“He has more ways than one;
                    But he would choose them all before that one.
  Ventidius. He first would choose an ague or a fever.
  Antony. No; it must be an ague, not a fever;
                    He has not warmth enough to die by that.”

Dryden could make his satire as direct and blasting as a thunderbolt.  He thus describes his publisher:—­

“With leering looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair,
With two left legs, and Judas-colored hair,
And frowsy pores that taint the ambient air.”

Argumentative or Didactic Verse.—­Dryden is a master in arguing in poetry.  He was not a whit hampered by the restrictions of verse.  They were rather an advantage to him, for in poetry he could make more telling arguments in briefer compass than in prose.  The best two examples of his power of arguing in verse are Religio Laici, written in 1682, to uphold the Episcopal religion, and The Hind and the Panther, composed in 1687, to vindicate the Catholic church.  Verse of this order is called didactic, because it endeavors to teach or to explain something.  The age of the Restoration delighted in such exercises of the intellect vastly more than in flights of fancy or imagination.

Lyrical Verse.—­While most of Dryden’s best poetry is either satiric or didactic, he wrote three fine lyrical poems:  Alexander’s Feast, A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, and An Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew.  All are distinguished by remarkable beauty and energy of expression. Alexander’s Feast is the most widely read of Dryden’s poems.  The opening lines of the Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew seem almost Miltonic in their conception, and they show great power in the field of lyrical poetry.  Mistress Killigrew was a young lady of rare accomplishments in both poetry and painting, who died at the age of twenty-five.  Dryden thus begins her memorial ode:—­

 “Thou youngest virgin daughter of the skies,
    Made in the last promotion of the blest;
  Whose palms, new plucked from Paradise,
    In spreading branches more sublimely rise,
  Rich with immortal green above the rest: 
       * * * * *
  Thou wilt have time enough for hymns divine,
    Since Heaven’s eternal year is thine.”

Some of his plays have songs and speeches instinct with lyrical force.  The following famous lines on the worth of existence are taken from his tragedy of Aurengzebe:—­

  “When I consider’d life, ’tis all a cheat,
  Yet, fool’d with hope, men favor the deceit,
  Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay: 
  To-morrow’s falser than the former day,
  Lies worse; and while it says, we shall be blest
  With some new joys, cuts off what we possest. 
  Strange cozenage! none would live past years again;
  Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain. 
  And, from the dregs of life, think to receive
  What the first sprightly running could not give. 
  I’m tir’d with waiting for this chemic gold,
  Which fools us young and beggars us when old.”