The preface to his _Fables_ contains some excellent notes on Chaucer. They may be read as a sample of the breadth and perspicuity of his critical perceptions. His chief poetical works were most of them occasional--designed either to celebrate some remarkable event or to take a side and interpret a policy in the conflict, political or religious, of the time. _Absalom and Achitophel_ and _The Medal_ were levelled at the Shaftesbury-Monmouth intrigues in the closing years of Charles II. _Religio Laici_ celebrated the excellence of the Church of England in its character of _via media_ between the opposite extravagances of Papacy and Presbyterianism. _The Hind and the Panther_ found this perfection spotted. The Church of England has become the Panther, whose coat is a varied pattern of heresy and truth beside the spotless purity of the Hind, the Church of Rome. _Astrea Reddux_ welcomed the returning Charles; _Annus Mirabilis_ commemorated a year of fire and victories, Besides these he wrote many dramas in verse, a number of translations, and some shorter poems, of which the odes are the most remarkable. His qualities as a poet fitted very exactly the work he set himself to do. His work is always plain and easily understood; he had a fine faculty for narration, and the vigorous rapidity and point of his style enabled him to sketch a character or sum up a dialectical position very surely and effectively. His writing has a kind of spare and masculine force about it. It is this vigour and the impression which he gives of intellectual strength and of a logical grasp of his subject, that beyond question has kept alive work which, if ever poetry was, was ephemeral in its origin. The careers of the unscrupulous Caroline peers would have been closed for us were they not visible in the reflected light of his denunciation of them. Though Buckingham is forgotten and Shaftesbury's name swallowed up in that of his more philanthropic descendant, we can read of Achitophel and Zimri still, and feel something of the strength and heat which he caught from a fiercely fought conflict and transmitted with his own gravity and purposefulness into verse. The Thirty-nine Articles are not a proper subject for poetry, but the sustained and serious allegory which Dryden weaves round theological discussion preserves his treatment of them from the fate of the controversialists who opposed him. His work has wit and vitality enough to keep it sweet.