There are three hundred other stanzas in the poem, of the same make and rhythm, telling of fire, of plague, and of battles. I am not sure if anybody reads it nowadays; but if you do--and it is not fatiguing--you will find wonderful word-craft in it, which repeats the din and crash of battle, and paints the smouldering rage and the blazing power of the Great Fire of London in a way which certain boys, I well remember in old school days, thought represented the grand climacteric of poetic diction. _The London of Dryden._ But let us not forget where we are in our English story; it is London that has been all aflame in that dreadful year of 1666. Thirteen thousand houses have been destroyed, eighty odd churches, and some four hundred acres of ground in the central part of the city have been burned over. The fire had followed swiftly upon the devastating plague of the previous year, which Dryden had gone into Wiltshire to avoid. It is doubtful, indeed, if he came back soon enough to see the great blaze with his own eyes; “chemical fire,” the poet calls it, and it licked up the poison of the plague; but it did not lick up the leprosy of Charles’ court. There was a demand for plays, and for plays of a bad sort; and Dryden met the demand. Never was there an author more apt to divine what the public did want, and more full of literary contrivances to meet it. Dryden knew all the purveyors of this sort of intellectual repast, and all their methods, and soon became a king among them; and to be a king among the playwrights was to have a very large sovereignty in that time. Everybody talked of the plays; all of Royalist faith went to the plays, if they had money; and money was becoming more and more plentiful. There had been the set-back, it is true, of the Great Fire; but English commerce was making enormous strides in these days. There was a pathetic folding of the hands and dreary forecastings directly after the disaster, as after all such calamities. But straight upon this the city grew, with wider streets and taller houses, and in only a very few years the waste ground was covered again, and the new temple of St. Paul’s rising, under the guidance of Sir Christopher Wren, into those grand proportions of cupola and dome, which, in their smoked and sooty majesty, dominate the city of London to-day.