Thus wrote Pope, using for the nonce the triplet and alexandrine by which Dryden frequently varied the couplet.  Pope himself added a greater neatness and polish to Dryden’s verse and brought the system to such monotonous perfection that he “made poetry a mere mechanic art.”

The lyrical poetry of this generation was almost entirely worthless.  The dissolute wits of Charles the Second’s court, Sedley, Rochester, Sackville, and the “mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease,” threw off a few amatory trifles; but the age was not spontaneous or sincere enough for genuine song.  Cowley introduced the Pindaric ode, a highly artificial form of the lyric, in which the language was tortured into a kind of spurious grandeur, and the meter teased into a sound and fury, signifying nothing.  Cowley’s Pindarics were filled with something which passed for fire, but has now utterly gone out.  Nevertheless, the fashion spread, and “he who could do nothing else,” said Dr. Johnson, “could write like Pindar.”  The best of these odes was Dryden’s famous Alexander’s Feast, written for a celebration of St. Cecilia’s day by a musical club.  To this same fashion, also, we owe Gray’s two fine odes, the Progress of Poesy and the Bard. written a half-century later.

Dryden was not so much a great poet as a solid thinker, with a splendid mastery of expression, who used his energetic verse as a vehicle for political argument and satire.  His first noteworthy poem, Annus Mirabilis, 1667, was a narrative of the public events of the year 1666; namely, the Dutch war and the great fire of London.  The subject of Absalom and Ahitophel—­the first part of which appeared in 1681—­was the alleged plot of the Whig leader, the Earl of Shaftesbury, to defeat the succession of the Duke of York, afterward James II., by securing the throne to Monmouth, a natural son of Charles II.  The parallel afforded by the story of Absalom’s revolt against David was wrought out by Dryden with admirable ingenuity and keeping.  He was at his best in satirical character-sketches, such as the brilliant portraits in this poem of Shaftesbury, as the false counselor Ahitophel, and of the Duke of Buckingham as Zimri.  The latter was Dryden’s reply to the Rehearsal..  Absalom and Ahitophel was followed by the Medal, a continuation of the same subject, and Mac Flecknoe, a personal onslaught on the “true blue Protestant poet” Thomas Shadwell, a political and literary foe of Dryden.  Flecknoe, an obscure Irish poetaster, being about to retire from the throne of duncedom, resolved to settle the succession upon his son, Shadwell, whose claims to the inheritance are vigorously asserted.

  The rest to some faint meaning make pretense,
  But Shadwell never deviates into sense.... 
  The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull
  With this prophetic blessing—­Be thou dull.