m the stage, and it equalled
for many years the income of a country squire, he was always in debt and
forced to squeeze gifts from patrons by fulsome adulation. Like the rest
of the fine gentlemen about him he aired his Hobbism in sneers at the
follies of religion and the squabbles of creeds. The grossness of his
comedies rivalled that of Wycherley himself. But it is the very
extravagance of his coarseness which shows how alien it was to the real
temper of the man. A keen French critic has contrasted the libertinism
of England under the Restoration with the libertinism of France, and has
ruthlessly pointed out how the gaiety, the grace, the naturalness of
the one disappears in the forced, hard, brutal brilliancy of the other.
The contrast is a just one. The vice of the English libertine was hard
and unnatural just because his real nature took little share in it. In
sheer revolt against the past he was playing a part which was not his
own and which he played badly, which he forced and exaggerated, just
because it was not his own. Dryden scoffs at priests and creeds, but his
greater poetry is coloured throughout with religion. He plays the rake,
but the two pictures which he has painted with all his heart are the
pictures of the honest country squire and the poor country parson. He
passes his rivals in the grossness of his comedies, he flings himself
recklessly into the evil about him because it is the fashion and because
it pays. But he cannot sport lightly and gaily with what is foul. He is
driven if he is coarse at all to be brutally coarse. His freedom of
tone, to borrow Scott's fine remark, is like the forced impudence of a
timid man.

[Sidenote: The New Criticism.]

Slowly but ceaselessly, however, the critical taste of his time told on
Dryden. The poetry of good sense, as it proudly called itself, triumphed
in Boileau, and the rules of taste and form which Boileau laid down were
accepted as the law of letters on the one side of the Channel as well as
on the other. Andrew Marvell, in whom the older imaginative beauty still
found a worshipper, stood alone in his laughter at the degradation of
poetry into prose. Fancy was set aside for reason, "that substantial
useful part which gains the head, while Fancy wins the heart." It was
the head and not the heart that poetry now cared to gain. But with all
its prose the new criticism did a healthy work in insisting on
clearness, simplicity, and good sense. In his "Rehearsal