THEIE AUTHORS AND ORIGIN. 53
against Shaftesbury, Dryden wrote another severe satire on Shaftesbury, entitled, " The Medal." " The satirical powers of Dryden," says Sir Walter Scott, " were of the highest order. He draws his arrow to the head, and dismisses it straight upon his object of aim."
One of Dryden s pieces is of a religious nature, " The Hind and the Panther," in which " The Hind" represents the Church of Rome, and "The Panther" the Church of England. Of this production, Dr. Johnson justly says, " A fable which exhibits two beasts talking theology appears at once full of absurdity." Dryden s plays are too numerous to mention, and some flowed from his productive pen with extraordinary rapidity.
In 1068 Dryden was made poet-laureate, an office he retained till 1G88, when, on account of the accession of William, it was not possible for a Papist any longer to hold the position. The appointment in his place of his old enemy Shadwell was so offensive to Dryden, that he celebrated his inauguration by a satirical poem, entitled " Mac Flecknoe," a work imitated by Pope, as he acknowledges, in his celebrated "Dunciad."
At the age of thirty-one, Dryden married Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. Of their sons, Charles and John assisted their father in his translation of " Juvenal." Dryden s private fortune and his official income were not together sufficient to meet his expenses, so that he sometimes wrote under the pressure of pecuniary necessity.
Several prose works were written by Dryden. His " Essay on Dramatic Poetry," an elegant and instructive dialogue, is valued as the earliest work of the kind in the English language, and as marking an era in the history of our poesy. Of this essay, Dr. Johnson says : " It will not be easy to find, in all the opulence of our language, a treatise so artfully variegated with successive representations of opposite probabilities, so enlivened with imagery, so brightened with illustrations." He also published a translation of Maimbourg s " History of the League," a work undertaken to promote Popery : and by his various works in
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