If English literature were really taught in schools, and the eldest boys had received training that brought them in their last school-year to a knowledge of the changes of intellectual fashion that set their outward mark upon successive periods, there is no prose writing of Dryden that could be used by a teacher more instructively than these Discourses on Satire and on Epic Poetry. They illustrate abundantly both Dryden and his time, and give continuous occasion for discussion of first principles, whether in disagreement or agreement with the text. Dryden was on his own ground as a critic of satire; and the ideal of an epic that the times, and perhaps also the different bent of his own genius, would not allow him to work out, at least finds such expression as might be expected from a man who had high aspirations, and whose place, in times unfavourable to his highest aims, was still among the master-poets of the world. The Discourse on Satire was prefixed to a translation of the satires of Juvenal and Persius, and is dated the 18th of August, 1692, when the poet’s age was sixty-one. In translating Juvenal, Dryden was helped by his sons Charles and John. William Congreve translated one satire; other translations were by Nahum Tate and George Stepney. Time modern reader of the introductory discourse has first to pass through the unmeasured compliments to the Earl of Dorset, which represent a real esteem and gratitude in the extravagant terms then proper to the art of dedication. We get to the free sea over a slimy shore. We must remember that Charles the Second upon his death was praised by Charles Montague, who knew his faults, as “the best good man that ever filled a throne,” and compared to God Himself at the end of the first paragraph of Montague’s poem. But when we are clear of the conventional unmeasured flatteries, and Dryden lingers among epic poets on his way to the satirists, there is equal interest in the mistaken criticisms, in the aspirations that are blended with them, and in the occasional touches of the poet’s personality in quiet references to his critics. The comparisons between Horace and Juvenal in this discourse, and much of the criticism on Virgil in the discourse on epic poetry, are the utterances of a poet upon poets, and full of right suggestions from an artist’s mind. The second discourse was prefixed in 1697—three years before Dryden’s death—to his translation of the Æneid. H. M. A DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGINAL AND PROGRESS OF SATIRE: ADDRESSED TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE CHARLES, EARL OF DORSET AND MIDDLESEX, LORD CHAMBERLAIN OF HIS MAJESTY’S HOUSEHOLD, KNIGHT OF THE MOST NOBLE ORDER OF THE GARTER, ETC. MY LORD,