they are full of
a peculiarly disagreeable obscenity. One of his worst offenses in this
direction, and altogether his most impudent one, was his adaptation
for the stage of Shakespeare's 'Tempest.' The two plays are worth
reading together for the sake of seeing how easily a pure and perfect
creation of genius can be vulgarized in language and spirit almost
beyond the possibility of recognition. In his tragedies, however,
Dryden was much more successful. Yet even these, in spite of the
excellence of occasional passages, do not attain to a high rank.
Indeed, thought and expression are at times extravagant, not to say
stilted, to an extent which afterward led him himself to make them the
subject of ridicule. It was in them, however, during these years that
he perfected by degrees his mastery of heroic verse, of which later he
was to display the capabilities in a way that had never previously
been seen and has never since been surpassed.

A controversy in regard to the proper method of composing plays
brought forward Dryden, at an early period in his literary career, as
a writer of prose. In this he at once attained unusual eminence. In
him appear for the first time united the two characters of poet and of
critic. Ben Jonson had in a measure preceded him in this respect; but
Jonson's criticism was not so much devoted to the examination of
general principles as to the exposure of the hopeless, helpless
obtuseness of the men who had a different opinion of his works from
what he himself entertained. The questions discussed by Dryden were of
a more general nature. With the Stuarts had come in French literary
tastes and French literary methods. The age was supposed to be too
refined to be pleased with what had satisfied the coarse palates of
preceding generations. In stage-writing in particular, the doctrine of
the unities, almost uniformly violated by Shakespeare and most of the
Elizabethans, was now held up as the only correct method of
composition that could be employed by any writer who sought to conform
to the true principles of art. Along with this came the substitution
in the drama of rhyme for blank verse. Upon the comparative merits of
these two as employed in tragedy, arose the first controversy in which
Dryden was engaged. This one was with his brother-in-law, Sir Robert
Howard; for in 1663 Dryden had become the husband of the daughter of
the Earl of Berkshire, thus marrying, as Pope expressed it, "misery in
a noble