Nor was this all of Dryden’s translating work. He roamed high and low among all the treasures of the ancients. Theocritus gave his tangle of sweet sounds to him, and Homer his hexameters; Juvenal and Horace and Ovid were turned into his verse; and Dryden’s _Virgil_ is the only Virgil of thousands of readers. He sought motive, too, in Boccaccio and Chaucer; and within times the oldest of us can remember his “Flower and Leaf” and his “Palamon and Arcite” were more read and known than the poems of like name attributed to Chaucer. But in the newer and more popular renderings and printings of the old English poet, Chaucer has come to his own again, and rings out his tales with a lark-like melody that outgoes in richness and charm all the happy paraphrases of Dryden. A still more dangerous task our poet undertook in the days of his dramatic work. I have in my library some half dozen of Dryden’s plays--yellowed and tattered, and of the imprint of 1710 or thereabout--and among them is one bearing this title, _The Tempest, originally written by William Shakespeare, and altered and improved by John Dryden_; and the story of Antony and Cleopatra underwent the same sort of improvement--dangerous work for Dryden; dangerous for any of us. And yet this latter, under name of “All for Love,” was one of Dryden’s greatest successes, and reckoned by many dramatic critics of that day far superior to Shakespeare. One more extract from this voluminous poet and we shall leave him; it was written when he was well toward sixty, and when his dramatic experiences were virtually ended; it is from an ode in memory of Mistress Killigrew, a friend and a poetess. In the course of it he makes honest bewailment, into which it would seem his whole heart entered: “O gracious God! how far have we Profaned thy heavenly gift of Poesy? Made prostitute and profligate the muse, Debased to each obscene and impious use, Whose harmony was first ordained above For tongues of angels, and for hymns of love?” And again, a verselet that is full of all his most characteristic manner: “When in mid-air the golden trump shall sound, To raise the nations under ground; When in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, The judging God shall close the book of Fate; And there the last assizes keep, For those who wake and those who sleep: When rattling bones together fly, From the four corners of the sky; When sinews o’er the skeletons are spread, Those clothed with flesh, and life inspires the dead; The sacred poets first shall hear the sound, And foremost from the tomb shall bound, For they are covered with the lightest ground; And straight, with inborn vigor, on the wing, Like mounting larks, to the new morning sing. Then thou, sweet Saint, before the quire shall go, As Harbinger of Heaven, the way to show, The way which thou so well hast learnt below!”