taste of the age, to make verse translations from the chief Latin poets,
and in 1697 he brought out a version of all the poems of Vergil. He died in
1700, and his death may conveniently be taken, with substantial accuracy,
as marking the end of the Restoration period.

Variety, fluency, and not ungraceful strength are perhaps the chief
qualities of Dryden's work, displayed alike in his verse and in his prose.
Since he was primarily a poet it is natural to speak first of his verse;
and we must begin with a glance at the history of the rimed pentameter
couplet, which he carried to the highest point of effectiveness thus far
attained. This form had been introduced into English, probably from French,
by Chaucer, who used it in many thousand lines of the 'Canterbury Tales.'
It was employed to some extent by the Elizabethans, especially in scattered
passages of their dramas, and in some poems of the early seventeenth
century. Up to that time it generally had a free form, with frequent
'running-on' of the sense from one line to the next and marked irregularity
of pauses. The process of developing it into the representative
pseudo-classical measure of Dryden and Pope consisted in making the lines,
or at least the couplets, generally end-stopt, and in securing a general
regular movement, mainly by eliminating pronounced pauses within the line,
except for the frequent organic cesura in the middle. This process, like
other pseudo-classical tendencies, was furthered by Ben Jonson, who used
the couplet in more than half of his non-dramatic verse; but it was
especially carried on by the wealthy politician and minor poet Edmund
Waller (above, page 164), who for sixty years, from 1623 on, wrote most of
his verse (no very great quantity) in the couplet. Dryden and all his
contemporaries gave to Waller, rather too unreservedly, the credit of
having first perfected the form, that is of first making it (to their
taste) pleasingly smooth and regular. The great danger of the couplet thus
treated is that of over-great conventionality, as was partly illustrated by