hard fact rather than brilliant aperçus, the picture shifts slightly and
a new pattern imposes itself on the material, and so on the works
themselves. Moreover, each age--it is a mere truism--must look for
itself at the great figures of the past, must find for itself what is most
valuable and significant to it in the work of a great writer--without,
however, abdicating from the historian's duty of trying to see what the
writer was to himself, to his contemporaries, and they to him, and of
trying also to see him and his age sub specie aeternitatis. On this, the
deepest level, the biographer's attitude to his subject must be the same
as the humanist's to his fellow men, the position being, as Cyril
Connolly has well expressed it: "Every human being enjoys an
exquisite privilege, that of being alive, and suffers, in the knowledge
that he must die, an unbearable torture. To all those so privileged we
owe respect and honour, to all those under that common death
sentence pity and love . . . . . the sum of human consciousness is
what is loaned to the living for the appreciation of the world and should
be handed on in better shape to those who follow".

The researches of the last forty years, to which I referred, and with-
out which my attempt would have been impossible and otiose, have
been carried out almost entirely by Americans, for reasons on which
this is not the place to speculate. Indeed after the eighteenth century
singularly little real research took place until twentieth-century
American scholars took a hand: Macaulay and Christie, although the
latter was a trained historian and an expert on the Restoration period
which he heartily disliked, produced little in the way of new facts;
Saintsbury, though his Life has a fair claim to be considered the second
best in existence, seems never to have moved from his study. But in
1909, the American Professor George R. Noyes brought out his
complete, annotated edition of the poems and translations, everything
Dryden wrote in verse except the plays. This edition, in its 1950
revised form, is a magnificent piece of scholarship and a gold mine for
the biographer. It has, too, an excellent short life--and, I must
regretfully add, it is difficult to obtain in this country, never having
been handled by an English publisher. It is, therefore, good news
that Dr. James Kinsley of the University of Wales is working on a
complete three-volume edition of all Dryden's poetry, except the
plays, for the Oxford English Texts series.

Two other outstanding American studies must be mentioned. One
is Professor Louis I. Bredvold The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden,
published by the University of Michigan Press in 1934, in which the
contents of a mind steeped in seventeenth-century philosophical,
religious and political writing are devoted to revealing the origin and
development of the ideas in Dryden's mind. The second is Mr.
James M. Osborn John Dryden: Some Biographical Facts and Problems,

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