. In the laureateship he was succeeded by his old
antagonist Shadwell; and within a few years he saw the dignity of the
position still further degraded by the appointment to it of Nahum
Tate, one of the worst of the long procession of poetasters who have
filled it. Dryden henceforth belonged to the party out of power. His
feelings about his changed relations are shown plainly in the fine
epistle with which he consoled Congreve for the failure of his comedy
of the 'Double Dealer.' Yet displaced and unpensioned, and sometimes
the object of hostile attack, his literary supremacy was more absolute
than ever. All young authors, whether Whigs or Tories, sought his
society and courted his favor; and his seat at Will's coffee-house was
the throne from which he swayed the literary sceptre of England.

After the revolution of 1688 Dryden gave himself entirely up to
authorship. He first turned to the stage; and between 1690 and 1694
he produced five plays. With the failure in the last-mentioned year of
his tragi-comedy called 'Love Triumphant,' he abandoned writing for
the theatre. The period immediately following he devoted mainly to his
translation of Virgil, which was published in 1697. It was highly
successful; but far more reputation came to him from a large folio
volume that was brought out in November 1699, under the title of
'Fables.' Its contents consisted mainly of poetical narratives founded
upon certain stories of the 'Decameron,' and of the modernization of
some of the 'Canterbury Tales.' In certain ways these have been his
most successful pieces, and have made his name familiar to successive
generations of readers. Of the tales from Boccaccio, that of 'Cymon
and Iphigenia' is on the whole the most pleasing. The modernizations
of Chaucer were long regarded as superior to the original; and though
superior knowledge of the original has effectually banished that
belief, there is on the other hand no justification for the derogatory
terms which are now sometimes applied to Dryden's versions.

The verse in this volume was preceded by a long critical essay in
prose. Many of its views, especially those about the language of
Chaucer, have been long discarded; but the criticism will always be
read with pleasure for the genial spirit and sound sense which pervade
it, and the unstudied ease with which it is written. Cowley and Dryden
are in fact the founders of modern English prose; and the influence of
the latter has been much