We need do no more than mention two or three very bad adaptations of plays of Shakspere to the Restoration taste in which Dryden had a hand; but his most enduring dramatic work is his 'All for Love, or the World Well Lost,' where he treats without direct imitation, though in conscious rivalry, the story which Shakspere used in 'Antony and Cleopatra.' The two plays afford an excellent illustration of the contrast between the spirits of their periods. Dryden's undoubtedly has much force and real feeling; but he follows to a large extent the artificial rules of the pseudo-classical French tragedies and critics. He observes the 'three unities' with considerable closeness, and he complicates the love-action with new elements of Restoration jealousy and questions of formal honor. Altogether, the twentieth century reader finds in 'All for Love' a strong and skilful play, ranking, nevertheless, with its somewhat formal rhetoric and conventional atmosphere, far below Shakspere's less regular but magnificently emotional and imaginative masterpiece. A word must be added about the form of Dryden's plays. In his comedies and in comic portions of the others he, like other English dramatists, uses prose, for its suggestion of every-day reality. In plays of serious tone he often turns to blank verse, and this is the meter of 'All for Love.' But early in his dramatic career he, almost contemporaneously with other dramatists, introduced the rimed couplet, especially in his heroic plays. The innovation was due in part to the influence of contemporary French tragedy, whose riming Alexandrine couplet is very similar in effect to the English couplet. About the suitability of the English couplet to the drama there has always been difference of critical opinion; but most English readers feel that it too greatly interrupts the flow of the speeches and is not capable of the dignity and power of blank verse. Dryden himself, at any rate, finally grew tired of it and returned to blank verse. Dryden's work in other forms of verse, also, is of high quality. In his dramas he inserted songs whose lyric sweetness is reminiscent of the similar songs of Fletcher. Early in his career he composed (in pentameter quatrains of alternate rime, like Gray's 'Elegy') 'Annus Mirabilis' (The Wonderful Year--namely 1666), a long and vigorous though far from faultless narrative of the war with the Dutch and of the Great Fire of London. More important are the three odes in the 'irregular Pindaric' form introduced by Cowley. The first, that to Mrs. (i. e., Miss) Anne Killigrew, one of the Queen's maids of honor, is full, thanks to Cowley's example, of 'metaphysical' conceits and science. The two later ones, 'Alexander's Feast' and the 'Song for St. Cecilia's Day,' both written for a musical society's annual festival in honor of the patron saint of their art, are finely spirited and among the most striking, though not most delicate, examples of onomatopoeia in all poetry.