Conquest of Granada belongs, like the Epilogue itself, to a different point of view from the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, and is generally in agreement with the Preface to the Feigned Astrologer. The difference in eloquence between the present age and the age of Ben Jonson is what Dryden has in his mind. His Essay on the Dramatic Poetry of the Last Age is an explanation of the superiority of the present times in Wit, Language, and Conversation.

As to Language, Dryden selects a number of examples from the older dramatists, and points out their irregularities. In Wit he finds himself obliged to make distinctions. The definition of Wit engaged Dryden's attention, and he finally arrived at a statement which satisfied him, and by which he was content to abide. In this Essay he comes near his later account of Wit as adequacy or propriety of language; but he distinguishes farther between two senses of the term: Wit in the larger sense is propriety of language; Wit in the narrower and stricter sense is sharpness of conceit. Jonson's Wit in the larger sense is unquestioned: 'he always writ properly, and as the character required'; his fault was that his subjects were too uniformly low. In sharpness of conceit he was not admirable; Dryden expresses the natural aversion of a later generation for the Elizabethan taste in epigrams. He remarks on the extremes between which the careless genius of Shakespeare has its range, and on the luxuriance of Fletcher; 'he is a true Englishman; he knows not when to give over.' Conversation, the third head of Dryden's discourse, brings him to the summary of his argument. His age is better than Shakespeare's because it has better manners, a more refined society, a more affable monarch. Hence the change in the dramatic ideal, as already explained in the Mock Astrologer. It is

an ideal of refined comedy; for though the Epilogue had spoken of the heroic motives of Love and Honour, both the Epilogue and this Essay defending it take Comedy as the form of Drama to be most thought of. The Comedy of Jonson is still an example and a standard as far as concerns the virtues of construction, of arrangement, of coherence. But, 'the poets of this age will be more wary than to imitate the meanness of his persons. Gentlemen will now be entertained with the follies of each other; and though they allow Cobb and Tib to speak properly, yet they are not much pleased with their tankard or with their rags.'

THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGY FOR HEROIC POETRY AND POETIC LICENCE (1677).

This Essay was prefixed to The State of Innocence and Fall of Man, an Opera in Heroic Verse, Dryden's version of Paradise Lost. The Essay has nothing very particular to do either with the Epic or the Opera. It is an expansion of one of Dryden's views about poetry which he had already expressed in the Essay of Heroic Plays; it defends the magnificent language proper to the noblest kind of poetry, and is to some extent reactionary. Dryden had acknowledged the reforms of Waller and Denham, but he was not prepared to go all lengths with the new order of things. There was too much of the Elizabethan in him, and he could not accept the common sense of his contemporaries as an adequate test of good and bad poetry. 'What fustian, as they call it, have I heard these gentlemen find out in Mr. Cowley's Odes!' 'All that is dull, insipid, languishing, and without sinews in a poem, they call an imitation of Nature.' Dryden, like Tasso before him,

is compelled to stand up against the scholars who have learned their lesson too well; it is as if he foresaw the sterilizing influence of the prose understanding, and the harm that might be done by correctness if the principles of correctness were vulgarized.

Imitation of Nature was no new catchword of art criticism. It came from Aristotle, and was one of the chief formulas in the endless talk about Poetry which grew out of the rhetorical and grammatical studies of the Revival of Learning. It was made the guiding principle in all sorts of literary undertakings: even the French Heroic Romances professed to be imitations of Nature, if we may trust the preface to the Illustrious Bashaw. Butler, in his Character of a Small Poet, puts the same formula in his mouth-'a nasty, flat description he calls great Nature.' Pope, in the Essay on Criticism, made this his text, and found an easy way out of it by recommending the Ancients as an equivalent. To follow Nature is to follow them. Nature in these discussions generally implied, as it did for Aristotle, the right conception of the true character of the subject by the reason of the poet; hence due subordination of details; hence abstraction from the manifold details of reality, a selective and logical method of treatment, in opposition both to the realistic accumulation of particulars ('nasty, flat description') and to the fantastic licence of conceits.

Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses expressed the mind of many previous generations when he explained the derivation of the grand style from that ideal beauty which is Nature. The painter must transcend reality; ' and what may seem a paradox, he learns to design naturally by drawing his figures unlike to any one object. The idea of the perfect state of Nature, which the artist calls the ideal beauty, is the great leading

principle by which works of genius are conducted. By this Phidias acquired his fame. He wrought upon a sober principle what has so much excited the enthusiasm of the world; and by this method you, who have courage to tread the same path, may acquire equal reputation.'

This lofty ideal was one to which Dryden, like Corneille before him, had given his homage in many passages of his criticism. It was, however, capable of being misunderstood, and the Apology for Heroic Poetry is directed against the conventional admiration of reasonable art, the conventional depreciation of everything fantastic and capricious, which, as Dryden saw, was apt to condemn as fustian everything that was not respectable prose. Dryden defends Fantasy in the name of Reason, and concludes his Apology with the definition of Wit (which here means the faculty of poetical style), as a propriety of thoughts and words. He had already shown that this definition was in his mind, and he repeats it afterwards. Thus his apology, although it is in fact reactionary, and generally in favour of the Elizabethans and the 'metaphysical' poets, is not onesided, like the later romantic rebellion against Pope. It is comprehensive, a claim for poetical freedom, a protest in the name of Reason and Common Sense against a narrow and trivial misuse of Common Sense to the detriment of Imagination.

As in the Essay of Heroic Plays, so also here the question of supernatural 'machinery' is important, and Dryden repeats his dissent from the critics who objected to the agency of gods or fairies. Boileau and Rapin are referred to as among the chief of modern critics (p. 181), and Dryden had probably attentively studied the deliverances on the subject of 'machinery' in Boileau's Art Poétique. The critical authorities to which he

attaches himself in this Apology for Poetic Licence are not specially romantic or extravagant. It is not a factious or partisan composition, though it moves in the thick of the most dangerous matters of debate.

About this time Dryden was growing tired of his heroic plays; the last of them, Aureng-zebe, was published in 1676, and contained in its Prologue the author's farewell to that kind of drama.

PREFACE TO ALL FOR LOVE (1678).

Aureng-zebe, the last of the rhyming heroic plays, was published in 1676. The tragedy of All for Love (written to please himself, as Dryden afterwards tells us) was meant to follow both Shakespeare and the classical rules. 'I have endeavoured in this play to follow the practice of the Ancients, who, as Mr. Rymer has judiciously observed, are and ought to be our masters.' But the Ancients are not to be followed to the disparagement of the English genius: 'though their models are regular they are too little for English Tragedy, which requires to be built in a larger compass.' Shakespeare is acknowledged by Dryden as his master in dramatic style; the play is in blank verse, rhyme is abandoned; 'not that I condemn my former way, but that this is more proper to my present purpose.'

The Preface further touches upon those themes of ignorant and malicious criticism which were provided for Dryden in his feuds with Settle and others, and most recently in Rochester's imitation of Horace (An Allusion to the Tenth Satire of his First Book).

THE GROUNDS OF CRITICISM IN TRAGEDY (Preface to Troilus and Cressida, 1679).

Dryden was still interested by the problems of regularity which had been discussed in the Essay of Dra