At this same time he not only discussed the drama, but indulged in its
production; and for a score of years from the early sixties he devoted
himself almost exclusively to the stage. It was the most popular and the
most profitable mode of expression. He began with a comedy, the _Wild
Gallant_, in 1662. It was a poor play and was incontinently condemned.
He then developed a curious series of plays, of which the _Indian
Emperor_, the _Conquest of Grenada_, and _Aurengzebe_ are examples. He
professedly followed French methods, observed the unities, and used the
rhymed couplet. But they were not French; they were a nondescript
incubation by Dryden himself, and were called heroic dramas. They were
ridiculed in the Duke of Buckingham's farce, the _Rehearsal_; but their
popularity was scarcely impaired.

In 1678 Dryden showed a return to common sense and to blank verse in
_All for Love_, and, though it necessarily suffers from its comparison
with the original, Shakspere's _Antony and Cleopatra_, it nevertheless
possesses enough dramatic power to make it his best play. He had
preceded this by rewriting Milton's _Paradise Lost_ as an opera, in the
_State of Innocence_, and he followed it in 1681 with perhaps his best
comedy, the _Spanish Friar_.

Dryden was now far the most prominent man of letters in London. In 1670
he had been appointed Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal with a
salary of two hundred pounds and a butt of sack. His connection with the
stage had been a decided financial success, and he was in receipt of an
income of about seven hundred pounds, which at modern values would
approximate $15,000. His house on Gerard Street, Soho, backed upon
Leicester's gardens. There he spent his days in writing, but the evening
found him at Will's Coffee House. In this famous resort of the wits and
writers of the day the literary dictator of his generation held his