him to sketch a character or sum up a dialectical position very
surely and effectively. His writing has a kind of spare and masculine
force about it. It is this vigour and the impression which he gives of
intellectual strength and of a logical grasp of his subject, that beyond
question has kept alive work which, if ever poetry was, was ephemeral in
its origin. The careers of the unscrupulous Caroline peers would have
been closed for us were they no