The greatest writer of the age is John Dryden, who established the heroic couplet as the prevailing verse form in English poetry, and who developed a new and serviceable prose style suited to the practical needs of the age.  The popular ridicule of Puritanism in burlesque and doggerel is best exemplified in Butler’s Hudibras.  The realistic tendency, the study of facts and of men as they are, is shown in the work of the Royal Society, in the philosophy of Hobbes and Locke, and in the diaries of Evelyn and Pepys, with their minute pictures of social life.  The age was one of transition from the exuberance and vigor of Renaissance literature to the formality and polish of the Augustan Age.  In strong contrast with the preceding ages, comparatively little of Restoration literature is familiar to modern readers.

SELECTIONS FOR READING. Dryden.  Alexander’s Feast, Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, selections from Absalom and Achitophel, Religio Laici, Hind and Panther, Annus Mirabilis,—­in Manly’s English Poetry, or Ward’s English Poets, or Cassell’s National Library; Palamon and Arcite (Dryden’s version of Chaucer’s tale), in Standard English Classics, Riverside Literature, etc.; Dryden’s An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, in Manly’s, or Garnett’s, English Prose.

Butler.  Selections from Hudibras, in Manly’s English Poetry, Ward’s English Poets, or Morley’s Universal Library.

Pepys.  Selections in Manly’s English Prose; the Diary in Everyman’s Library.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. HISTORY. Text-book, Montgomery, pp. 257-280; Cheyney, pp. 466-514; Green, ch. 9; Traill; Gardiner; Macaulay.

Special Works.  Sydney’s Social Life in England from the Restoration to the Revolution; Airy’s The English Restoration and Louis XIV; Hale’s The Fall of the Stuarts.

LITERATURE.  Garnett’s The Age of Dryden; Dowden’s Puritan and Anglican.

Dryden.  Poetical Works, with Life, edited by Christie; the same, edited by Noyes, in Cambridge Poets Series; Life and Works (18 vols.), by Walter Scott, revised (1893) by Saintsbury; Essays, edited by Ker; Life, by Saintsbury (English Men of Letters); Macaulay’s Essay; Lowell’s Essay, in Among My Books (or in Literary Essays, vol. 3); Dowden’s Essay, supra.

Butler.  Hudibras, in Morley’s Universal Library; Poetical Works, edited by Johnson; Dowden’s Essay, supra.

Pepys.  Diary in Everyman’s Library; the same, edited by Wheatley (8 vols.); Wheatley’s Samuel Pepys and the World He Lived In; Stevenson’s Essay, in Familiar Studies of Men and Books.

The Restoration Drama.  Plays in the Mermaid Series; Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Comic Writers; Meredith’s Essay on Comedy and the Comic Spirit; Lamb’s Essay on the Artificial Comedy; Thackeray’s Essay on Congreve, in English Humorists.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. 1.  What marked change in social conditions followed the Restoration?  How are these changes reflected in literature?