upon the stage, and they acted in plays whose moral tone is so low that
they cannot now be presented on the stage or read in the drawing-room.
Of course they voiced the social conditions of the time. Marriage ties
were lightly regarded; no gallant but boasted his amours. Revelry ran
riot; drunkenness became a habit and gambling a craze. The court
scintillated with brilliant wits, conscienceless libertines, and
scoffing atheists. It was an age of debauchery and disbelief.

The splendor of this life sometimes dazzles, the lack of conveniences
appalls. The post left London once a week. A journey to the country must
be made in your own lumbering carriage, or on the snail-slow stagecoach
over miserable roads, beset with highwaymen. The narrow, ill-lighted
streets, even of London, could not be traversed safely at night; and
ladies, borne to routs and levees in their sedan chairs, were lighted by
link-boys, and were carried by stalwart, broad-shouldered bearers who
could wield well the staves in a street fight. Such were the conditions
of life and society which Dryden found in the last fifty years of the
seventeenth century.

Strong as were the contrasts in politics and manners during Dryden's
lifetime, they were paralleled by contrasts in literature no less
marked. Dryden was born in 1631; he died in 1700. In the year of his
birth died John Donne, the father of the Metaphysical bards, or
Marinists; in the year of his death was born James Thomson, who was to
give the first real start to the Romantic movement; while between these
two dates lies the period devoted to the development of French
Classicism in English literature.

At Dryden's birth Ben Jonson was the only one of the great Elizabethan
dramatists still living, and of the lesser stars in the same galaxy,