"The Indian Emperor," in rhyme (1665), was a contribution by Dryden to this class of drama. Cortez and Pizarro go conquering together, which is odd, "in a pleasant Indian country," within two leagues of Mexico. The High Priest's morning sacrifice has disposed of 500 human victims—love scenes with ladies of such Mexican names as Almeria and Cydaria follow; Cortez and Pizarro approach in arms, Cydaria and Cortez fall in love, in a song, and after much heroic passion, all ends happily for the lovers. The merits of the versification and the rhetoric are great; Montezuma is racked on the stage; and holds a dialogue about religion, in fine distiches, with his equally tormented High Priest. The priest expires, but Cortez releases Montezuma, and throws the blame on Pizarro.
"The Conquest of Granada" (1670) was a yet more triumphant play of the heroic variety; "The Rehearsal," a satirical piece, partly by the Duke of Buckingham, partly by collaborators, derided "Bayes" (as we have seen); and as Dryden received the Laureate's bays in 1670, he is, at least, in part, the object of the mockery. He took it very unconcernedly, and went on writing heroic plays, but in 1677-1678, in "All for Love," abandoned rhyme for blank verse. "The Spanish Friar" (1681) was a "topical" play, full of the Protestantism of Oates's Popish Plot.
The sequels of the Whig and Protestant lunacy of the Popish Plot, and the political turmoil and Whig conspiracies in the interests of Monmouth, and against the succession of the Duke of York (James II.), found Dryden on the side of the King, and gave occasion for his greatest works, the political satires, "Absalom and Achitophel" (Monmouth and Shaftesbury) and "The Medal" (1681-1682), while more amusing if less monumental, is "Mac-Flecknoe," the attack on the Whig playwright and versifier, Shadwell. "The Hind and Panther" (the Roman and Anglican Churches) is not very appropriate in its allegory, but magnificent in many passages of verse. Dryden came into the religion of the Duke of York, apparently from conviction, and so threw in his lot with a doomed cause. After the Revolution of 1688, no longer Laureate, he simply worked hard at literature for his livelihood. He translated Virgil with much spirit, into rhymed ten syllabled couplets; and wrote that Ode to the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew which contains his repentance for the prostitution of the Muse throughout the revel of the Restoration.
O gracious God I how far have we
Profaned thy heavenly grace of poesy!
Made prostitute and profligate the Muse,
Debased to each obscene and impious use,
Whose harmony was first ordained above
For tongues of angels and for hymns of love.
Dryden's old age, as the dictator to the wits at Will's Coffee House, was tranquil and happy: he had sown his literary wild oats, his life was one of peaceful and honoured industry, without failure of mental force. He died in May, 1700, and was buried near Chaucer in Westminster Abbey, with strangely maimed rites, according to Farquhar, the author of "The Beaux' Stratagem," who was present.
Dryden's prose, chiefly critical, was addressed to that part of the literary world, the Court and the Town, and the Templars, which was mainly interested in the theatre. He could thus write with freedom, alertness, and gaiety, to appreciative readers concerned with the problems of the drama. It had almost expired by a kind of natural decay, moral and literary, before the theatres were closed by the Puritans. Now writers of plays looked back on the glories of the "former temple," to Jonson, Fletcher, and Shakespeare, and also looked abroad to the French stage then flourishing under Corneille and Molière. Which was the better way? Was the rhyme of French tragedy, and of many French comedies, to be imitated? It was imitated, and in his rhymed tragedies Dryden acquired his mastery of the couplet. What was to be said for and against the English practice of an upper and an under plot? What were the famous "unities" of time, place, and action? Should deaths be merely reported or presented on the stage? Dryden observes that the audiences used to laugh at dying scenes in tragedies: "it is the most comic part of the whole play".
Having such topics to discuss, Dryden adopted the prose style so justly appreciated, though it was the reverse of his own manner, by Dr. Johnson. Dryden's prefaces to his plays "have not the formality of a settled style, in which the first half of the sentence betrays the other. The clauses are never balanced, nor the periods modelled: every word seems to drop by chance, though it falls into its proper place. Nothing is cold or languid; the whole is airy, animated, and vigorous; what is little is gay; what is great is splendid."
The most famous essays are those of "Dramatic Poesy," and "The Preface to the Fables," adaptations or "translations" of Chaucer and Boccaccio. The former essay is, in form, a dialogue, held in a boat on the Thames, while the thunder of the guns, in a great naval battle against the Dutch (3 June, 1665) dies away from the English shores, with promise of an English victory. The speakers are Lord Buckhurst, Sir Robert Howard, Dryden's brother-in-law, the poet himself, and Sir Charles Sedley, the gayest of the four, though his knowledge of Aristotle's "Poetics" is far from adequate. The speeches are rather long; there is no rapid interchange of opinions. In Dryden's lips are placed the words, "Shakespeare was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul". Yet "he is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clinches, his serious swelling into bombast". Dryden, here, and in "The Preface to the Fables," was much more keen to praise Shakespeare than to blame him: in the second place the zest with which he applauds Shakespeare and Chaucer (whose scansion, unluckily, he did not understand), is worthy of himself and of them. He translated Virgil, but, when he did some Homeric passages into English, we see how entirely the Greek, to his taste, overcomes the Mantuan poet. "I have found, by trial, Homer a more pleasing task than Virgil... the Grecian is more according to my genius than the Latin poet."
Dryden himself, at the meeting of the ways of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, belonged by genius more to the past than the immediate future. His criticisms are like the conversation of a great artist, speaking of his art, and also (Dr. Johnson thought him too copious on this subject) of himself. But here Johnson resembles Dryden when he rebukes Andromache, at her last leave-taking with Hector, for speaking of her utter bereavement of father and brothers by the spear of Achilles. "The devil was in Hector," says Dryden, "if he knew not all this matter, as well as she who told it him, for she had been his bed-fellow for many years together"—an error in fact, and an example of Dryden's occasional frivolity.