His Prose.—­Although to the majority of people Dryden is known only as a poet, his influence on prose has been so far-reaching as to entitle him to be called one of the founders of modern prose style.

The shortening of sentences has been a striking feature in the development of modern English prose.  Edmund Spenser averages about fifty words to each of his prose sentences; Richard Hooker, about forty-one.  One of the most striking sentences in Milton’s Areopagitica contains ninety-five words, although he crowds over three hundred words into some of his long sentences.  The sentences in some of Dryden’s pages average only twenty-five words in length.  Turning to Macaulay, one of the most finished masters of modern prose, we find that his sentences average twenty-two words.  Dryden helped also to free English prose from the inversions, involutions, and parenthetical intricacies of earlier times.  His influence on both prose and poetry were much the same.  In verse he adopted the short, easily understood unit of the classical couplet; and in prose, the short, direct sentence.

Dryden’s prose deals chiefly with literary criticism.  Most of his prose is to be found in the prefaces to his plays and poems.  His most important separate prose composition is his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, a work which should be read by all who wish to know some of the foundation principles of criticism.

Satiric Poetry.—­No English writer has surpassed Dryden in satiric verse.  His greatest satire is Absalom and Achitophel, in which, under the guise of Old Testament characters, he satirizes the leading spirits of the Protestant opposition to the succession of James, the brother of Charles II., to the English throne.  Dryden thus satirizes Achitophel, the Earl of Shaftesbury:—­

  “Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
   And thin partitions do their bounds divide;
   Else, why should he, with wealth and honor blest,
   Refuse his age the needful hours of rest? 
   Punish a body which he could not please,
   Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease? 
   And all to leave what with his toil he won
   To that unfeathered two-legged thing, a son.
       * * * * *
   In friendship false, implacable in hate,
   Resolved to ruin or to rule the state.”

Zimri, the Duke of Buckingham, is immortalized thus:—­

  “Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
   Was everything by starts, and nothing long.”

Mac Flecknoe is another satire of almost as great merit, directed against a certain Whig poet by the name of Shadwell.  He would have been seldom mentioned in later times, had it not been for two of Dryden’s lines:—­

“The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.”

All for Love, one of Dryden’s greatest plays, shows the delicate keenness of his satire in characterizing the cold-blooded Augustus Caesar, or Octavius, as he is there called.  Antony has sent a challenge to Octavius, who replies that he has more ways than one to die.  Antony rejoins:—­