Dryden is the first eminent English poet whose works show the marks of French influence, and a decline from the artistic toward the artificial, from nature toward fashion. Dryden had known Milton, had visited the grand old man probably in that “small chamber hung with rusty green,” where he is described as “sitting in an elbow-chair, neatly dressed in black, pale but not cadaverous”; or had found him as he “used to sit in a gray, coarse cloth coat, at the door of his house near Bunhill Fields, in warm, sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh air.” Dryden undertook to put the “Paradise Lost” into rhyme, and on Milton’s leave being asked, he said, rather contemptuously, “Ay, he may _tag_ my verses if he will.” He also said that Dryden was a “good rhymist, but no poet.” Dryden turned the great epic into a drama called “The State of Innocence,” and intended for representation on the stage. Sir Walter Scott dryly remarks that the _costume_ of our first parents made it rather an awkward thing to bring them before the footlights. It is an illustration of the character of the times that Dryden makes Eve the mouthpiece of something very like obscenity. Of the taste shown by such a travesty nothing need be said. In the poems of Dryden nothing is more striking than the alternations between natural vigor and warmth of temperament and the merest common-places of diction. His strength lay chiefly in the understanding, and for weight of sterling sense and masculine English, and force of argument, I know nothing better than his prose. His mind was a fervid one, and I think that in his verse he sometimes mistook metrical enthusiasm for poetry. In his poems we find wit, fancy, an amplitude of nature, a rapid and graphic statement of the externals and antitheses of character, and a dignified fluency of verse rising sometimes to majesty--but not much imagination in the high poetic meaning of the term. I have only spoken of his poems at all because they stand midway between the old era, which died with Milton and Sir Thomas Browne, and the new one which was just beginning. In the sixty years extending from 1660 to 1720, more French was imported into the language than at any other time since the Norman Conquest. What is of greater importance, it was French ideas and sentiments that were coming in now, and which shaped the spirit and, through that, the form of our literature.