How shall I speak of that triumphant day When you renewed the expiring pomp of May? A month that owns an interest in your name, You and the flowers are its peculiar claim. I am following the life of Dryden by Professor Saintsbury, an eminent scholar of the Tory way of thought, who has just immortalized himself by publishing a whole volume devoted to the literature of alcoholic liquor. This professor says everything that can be said in defense of Dryden, but the best he can say about this “Astræa Redux” is that in order to appreciate its beauties, you must forget the facts about the “bonnie Prince Charlie” and his reign. The professor lists a few of the facts you must forget: “the treaty of Dover and the closed exchequer, Madam Carwell’s twelve thousand a year and Lord Russell’s scaffold.” That is the way to read literature under the guidance of a leisure-class critic! As we used to say when we were children: “Open your mouth and shut your eyes, and I’ll give you something to make you wise!” The elegant literature of that time was described by the term “metaphysical,” which meant that the poet exhausted his imagination in inventing quaint and startling conceits. For example, one of Dryden’s noble patrons contracted smallpox, and the poet, describing his appearance, records that Each little dimple had a tear in it, To wail the fault its rising did commit. By such personal attention to the rich and powerful John Dryden became the greatest poet of his century, and married the daughter of an earl. He took to writing heroic plays in the style of his time, such preposterous bombast that if I were to tell you about them you would think I was making them up. Then he wrote society comedies, also in the style of his time, which was such high-toned sex nastiness that if I were to write it today I should be taken up by the Shuberts and the Laskys, and paid as much as Cecil de Mille and Robert W. Chambers and Elinor Glyn rolled into one. The “Restoration comedies” were much the same thing as our “bedroom farces,” except that they were long drawn out; the seventeenth century audience was satisfied to listen to smart people gossiping about their vices, while our audience wants to see the smart people climbing through the transom in their pajamas. Also, the old comedies are difficult for us to understand, because the language of polite obscenity changes from age to age, and we don’t always know what Dryden and Congreve and Wycherley are talking about. But we need not rack our brains; we may be sure that all their witticisms have reference to fornication and adultery. There was no other occupation for these “restored” ladies and gentlemen--except gambling and eating and drinking, and cheating and lying in order to get the money to pay for their elegant pleasures.