was thought an odd way of alluding to regicide: though Dryden may perhaps have spoken of the wars in general.
Her safety rescued Ireland to him owes
is a strange compliment to the man of the Drogheda massacre. Dryden, at this time, wrote as a Protestant; much later he was reconciled to the ancient Church.
His "Astræa Redux," and poem on the Coronation of Charles II show his early mastery of the heroic couplet. Scott thought that in these poems the Muse awoke, like the Sleeping Beauty of the fairy tale "in the same antiquated and absurd vestments in which she had fallen asleep twenty years before". This means that the so-called "metaphysical" style of far-fetched conceits and comparisons (which Sir Walter heartily hated) still prevailed. There are, indeed, traces of the habits attributed by fable to elephants, and remote classical allusions, and abrupt changes of metaphor from anatomy to bait-fishing (of which Dryden was fond) and it is rather absurd to make a ship of war "groan beneath the weight" of a lad like the Duke of Gloucester! But the verse is excellent, and the spirit high and joyous, as became the great occasion. As much may be said of the lines addressed to Clarendon.
In the "Annus Mirabilis" (1667), concerning the naval war with Holland and the Great Fire of 1666, Dryden reverted to the quatrains made fashionable by Davenant's "Gondibert". Mr. Pepys, of the Admiralty, thought this "a very good poem," it came home to his bosom and business, and, as a poem of war, is much superior to Addison's "Campaign". There are still conceits, as when Dutch mariners killed on board a ship laden with spices and Oriental porcelain "by shattered porcelain fall," or "by aromatic splinters die". To appreciate the poem the reader needs a good chart and an intimate knowledge of naval history, but the vigour of the verses on the fire carries them on like the conflagration itself. The "Prayer of Charles II" is royal, and worthy of David, to whom Dryden had already compared him in "Astræa Redux," as later in "Absalom and Achitophel". Indeed Charles in certain points of conduct resembled the Psalmist.
For some fifteen years Dryden was now to be occupied with play-writing, and his tragedies and comedies, as his latest editor says, supply the historian with "the most troublesome and perhaps the most thankless... part of his task". But Dryden does not live by the merits of his dramas. When we have said that Scott, with all his zeal for old plays, did not like Dryden's, it is clear that people less omnivorous in literature and less devoted to the drama, will leave them alone.
Of Dryden's first comedy, "The Wild Gallant," 1663, Mr. Pepys said it was "so poor a thing as I ever saw in my life". It was condemned, but was amended and repeated. The judgment of Mr. Pepys was well deserved. The play is in prose.
"The Rival Ladies" (published 1664) was reckoned "innocent and most pretty witty" by Pepys: it is partly in poor blank verse, partly in rhymed couplets: in the preface Dryden says that Waller "first showed us to conclude the sense, most commonly in distiches, which, in the verse before him, runs on for so many lines together, that the reader is out of breath to overtake it". The plot is reckless of probability, but, on the whole, the thing is not coarse as well as shocking to the credulity of the reader.
In "The Indian Queen" (1664) Dryden added some scenes to a "heroic" play by Sir Robert Howard, and is credited with the part of Montezuma. The "heroic" play resembled the immense extravagant romances of the day ("Gondibert" is a versified romance of this kind); written by Mdlle. de Scudéry and her imitators. Intricate prolonged extravagance was then characteristic; and Sir George Mackenzie ("Bluidy Mackenzie"), who wrote such a romance about the civil war, reckoned these heroic tales the final and perfect type of the novel.