page. Latterly the critics with historical bent and
eclectic taste have been busy either at placing Dry-
den in time or at explaining his imperfections by an
appeal to the shortcomings of the audience for which
he wrote. This tasting and this research have
done much to lay bare huge flaws and inequalities
in the surface which Dryden presented to posterity.
Little has been done in the way of exploring the
large spirit which worked beneath that surface, or
in surveying other surfaces less conspicuous. The
embattled seventeenth century left a number of
bruised and defective monuments, none of which
is more engaging than the poetry of John Dryden.

The story of Dryden's poetry is the story of a sin-
ewy mind attacking bulky materials. Since we
know next to nothing about Dryden's mind before
it ripened, the story naturally begins for us with the
materials which are known to have lain at hand dur-
ing the years of his growth.

The thirty years, from 1631 to 1660, during
which Dryden came slowly to his maturity, saw
many slender volumes of fine verse published in
England, the work of Milton, Herbert, Randolph,
Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, Crashaw, Vaughan, and
Herrick. Yet after Ben Jonson no one poetic per-
sonality was dominant in these years, and there
flowed no current powerful enough to draw young
writers in. Of the nine poets who have just been
named, six had done their work in comparative iso-
lation, and the other three had been content to
toss off courtly trifles. Dryden is temperamentally
akin to none of them, and it is unlikely that they

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