At the time of the production of _Palamon and Arcite_ Dryden had, by long practice, become an absolute master of the verse he used. As we have seen, his early work was impregnated with the peculiarities of the Marinists; and even after the ascendency of French taste at the Restoration he still dallied with the stanza, and was not free from conceits. But his work in the heroic drama and in satire had determined his verse form and developed his ability in its use. In this poem, as in the bulk of his work, he employs the unenjambed pentameter distich; that is, a couplet with five accented syllables in each verse and with the sense terminating with the couplet. Dryden's mastery of this couplet was marvelous. He did not attain to the perfect polish of Pope a score of years later, but he possessed more vitality; and to this strength must be added a fluent grace and a ready sequence which increased the beauty of the measure and gave to it a nervous energy of movement. The great danger that attends the use of the distich is monotony; but Dryden avoided this. By a constant variation of cadence, he threw the natural pause now near the start, now near the close, and now in the midst of his verse, and in this way developed a rhythm that never wearies the ear with monotonous recurrence. He employed for this same purpose the hemistich or half-verse, the triplet or three consecutive verses with the same rhyme, and the Alexandrine with its six accents and its consequent well-rounded fullness. So much for _Palamon and Arcite_. First put into English by the best story-teller in our literature, it was retold at the close of the seventeenth century by the greatest poet of his generation, one of whose chief claims to greatness lies in his marvelous ability for adaptation and paraphrase. DRYDEN'S PLACE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. It remains to indicate briefly Dryden's position in English literature. To the critics of his own time he was without question the greatest man of letters in his generation, and so he undeniably was after the death of Milton. We are not ready to say with Dr. Johnson that "he found English of brick and left it of marble," for there was much marble before Dryden was dreamed of, and his own work is not entirely devoid of brick; but that Dryden rendered to English services of inestimable value is not to be questioned. For forty years the great aim of his life was, as he tells us himself, to improve the English language and English poetry, and by constant and tireless effort in a mass of production of antipodal types he accomplished his object. He enriched and extended our vocabulary, he modulated our meters, he developed new forms, and he purified and invigorated style.