The verse in this volume was preceded by a long critical essay in prose. Many of its views, especially those about the language of Chaucer, have been long discarded; but the criticism will always be read with pleasure for the genial spirit and sound sense which pervade it, and the unstudied ease with which it is written. Cowley and Dryden are in fact the founders of modern English prose; and the influence of the latter has been much greater than that of the former, inasmuch as he touched upon a far wider variety of topics, and for that reason obtained a far larger circle of readers in the century following his death. There was also the same steady improvement in Dryden's critical taste that there was in his poetical expression. His admiration for Shakespeare constantly improved during his whole life; and it is to be noticed that in what is generally regarded as the best of his plays--'All for Love,' brought out in the winter of 1677-78--he of his own accord abandoned rhyme for blank verse. The publication of the 'Fables' was Dryden's last appearance before the public. In the following year he died, and was buried in Westminster Abbey by the side of Chaucer and Cowley. After his death his fame steadily increased instead of diminishing. For a long period his superiority in his particular line was ungrudgingly conceded by all, or if contested, was contested by Pope alone. His poetry indeed is not of the highest kind, though usually infinitely superior to that of his detractors. Still his excellences were those of the intellect and not of the spirit. On the higher planes of thought and feeling he rarely moves; to the highest he never aspires. The nearest he ever approaches to the former is in his later work, where religious emotion or religious zeal has lent to expression the aid of its intensity. There is a striking example of this in the personal references to his own experiences in the lines cited below from 'The Hind and the Panther.' Something too of the same spirit can be found, expressed in lofty language, in the following passage from the same poem, descriptive of the unity of the Church of Rome as contrasted with the numerous warring sects into which the Protestant body is divided:-- "One in herself, not rent by schism, but sound, Entire, one solid shining diamond, Not sparkles shattered into sects like you: One is the Church, and must be to be true, One central principle of unity. As undivided, so from errors free; As one in faith, so one in sanctity. Thus she, and none but she, the insulting rage Of heretics opposed from age to age; Still when the giant brood invades her throne, She stoops from heaven and meets them half-way down, And with paternal thunders vindicates her crown. * * * * *