Dryden is our first great satirist.  The formal satire had been written in the reign of Elizabeth by Donne, and by Joseph Hall, Bishop of Exeter, and subsequently by Marston, the dramatist, by Wither, Marvell, and others; but all of these failed through an over violence of language, and a purpose too pronouncedly moral.  They had no lightness of touch, no irony and mischief.  They bore down too hard, imitated Juvenal, and lashed English society in terms befitting the corruption of imperial Rome.  They denounced, instructed, preached, did every thing but satirize.  The satirist must raise a laugh.  Donne and Hall abused men in classes; priests were worldly, lawyers greedy, courtiers obsequious, etc.  But the easy scorn of Dryden and the delightful malice of Pope gave a pungent personal interest to their sarcasm, infinitely more effective than these commonplaces of satire.  Dryden was as happy in controversy as in satire, and is unexcelled in the power to reason in verse.  His Religo Laici, 1682, was a poem in defense of the English Church.  But when James II came to the throne Dryden turned Catholic and wrote the Hind and Panther, 1687, to vindicate his new belief.  Dryden had the misfortune to be dependent upon royal patronage and upon a corrupt stage.  He sold his pen to the court, and in his comedies he was heavily and deliberately lewd, a sin which he afterward acknowledged and regretted.  Milton’s “soul was like a star and dwelt apart,” but Dryden wrote for the trampling multitude.  He had a coarseness of moral fiber, but was not malignant in his satire, being of a large, careless, and forgetting nature.  He had that masculine, enduring cast of mind which gathers heat and clearness from motion, and grows better with age.  His Fables—­modernizations from Chaucer and translations from Boccaccio, written the year before he died—­are among his best works.

Dryden is also our first critic of any importance.  His critical essays were mostly written as prefaces or dedications to his poems and plays.  But his Essay of Dramatic Poesie, which Dr. Johnson called our “first regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing,” was in the shape of a Platonic dialogue.  When not misled by the French classicism of his day, Dryden was an admirable critic, full of penetration and sound sense.  He was the earliest writer, too, of modern literary prose.  If the imitation of French models was an injury to poetry it was a benefit to prose.  The best modern prose is French, and it was the essayists of the gallicised Restoration age—­Cowley, Sir William Temple, and above all, Dryden—­who gave modern English prose that simplicity, directness, and colloquial air which marks it off from the more artificial diction of Milton, Taylor and Browne.