Had Dryden written nothing but plays we should not remember him as one of our great poets.  Yet it was during this time of play-writing that Dryden was made Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal with the salary of 200 pounds a year and a butt of sack.  It was after he became Poet Laureate that Dryden began to write his satires, the poems for which he is most famous.  Although a satire is a poem which holds wickedness up to scorn, sometimes it was used, not against the wicked and the foolish, but against those who merely differed from the writer in politics or religion or any other way of life or thought.  Such was Dryden’s best satire—­thought by some people the best in the English language.  It is called Absalom and Achitophel.  To understand it we must know and understand the history of the times.  Here in the guise of the old Bible story Dryden seeks to hold Lord Shaftesbury up to scorn because he tried to have a law passed which would prevent the King’s brother James from succeeding to the throne, and which would instead place the Duke of Monmouth there.  When the poem was published Shaftesbury was in the Tower awaiting his trial for high treason.  The poem had a great effect, but Shaftesbury was nevertheless set free.

In spite of the fine sounding lines you will perhaps never care to read Absalom and Achitophel save as a footnote to history.  But Dryden’s was the age of satire.  Those he wrote called forth others.  He was surrounded and followed by many imitators, and it is well to remember Dryden as the greatest of them all.  His satires were so powerful, too, that the people against whom they were directed felt them keenly, and no wonder.  “There are passages in Dryden’s satires in which every couplet has not only the force but the sound of a slap in the face,” says a recent writer.*

Saintsbury.

Among the younger writers Dryden took the place Ben Jonson used hold.  He kinged it in the coffee-house, then the fashionable place at which the wits gathered, as Jonson had in the tavern.  He was given the most honored seat, in summer by the window, in winter by the fire.  And although he was not a great talker like Jonson, the young wits crowded around him, eager for the honor of a word or a pinch from the great man’s snuff-box.

Besides his plays and satires Dryden wrote a poem in support of the English Church called Religio Laici.  Then a few years later, when Charles II died and James II came to the throne, Dryden turned Roman Catholic and wrote a poem called The Hind and the Panther in praise of the Church of Rome.