His ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest;
    His name a great example stands, to show,
    How strangely high endeavours may be blessed,
    Where piety and valour jointly go.”

So wrote Dryden.  But after the death of Cromwell came the Restoration.  Dryden had been able to admire Cromwell, but although he came of a Puritan family he could never have been a Puritan at heart.  What we learn of him in his writings show us that.  He was not of the stern stuff which makes martyrs and heroes.  There was no reason why he should suffer for a cause in which he did not whole-heartedly believe.  So Dryden turned Royalist, and the very next poem he wrote was On the Happy Restoration and Return of His Majesty Charles the Second.

    “How easy ’tis when destiny proves kind,
    With full spread sails to run before the wind!"*

    Astroe Redux.

So Dryden ran before the wind.

About three years after the Restoration Dryden married an earl’s daughter, Lady Elizabeth Howard.  We know very little about their life together, but they had three children of whom they were very fond.

With the Restoration came the re-opening of the theaters, and for fourteen years Dryden was known as a dramatic poet.  There is little need to tell you anything about his plays, for you would not like to read them.  During the reign of Puritanism in England the people had been forbidden even innocent pleasures.  The Maypole dances had been banished, games and laughter were frowned upon.  Now that these too stern laws had been taken away, people plunged madly into pleasure:  laughter became coarse, merriment became riotous.  Puritan England had lost the sense of where innocent pleasure ends and wickedness begins.  In another way Restoration England did the same.  The people of the Restoration saw fun and laughter in plays which seem to us now simply vulgar and coarse as well as dull.  The coarseness, too, is not the coarseness of an ignorant people who know no better, but rather of a people who do know better and who yet prefer to be coarse.  I do not mean to say that there are no well-drawn characters, no beautiful lines, in Dryden’s plays for that would not be true.  Many of them are clever, the songs in them are often beautiful, but nearly all are unpleasant to read.  The taste of the Restoration times condemned Dryden to write in a way unworthy of himself for money.  “Neither money nor honour—­that in two words was the position of writers after the Restoration."*

Beljame, Le Public et les Hommes de Lettres in Angleterre.

    “And Dryden, in immortal strain,
    Had raised the table-round again
    But that a ribald King and Court
    Bade him toil on to make them sport,
    Demanding for their niggard pay,
    Fit for their souls, a loser lay."*

    Walter Scott, Marmion.