uently 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
_Religo Laici_, 1682, was a poem in defense of the 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
were mostly written as prefaces or dedications to his poems and plays.
But his _Essay of 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
gallicised Restoration age--Cowley, Sir William Temple, and above all,
Dryden--who gave modern Engli