Thebes did his green unknowing youth engage,
He chooses Athens in his riper age,
that is Oxford, the home of lost causes, like his own. In 1663 married Lady Elizabeth Howard; wrote plays for a livelihood (his rents were small); in 1670 became Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal: acted, we may say, in both capacities in his great satires of the troubles following on the Popish Plot and other poems down to the birth of the Prince of Wales (10 June, 1688), and, after the Revolution, supported himself by play-writing, translating Virgil, by his "Fables," and other works, till his death on 1 May, 1700.
Setting aside Milton, who dwelt apart, Dryden was by far the greatest man of letters of the Restoration and the reign of our Dutch deliverer. Under Dryden, and to a great extent through his versatile and manly genius, English literature matured and clarified itself. Though not averse to far-fetched "conceits" in his early poems, Dryden shook them off; he made the heroic couplet the instrument for Pope and his successors, he gave it a nobility, a richness and depth of music which it had not possessed: it was stronger, more varied, more poetical, in his hands than in those of Pope. Prose, touched by him, became much more lucid and rapid than it had been in the long involved periods of Clarendon, if not so purely simple as the prose of Swift.
It was, in a sense, the misfortune of Dryden that he was the poet of an age immersed in its own complicated and exciting, and now, to all but careful historical students, not easily understood affairs. We have no adequate and intelligent history of the Restoration. Dry den's verses, for the most part, are "topical," deal with events of the day: there is little time for meditation on what is universal; he is an urban poet, too: nature and landscape are rarely handled by him. If our ideal of poetry is derived from study of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and other recent moderns, we do not and cannot find in Dryden what they have taught us to desire and expect. His themes are of his time and of the men and the political passions of his time. His plays, many of them rhymed, are but little read; nobody strongly recommends his comedies, which are more coarse than comic; he did not, himself, think that comedy set his genius.
His lyrics, though spirited, have not the sweet spontaneity of the true English lyric from "Love has come with Lent to town" to those of the best nineteenth century makers. To read his best satires with entire enjoyment we need to be well acquainted with the obscure intrigues of an age of plots, royal, political, and religious. Yet, through all his poetic work, from his early "Heroic Stanzas" on the death of Cromwell, down to "Alexander's Feast," we see the note and hear the voice of a great poet; a voice new, noble, sonorous, and his own. There is, in almost all that Dryden did, in his criticism in prose not less than in his verse, a kind of conquering supremacy, an ease, an impetus, and a consciousness of his own greatness which is not arrogance, but lends facility and a triumphant speed to his verse; while his criticism is that of zest, of delight in excellence wherever he finds it; from Homer to Virgil, from Virgil to the then little understood Chaucer, to Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.
His "Heroic Stanzas" (published in 1659) in quatrains, may or may not have been inspired by appreciation of Cromwell; Dryden's kinsfolk were Presbyterian and Parliamentarian; but his heart and natural inclinations as a man and a poet, were more engaged (1660) in his "Astræa Redux," and verses to Charles II on his coronation. Dryden, like Waller, was (to our taste) more successful in praising the great usurper than the Merry Monarch. The first stanza in the poem on Cromwell strikes a ringing and a novel note, but the reader also requires a footnote on Roman imperial funereal ritual before he can understand what is meant. To say of Cromwell,
To our crown he did fresh jewels bring,
while, in fact, he sold the jewels, was to invite satire; to talk of
Stanching the blood by breathing of the vein,