If you can feel the difference between Chaucer and Dryden you will understand in part what I meant by saying that Dryden was the expression of his time.  For in Restoration times the taste was for art rather than for natural beauty.  The taste was for what was clever, witty, and polished rather than for the simple, stately grandeur of what was real and true.  Poetry was utterly changed.  It no longer went to the heart but to the brain.  Dryden’s poetry does not make the tears start to our eye or the blood come to our cheek, but it flatters our ear with its smoothness and elegance; it tickles our fancy with its wit.

You will understand still better what the feeling of the times was when I tell you that Dryden, with the help of another poet, re-wrote Shakespeare’s Tempest and made it to suit the fashion of the day.  In doing so they utterly spoiled it.  As literature it is worthless; as helping us to understand the history of those times it is useful.  But although The Tempest, as re-written by Dryden, is bad, one of the best of his plays is founded upon another of Shakespeare’s.  This play is called All for Love or the World Well Lost, and is founded upon Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.  It is not written in Dryden’s favorite heroic couplet but in blank verse.  “In my style,” he says, “I have professed to imitate the divine Shakespeare, which, that I might perform more freely, I have disencumbered myself from rhyme.  Not that I condemn my former way, but that this is more proper to my present purpose.”  And when you come to read this play you will find that, master as Dryden was of the heroic couplet, he could write, too, when he chose, fine blank verse.

Perhaps the best-known of all Dryden’s shorter poems is the ode called Alexander’s Feast.  It was written for a London musical society, which gave a concert each year on St. Cecilia’s day, when an original ode was sung in her honor.  Dryden in this ode, which was sung in 1697, pictures Timotheus, the famous Greek musician and poet, singing before Alexander, at a great feast which was held after the conquest of Persia.  Alexander listens while

“The lovely Thais, by his side,
Sate like a blooming Eastern Bride,
In flower of youth and beauty’s pride. 
Happy, happy, happy pair! 
None but the brave,
None but the brave,
None but the brave deserves the fair!”

As Timotheus sings he stirs at will his hearers’ hearts to love, to pity, or to revenge.

“Timotheus, to his breathing flute
And sounding lyre,
Could swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire.”

But those were heathen times.  In Christian times came St. Cecilia and she

“Enlarged the former narrow bounds,
And added length to solemn sounds,
With nature’s Mother-wit, and arts unknown before. 
Let old Timotheus yield the prize. 
Or both divide the crown: 
He raised a mortal to the skies
She drew an angel down.”