It remains to indicate briefly Dryden's position in English literature. To the critics of his own time he was without question the greatest man of letters in his generation, and so he undeniably was after the death of Milton. We are not ready to say with Dr. Johnson that "he found English of brick and left it of marble," for there was much marble before Dryden was dreamed of, and his own work is not entirely devoid of brick; but that Dryden rendered to English services of inestimable value is not to be questioned. For forty years the great aim of his life was, as he tells us himself, to improve the English language and English poetry, and by constant and tireless effort in a mass of production of antipodal types he accomplished his object. He enriched and extended our vocabulary, he modulated our meters, he developed new forms, and he purified and invigorated style.
There are a few poets in our literature who are better than Dryden; there are a great many who are worse; but there has been none who worked more constantly and more conscientiously for its improvement. Mr. Saintsbury has admirably summarized the situation: "He is not our greatest poet; far from it. But there is one point in which the superlative may safely be applied to him. Considering what he started with, what he accomplished, and what advantages he left to his successors, he must be pronounced, without exception, the greatest craftsman in English Letters."
REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY
HISTORY: Green, History of the English People, vols. iii, iv; Knight, Popular History of England, vols. iii, iv, v; Gardiner, The First Two Stuarts, and the Puritan Revolution; Hale, Fall of the Stuarts, and Western Europe; Green, Short History of the English People; Ransome, A Short History of England; Montgomery, English History.
BIOGRAPHY: Lives of Dryden in the editions of his Works by Scott, Malone, Christie; Johnson, Dryden (Lives of the Poets); Saintsbury, Dryden (English Men of Letters).
CRITICISM: Mitchell, English Lands, Letters, and Kings (Elizabeth to Anne); Gosse, From Shakespeare to Pope; Lowell, Dryden (Among my Books); Garnett, The Age of Dryden; Masson, Dryden and the Literature of the Restoration (Three Devils); Hamilton, The Poets Laureate of England; Hazlitt, On Dryden and Pope.
ROMANCE: Scott, Woodstock, Peveril of the Peak; Defoe, The Plague in London.
MYTHOLOGY: Bulfinch, Age of Fable; Gayley, Classic Myths in English Literature; Smith, Classical Dictionary.