His grandeur he derived from Heaven alone,
      For he was great ere Fortune made him so;
    And wars, like mists that rise against the sun,
      Made him but greater seem, not greater grow.

In these four lines, taken almost at random from the “Heroic Stanzas,” we have an epitome of the thought, the preciseness, and the polish that mark all his literary work.

This poem made Dryden well known, and he was in a fair way to become the new poet of Puritanism when the Restoration made a complete change in his methods.  He had come to London for a literary life, and when the Royalists were again in power he placed himself promptly on the winning side.  His “Astraea Redux,” a poem of welcome to Charles II, and his “Panegyric to his Sacred Majesty,” breathe more devotion to “the old goat,” as the king was known to his courtiers, than had his earlier poems to Puritanism.

In 1667 he became more widely known and popular by his “Annus Mirabilis,” a narrative poem describing the terrors of the great fire in London and some events of the disgraceful war with Holland; but with the theaters reopened and nightly filled, the drama offered the most attractive field to one who made his living by literature; so Dryden turned to the stage and agreed to furnish three plays yearly for the actors of the King’s Theater.  For nearly twenty years, the best of his life, Dryden gave himself up to this unfortunate work.  Both by nature and habit he seems to have been clean in his personal life; but the stage demanded unclean plays, and Dryden followed his audience.  That he deplored this is evident from some of his later work, and we have his statement that he wrote only one play, his best, to please himself.  This was All for Love, which was written in blank verse, most of the others being in rimed couplets.

During this time Dryden had become the best known literary man of London, and was almost as much a dictator to the literary set which gathered in the taverns and coffeehouses as Ben Jonson had been before him.  His work, meanwhile, was rewarded by large financial returns, and by his being appointed poet laureate and collector of the port of London.  The latter office, it may be remembered, had once been held by Chaucer.

At fifty years of age, and before Jeremy Collier had driven his dramas from the stage, Dryden turned from dramatic work to throw himself into the strife of religion and politics, writing at this period his numerous prose and poetical treatises.  In 1682 appeared his Religio Laici (Religion of a Layman), defending the Anglican Church against all other sects, especially the Catholics and Presbyterians; but three years later, when James II came to the throne with schemes to establish the Roman faith, Dryden turned Catholic and wrote his most famous religious poem, “The Hind and the Panther,” beginning: 

    A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged,
    Fed on the lawns and in the forest ranged;
    Without unspotted, innocent within,
    She feared no danger, for she knew no sin.