them with his rhymed _Essay on Translated Verse_; the brilliant court
wits, Rochester, Dorset, and Sedley, who were writing for pleasure and
not for publication, still clung to the frivolous lyric; but the most-
read and worst-treated poet of the Restoration was Butler. He published
his _Hudibras_, a sharp satire on the extreme Puritans, in 1663. Every
one read the book, laughed uproariously, and left the author to starve
in a garret. Of Dryden's contemporaries in prose, there were Sir William
Temple, later the patron of Swift, John Locke who contributed to
philosophy his _Essay Concerning the Human Understanding_, the two
diarists Evelyn and Pepys, and the critics Rymer and Langbaine; there
was Isaac Newton, who expounded in his _Principia_, 1687, the laws of
gravitation; and there was the preaching tinker, who, confined in
Bedford jail, gave to the world in 1678 one of its greatest allegories,
_Pilgrim's Progress_.

Dryden was nearly thirty before the production of the drama was resumed
in England. Parliament had closed the theaters in 1642, and that was an
extinguisher of dramatic genius. Davenant had vainly tried to elude the
law, and finally succeeded in evading it by setting his _Siege of
Rhodes_ to music, and producing the first English opera. At the
Restoration, when the theaters were reopened, the dramas then produced
reflected most vividly the looseness and immorality of the times. Their
worst feature was that "they possessed not wit enough to keep the mass
of moral putrefaction sweet."

Davenant was prolific, Crowne wallowed in tragedy, Tate remodeled
Shakspere; so did Shadwell, who was later to measure swords with Dryden,
and receive for his rashness an unmerciful castigation. But by all odds
the strongest name in tragedy was Thomas Otway, who smacks of true
Elizabethan genius in the _Orphan_ and _Venice Preserved_. In comedy we