n the present series by his Preface to the "Fables"
and his Dedication to the translation of Virgil. In these he
shows himself not only a critic of sound and penetrating
judgment, but the first master of modern English prose style.

With "Absalom and Achitophel," a satire on the Whig leader,
Shaftesbury, Dryden entered a new phase, and achieved what
is regarded as "the finest of all political satires." This
was followed by "The Medal," again directed against the Whigs,
and this by "Mac Flecknoe," a fierce attack on his enemy and
rival Shadwell. The Government rewarded his services by
a lucrative appointment.

After triumphing in the three fields of drama, criticism,
and satire, Dryden appears next as a religious poet in his
"Religio Laici," an exposition of the doctrines of the Church
of England from a layman's point of view. In the same year
that the Catholic James II. ascended the throne, Dryden joined
the Roman Church, and two years later defended his new religion
in "The Hind and the Panther," an allegorical debate between two
animals standing respectively for Catholicism and Anglicanism.

The Revolution of 1688 put an end to Dryden's prosperity; and
after a short return to dramatic composition, he turned to
translation as a means of supporting himself. He had already
done something in this line; and after a series of translations
from Juvenal, Persius, and Ovid, he undertook, at the age of
sixty-three, the enormous task of turning the entire works of
Virgil into English verse. How he succeeded in this, readers of
the "Aeneid" in a companion volume of these classics can judge
for themselves. Dryden's production closes with the collection
of narrative poems called "Fables," published in 1700, in which
year he died and was buried in the Poet's Corner in Westminster
Abbey.

Dryden lived in an age of reaction against excessive religious
idealism, and both his character and his works are marked by
the somewhat unheroic traits of such a period. But he was,
on the whole, an honest man, open minded, genial, candid, and
modest; the wielder of a style, both in verse and prose,
unmatched for clearness, vigor, and sanity.

Three types of comedy appeared in England in the time of Dryden--the
comedy of humors, the comedy of intrigue, and the comedy of
manners--and in all he did work that classed him with the
ablest of his contemporaries. He developed the somewhat
bombastic type of drama known as the heroic play,