would or no Dryden's temper was always
intellectual. He was a poet, for if dead to the subtler and more
delicate forms of imaginative delight he loved grandeur, and his
amazing natural force enabled him to realize in great part the grandeur
which he loved. But beneath all his poetry lay a solid bottom of reason.
His wildest outbursts of passion are broken by long passages of cool
argument. His heroes talk to his heroines in a serried dialectic. Every
problem of morals, of religion, of politics, forces itself into his
verse, and is treated there in the same spirit of critical inquiry.

[Sidenote: His Tragedies.]

In other words Dryden was the poet of his day. But he was the poet of a
time of transition, and his temper is transitional. It was only by slow
and uncertain steps that he advanced to the full rationalism of the
Critical school. His first little poem, some verses written in 1659 on
the death of Lord Hastings, is a mass of grotesque extravagances in the
worst style of Donne. The dramas of his early work after the Restoration
are crowded with the bombastic images, the affected conceits, the
far-fetched metaphors which it is the merit of the critical school to
have got rid of. In his tragedies indeed the tradition of a freer and
larger time jarred against the unities and the critical rules with which
he strove to bind himself. If he imitated the foreign stage he could not
be blind to the fact that the Elizabethan playwrights possessed "a more
masculine fancy and a greater spirit in the writing than there is in any
of the French." He followed Corneille but he was haunted by memories of
"the divine Shakspere." His failure indeed sprang from the very truth
of his poetic ideal. He could not be imaginative in the highest dramatic
sense, but the need of imaginativeness pressed on him while it was
ceasing to press on his brother playwrights. He could not reach the
sublime, but neither could he content himself as they did with the
prosaic; he rants, fumes, and talks wild bombast in the vain effort
after sublimity.

[Sidenote: His Comedies.]

Dryden failed in Comedy as he failed in Tragedy, but here the failure
sprang from the very force and vigour of his mind. He flung himself like
the men of his day into the reaction against Puritanism. His life was
that of a libertine; and his marriage with a woman of fashion who was
yet more dissolute than himself only gave a new spur to his
debaucheries. Large as was his income fro