period. In his last
years he wrote a spirited translation of Vergil, and retold in his own
inimitable way various stories from Chaucer and Boccaccio and _Ovid_.
These stories were published in a volume entitled _Fables, Ancient and
Modern_. Dryden died in 1700 and was buried in Westminster Abbey
beside Chaucer.

It is difficult to speak positively of Dryden's character. He wrote a
poem in honor of the memory of Cromwell, and a little later another
poem, _Astraea Redux_, welcoming Charles II. He argued in stirring
verse in favor of the Episcopal religion when that was the faith of
the court; but after the accession of James II., who was a Catholic,
Dryden wrote another poem to prove the Catholic Church the only true
one. He had been appointed poet laureate in 1670, but the Revolution
of 1688, which drove James from the throne, caused Dryden to lose the
laureateship. He would neither take the oath of fealty to the new
government nor change his religion. In spite of adversity and the loss
of an income almost sufficient to support him, he remained a Catholic
for the rest of his life and reared his sons in that faith.

He seems to have been of a forgiving disposition and ready to
acknowledge his own faults. He admitted that his plays were disfigured
with coarseness. He was very kind to young writers and willing to help
them with their work. In his chair at Will's Coffee House, discoursing
to the wits of the Restoration about matters of literary art, he was
one of the most prominent figures of the age.

His Prose.--Although to the majority of people Dryden is known only
as a poet, his influence on prose has been so far-reaching as to
entitle him to be called one of the founders of modern prose style.

The shortening of sentences has been a striking feature in the
development of modern English prose. Edmund Spenser averages about
fifty words to each of his prose sentences; Richard Hooker, about
forty-one. One of the most striking sentences in Milton's
_Areopagitica_ contains ninety-five words, although he crowds over
three hundred words into some of his long sentences. The sentences in
some of Dryden's pages average only twenty-five words in length.
Turning to Macaulay, one of the most finished masters of modern prose,
we find that his sentences average twenty-two words. Dryden helped
also to free English prose from the inversions, involutions, and
parenthetical intricacies of earlier times. His influence on both
prose a