lowe, and to the high personal character of Drayton are of great
interest. Meres was plainly a man of muddled and inaccurate learning, of
no judgment, and of no critical power, a sort of Elizabethan Boswell
without Boswell's virtues, and it is no paradox to say that it is this
which gives his _Discourse_ its chief interest. It probably represents
not his own but the judgments current on contemporary writers in
Elizabethan literary circles. And we cannot but be struck with their
general fairness. Full justice is done to Shakespeare, who is placed at
the head of the dramatists; full justice is done to Spenser, who is
styled divine, and placed at the head of narrative poets; to Sidney, both
as a prose writer and as a poet; to Drayton, to Daniel, and to Hall,
Lodge, and Marston, as satirists. We are surprised to find such a high
place assigned to Warner, 'styled by the best wits of both our
universities the English Homer,' and a modern critic would probably
substitute different names, notably those of Lodge and Campion, for those
of Daniel and Drayton in a list of the chief lyric poets then in activity.
In Meres's remarks on painters and musicians, there is nothing to detain
us.

Of a very different order is the important critical treatise which comes
next, Dryden's _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_, to which are prefixed as
prolegomena Dryden's _Dedicatory Epistle to The Rival Ladies_, Sir Robert
Howard's _Preface to Four New Plays_, and, as supplementary, Howard's
_Preface to The Duke of Lerma_, and Dryden's _Defence of the Essay of
Dramatic Poesy_. As Dryden's _Essay_, like almost all his writings, both
in verse and prose, was of a more or less occasional character, it will
be necessary to explain at some length the origin of the controversy out
of which it sprang, as well as the immediate object with which it was
written.

The Restoration found Dryden a literary adventurer, with a very slender
patrimony and with no prospects. Poetry was a drug in the market;
hack-work for the booksellers was not to his taste; and the only chance
of remunerative employment open to him was to write for the stage. To
this he accordingly betook himself. He began with comedy, and his comedy
was a failure. He then betook himself to a species of drama, for which
his parts and accomplishments were better fitted. Dryden had few or none
of the qualifications essential in a great dramatist; but as a
rhetorician, in the more comprehensive sense of the ter