merciless frequency. It had no notion of a unit of style in the sentence. It indulged, without the slightest hesitation, in every détour and involution of second thoughts and by-the-way qualifications. So far as any models were observed, those models were chiefly taken from the inflected languages of Greece and Rome, where the structural alterations of the words according to their grammatical connexion are for the most part sufficient to make the meaning tolerably clear. Nothing so much as the lack of inflexions saved our prose at this time from sharing the fate of German, and involving itself almost beyond the reach of extrication. The common people, when not bent upon fine language, could speak and write clearly and straighforwardly, as Bunyan's works show to this day to all who care to read. But scholars and divines deserved much less well of their mother tongue. It may indeed be said that prose was infinitely worse off than poetry. In the latter there had been an excellent style, if not one perfectly suited for all ends, and it had degenerated. In the former, nothing like a general prose style had ever yet been elaborated at all; what had been done had been done chiefly in the big-bow-wow manner, as Dryden's editor might have called it. For light miscellaneous work, neither fantastic nor solemn, the demand was only just being created. Cowley indeed wrote well, and, compara. tively speaking, elegantly, but his prose work was small in extent and little read in comparison to his verse. Tillotson was Dryden's own contemporary, and hardly preceded him in the task of reform.

From this short notice it will be obvious that the general view, according to which a considerable change took place and was called for at the Restoration, is correct, notwithstanding the attempts recently made to prove the

so great, that they sometimes find it difficult to understand how any rational being could exchange the blank verse of Shakespeare for the rhymes of Dryden, much more for the rhymes of his contemporaries and predecessors. But this omits the important consideration that it was not the blank verse of Shakespeare or of Fletcher that was thus exchanged. In the three-quarters of a century, or thereabouts, which elapsed between the beginning of the great dramatic era and the Restoration, the chief vehicle of the drama had degenerated full as much as the drama itself; and the blank verse of the plays subsequent to Ford is of anything but Shakespearian quality-is indeed in many cases such as is hardly to be recognized for verse at all. Between this awkward and inharmonious stuff and the comparatively polished and elegant couplets of the innovators there could be little comparison, especially when Dryden had taken up the couplet himself.

Lastly, in prose the time was pretty obviously calling for a reform. There were great masters of English prose living when Dryden joined the literary world of London, but there was no generally accepted style for the journeywork of literature. Milton and Taylor could arrange the most elaborate symphonies; Hobbes could write with a crabbed clearness as lucid almost as the flowing sweetness of Berkeley; but these were exceptions. The endless sentences out of which Clarendon is wont just to save himself, when his readers are wondering whether breath and brain will last out their involution; the hopeless coils of parenthesis and afterthought in which Cromwell's speech lay involved, till Mr. Carlyle was sent on a special mission to disentangle them, show the dangers and difficulties of the ordinary prose style of the day. It was terribly cumbered about quotations, which it introduced with

merciless frequency. It had no notion of a unit of style in the sentence. It indulged, without the slightest hesitation, in every détour and involution of second thoughts and by-the-way qualifications. So far as any models were observed, those models were chiefly taken from the inflected languages of Greece and Rome, where the structural alterations of the words according to their grammatical connexion are for the most part sufficient to make the meaning tolerably clear. Nothing so much as the lack of inflexions saved our prose at this time from sharing the fate of German, and involving itself almost beyond the reach of extrication. The common people, when not bent upon fine language, could speak and write clearly and straighforwardly, as Bunyan's works show to this day to all who care to read. But scholars and divines deserved much less well of their mother tongue. It may indeed be said that prose was infinitely worse off than poetry. In the latter there had been an excellent style, if not one perfectly suited for all ends, and it had degenerated. In the former, nothing like a general prose style had ever yet been elaborated at all; what had been done had been done chiefly in the big-bow-wow manner, as Dryden's editor might have called it. For light miscellaneous work, neither fantastic nor solemn, the demand was only just being created. Cowley indeed wrote well, and, comparatively speaking, elegantly, but his prose work was small in extent and little read in comparison to his verse. Tillotson was Dryden's own contemporary, and hardly preceded him in the task of reform.

From this short notice it will be obvious that the general view, according to which a considerable change took place and was called for at the Restoration, is correct, notwithstanding the attempts recently made to prove the

contrary by a learned writer. Professor Masson's lists of men of letters and of the dates of their publication of their works prove, if he will pardon my saying so, nothing. The actual spirit of the time is to be judged not from the production of works of writers who, as they one by one dropped off, left no successors, but from those who struck root downwards and blossomed upwards in the general literary soil. Milton is not a writer of the Restoration, though his greatest works appeared after it, and though he survived it nearly fifteen years. Nor was Taylor, nor Clarendon, nor Cowley: hardly even Davenant, or Waller, or Butler, or Denham. The writers of the Restoration are those whose works had the seeds of life in them; who divined or formed the popular tastes of the period, who satisfied that taste, and who trained up successors to prosecute and modify their own work. The interval between the prose and the poetry of Dryden and the prose and the poetry of Milton is that of an entire generation, notwithstanding the manner in which, chronologically speaking, they overlap. The objects which the reformer, consciously or unconsciously, set before him have been sufficiently indicated. It must be the task of the following chapters to show how and to what extent he effected a reform; what the nature of that reform was; what was the value of the work which in effecting it he contributed to the literature of his country.

CHAPTER II.

EARLY LITERARY WORK.

THE foregoing chapter will have already shown the chief difficulty of writing a life of Dryden-the almost entire absence of materials. At the Restoration the poet was nearly thirty years old, and of positive information as to his life during these thirty years we have half a dozen dates, the isolated fact of his mishap at Trinity, a single letter and three poems, not amounting in all to three hundred lines. Nor can it be said that even subsequently, during his forty years of fame and literary activity, positive information as to his life is plentiful. His works are still the best life of him, and in so far as a biography of Dryden is filled with any matter not purely literary, it must for the most part be filled with controversy as to his political and religious opinions and conduct rather than with accounts of his actual life and conversation. Omitting for the present literary work, the next fact that we have to record after the Restoration is one of some importance, though as before the positive information obtainable in connexion with it is but scanty. On the 1st of December, mane 1663, Dryden was married at St. Swithin's Church to Lady Elizabeth Howard, eldest daughter of the Earl of Berkshire.

This marriage, like most of the scanty events of Dryden's