r originals than any other rendering in
English that we possess. The foundation of their method has been
vindicated in the best modern translations from the Greek.

(2)

The term "eighteenth century" in the vocabulary of the literary
historian is commonly as vaguely used as the term Elizabethan. It
borrows as much as forty years from the seventeenth and gives away ten
to the nineteenth. The whole of the work of Dryden, whom we must count
as the first of the "classic" school, was accomplished before
chronologically it had begun. As a man and as an author he was very
intimately related to his changing times; he adapted himself to them
with a versatility as remarkable as that of the Vicar of Bray, and, it
may be added, as simple-minded. He mourned in verse the death of
Cromwell and the death of his successor, successively defended the
theological positions of the Church of England and the Church of Rome,
changed his religion and became Poet Laureate to James II., and
acquiesced with perfect equanimity in the Revolution which brought in
his successor. This instability of conviction, though it gave a handle
to his opponents in controversy, does not appear to have caused any
serious scandal or disgust among his contemporaries, and it has
certainly had little effect on the judgment of later times. It has
raised none of the reproaches which have been cast at the suspected
apostasy of Wordsworth. Dryden had little interest in political or
religious questions; his instinct, one must conceive, was to conform to
the prevailing mode and to trouble himself no further about the matter.
Defoe told the truth about him when he wrote that "Dryden might have
been told his fate that, having his extraordinary genius slung and
pitched upon a swivel, it would certainly turn round as fast as the
times, and instruct him how to write elegies to Oliver Cromwell and King
Charles the Second with all the coherence imaginable; how to write
_Religio Laici_ and the _Hind and the Panther_ and yet be the same man,
every day to change his principle, change his religion, change his coat,
change his master, and yet never change his nature." He never changed
his nature, he was as free from cynicism as a barrister who represents
successively opposing parties in suits or politics; and when he wrote
polemics in prose or verse he lent his talents as a barrister lends his
for a fee. His one intellectual interest was in his art, and it is in
his comments on his