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 court. Seated in his particular armchair, on the balcony in summer, by the fire in winter, he discoursed on topics current in the literary world, pronounced his verdict of praise or condemnation, and woe to the unfortunate upon whom the latter fell. A week before Christmas, in 1679, as Dryden was walking home from an evening of this sort, he was waylaid by masked ruffians in Rose Alley and was beaten to unconsciousness. The attack was supposed to have been incited by Rochester, who smarted under an anonymous satire mistakenly attributed to Dryden.