In 1690 Dryden returned to his old employment, and produced four plays between that year and 1694. This was no doubt owing to poverty, as the revolution deprived him of the laureateship, which he had ob tained on the death of Davcnant in 1668, and the expenses of his family were now increasing. For the next three years he was busied in his translation of the IEneid,' and about the same time with it appeared his celebrated odo on St. Cecilia's day, which is in its way perhaps one of the finest pieces of exact lyrical poetry which our language possesses.
In the middle of 1698 he undertook his adaptations of Chaucer, and about a year and a half afterwards completed his Fables. His last work—a masque, with prologue and epilogue—was written about three weeks before his death, which happened, after a short illness arising from neglected inflammation of the foot, on the 1st of May 1700. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, where a monument was erected to his memory by John duke of Buckingham. A portrait of him hangs in the hall of Trinity College, Cambridge.
It is extremely difficult to form an opinion on the character of a man of whose life we possess such scanty notice, and who, for the greater part of his literary career, wrote entirely to please others. Congreve has left a description of him, and there seems no reason to distrust it, which ensures for him the praise of modesty, self-respect, true-beartedness, and a forgiving spirit. His manners are said to have been easy without forwardness; but it has been said that his powers of conversation were rather limited. It does not seem necessary that we should attribute his extreme indelicacy as a dramatic writer to corresponding coarseness or impurity as a man. The close connection which existed between the Cavaliers and the court of France had tended much to vitiate the taste of those who were the received judges of literary merit. To the Italian sources, whence Spenser and Milton drew, was preferred the French school; and the consequences are as apparent in the grossness of Dryden's comedies as in tho stilts and extravagance of his heroic drama. Dryden appears to have been very
late in discovering that style for which he was most fitted, namely, satire, in which he has never been surpassed, and rarely equalled. His translations of Virgil and Juvenal deserve very high praise, par ticularly when they are compared with the style of translation usual in hiss time. In his version of Chaucer he has not been no successful. That substitution of general for particular images which characterises the performance is always a step away from poetry. Perhaps the most striking instance of the superiority of Chaucer is that description of the Temple of Mars which occurs towards the close of the second book of Palamon and Arcite' in Dryden, and a little past the middle of Chaucer's ' Knighte's Tale.' This passage is also curious as an instance of Dryden's hatred of the clergy ; he introduced two lines to convert Chaucer'a "smiler with the knife under the cloak" into a priest. In his diction Dryden is thoroughly English, free from affec tation, and always perspicuous. His versification is that of a master : no one else has used the heroic measure with such ease and vigour.
Dryden's prose works consist mostly of dedications, the extravagant flattery of which is only palliated by custom, and of prefaces, which are in fact rather essays, and many of them very remarkable ones. His 'Essay on Dramatic .Poesy' has been already noticed ; that on Painting is a good example alike of the excellences and defects of his prose—of its colloquial.ease and rhythm, of its shallowness, loose reasoning, its frequent egotism, and at times somewhat excessive fami liarity. He also wrote Lives of Polybius, Lucian, and Plutarch (' Biog. Brit.'), and assisted in translating the last-named author : perhaps, however, only from the French.
(Langbaine, Dramatic Poets; Johnson, Malone, Scott, and Bell, Lives of Dryden ; Quarterly Review for 1826; Edinburgh Review, 1803; Life of Sir IV. Scott, vol. ii.)