mot, Earl of Rochester, who suspected him of complicity in an anonymous and scurrilous Essay on Satire. In 1681 and 1682 appeared the matchless satires upon Shaftesbury and his partisans: Absalom and Achitophel, The Medal, Mac Flecknoe, and the second part of Absalom and Achitophel, only in part Dryden's work. In the latter year he also published the Religio Laici, a versified argument in behalf of the English Church. A letter written about this time to Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, shows him to have been in urgent need of money, "even almost to arresting," burdened by the expense of educating his three sons, in ill health, and discouraged. He begged that a half-year of his salary, which was in arrears, be paid to him, and asked for some small employment. In 1683 he was appointed Collector of Customs in the Port of London. In 1685, on the death of Charles, he eulogized him and saluted his successor in an ode, Threnodia Augustalis. Early in 1686 Dryden embraced the Roman Catholic faith, and in 1687 championed his new church in The Hind and the Panther. No conversion has ever been more harshly judged, but the change was really foreshadowed in the Religio Laici. With the Revolution Dryden lost all his offices and was reduced to dependence upon his pen. He wrote five more plays, translated Juvenal and Persius in 1693, Vergil in 1697, wrote his brilliant ode, Alexander's Feast, in the same year, and in 1700 published his Fables. In the preface to the last work he humbly acknowledged the justice of Collier's reproaches for the offenses against morality in his comedies. He died in the same year, upon the 1st of May, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Chronological List of Dryden's Plays (The first date is that of first presentation; the second, that of publication.) 1. The Wild Gallant. Feb., 1662–63; 1669. 2. The Rival Ladies. 1663 (?); 1664. 1 3. The Indian Queen (with Sir Robert Howard). 1664; 1665. 4. The Indian Emperor. 1665; 1667. 5. Secret Love; or, The Maiden Queen. 1667; 1668. 6. Sir Martin Mar-all. 1667; 1668. 7. The Tempest; or, The Enchanted Island (with D'Avenant). 1667; 1670. 8. An Evening's Love; or, The Mock Astrologer. 1668; 1671. 9. Tyrannick Love; or, The Royal Martyr. 1669; 1670. 10-11. Almanzor and Almahide; or, The Conquest of Granada (two parts). 1670; 1672. 12. Marriage à la Mode. 1672; 1673. 13. The Assignation; or, Love in a Nunnery. 1672; 1673. 14. Amboyna. 1673; 1673. 15. The State of Innocence; or, The Fall of Man. Never acted; entered, 1674; printed, 1677.2 16. Aureng-Zebe. 1675; 1676. 17. All for Love; or, The World Well Lost. 1677-78; 1678. 18. The Kind Keeper; or, Mr. Limberham. 1678; 1678. 19. Oedipus (with Lee). 1679; 1679. 20. Troilus and Cressida. 1679; 1679. 21. The Spanish Fryar; or, The Double Discovery. 1681; 1681. 22. The Duke of Guise (with Lee). 1682; 1683. I This play is not included in the list given in the Dictionary of National Biography. 2 An alleged edition of 1674 appears to be mythical; see W. P. Ker, Essays of John Dryden, 1, 313. Chronological List of Dryden's Plays ix 23. Albion and Albanius. 1685; 1685. 28. Love Triumphant. 1693-94; 1694. (According to the bookseller R. Bentley, Dryden supplied a scene in an anonymous comedy, The Mistaken Husband, 1675; in 1691 Dryden denied that the play was his. See Swinburne, “A Relic of Dryden," in Miscellanies (1886), PP. 361-370.) FRONTISPIECE ANTHONY LEE Or LEIGH, that industrious and mirthful player, in the score of years he was before the public from 1672 to 1692 -originated above thrice that number of characters. His masterpiece was Dryden's Spanish Friar, Dominique. How he looked in that once famous part, may be seen by any one who can gain access to Knowle, where his portrait, painted for the Earl of Dorset, still hangs and all but speaks. But we may see how Leigh looked by another portrait, painted in words, by Cibber. "In the canting, grave hypocrisy, of the Spanish Friar, Leigh stretched the veil of piety so thinly over him, that in every look, word, and motion, you saw a palpable slyness shine throughout it. Here he kept his vivacity demurely confined, till the pretended duty of his function demanded it: and then he exerted it with a choleric, sacerdotal insolence. I have never yet seen any one that has filled them" (the scenes of broad jests) "with half the truth and spirit of Leigh. I do not doubt but the poet's knowledge of Leigh's genius helped him to many a pleasant stroke of nature, which, without that knowledge, never might have entered into his conception." Leigh had the art of making pieces-dull to the reader, side-splitting mirth to an audience. - Doran, Annals of the English Stage, vol. 1, p. 144. Introduction THE two plays reprinted in this volume have both an intrinsic and an accidental interest. All for Love is a masterpiece of sentimental tragedy, the presentation, with great technical art, with brilliant rhetoric, and at times with genuine inspiration, of one of the few authentic stories of that imperial romance in which seventeenthcentury tragedy found its favorite theme. The Spanish Fryar, apart from its merits of construction, in which Dryden believed that he had surpassed himself, has in Dominic a figure of great theatrical effectiveness, that for over a century filled pit and gallery with laughter. Of all Dryden's dramatic efforts, All for Love best pleased its author, and The Spanish Fryar, perhaps, his audiences. On the other hand, these two plays show us Dryden, now as the pupil of Shakespeare, now as the disciple of Fletcher. What great change, in the space of two generations, had come upon tragedy, and what little change upon comedy, could hardly be better illustrated than by the comparison of All for Love with Antony and Cleopatra, and of The Spanish Fryar with The Spanish Curate. During the fourteen years which preceded All for Love, Dryden's most ambitious work for the stage had been his heroic plays, beginning with his third play, The Indian Queen, written in collaboration with his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, and first acted in |