His father had died in 1654 and had bequeathed him a small estate. When, in 1657, he finally left the university, he attached himself to his uncle, Sir Gilbert Pickering, a general of the Commonwealth. In 1658 he wrote _Heroic Stanzas on Cromwell's Death;_ but shortly thereafter he went to London, threw himself into the life of literary Bohemia, and at the Restoration, in 1660, wrote his _Astroea Redux_, as enthusiastically as the veriest royalist of them all. This sudden transformation of the eulogist of Cromwell to the panegyrist of Charles won for Dryden in some quarters the name of a political turncoat; but such criticism was unjust. He was by birth and early training a Puritan; add to this a poet's admiration for a truly great character, and the lines on Cromwell are explained; but during his London life he rubbed elbows with the world, early prejudices vanished, his true nature asserted itself, and it was John Dryden himself, not merely the son of his father, who celebrated Charles' return. On December 1, 1663, he married Lady Elizabeth Howard, eldest daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, and the sister of a literary intimate. Tradition has pronounced the marriage an unhappy one, but facts do not bear out tradition. He nowhere referred other than affectionately to his wife, and always displayed a father's warm affection for his sons, John, Charles, and Erasmus. Lady Elizabeth outlived her husband and eventually died insane. During the great plague in London, 1665, Dryden fled with his wife to Charleton. He lived there for two years, and during that time wrote three productions that illustrate the three departments of literature to which he devoted himself: _Annus Mirabilis_, a narrative and descriptive poem on the fire of 1666 and the sea fight with the Dutch, the _Essay on Dramatic Poesy_, his first attempt at literary criticism in prose, and the _Maiden Queen_, a drama. In _Annus Mirabilis_ we find the best work yet done by him. Marinist quaintness still clings here and there, and he has temporarily deserted the classical distich for a quatrain stanza; but here, for the first time, we taste the Dryden of the _Satires_ and the _Fables_. His _Essay on Dramatic Poesy_ started modern prose. Hitherto English prose had suffered from long sentences, from involved sentences, and from clumsy Latinisms or too bald vernacular. Dryden happily united simplicity with grace, and gave us plain, straightforward sentences, musically arranged in well-ordered periods. This was the vehicle in which he introduced literary criticism, and he continued it in prefaces to most of his plays and subsequent poems.