Dryden's early poems, the _Heroic Stanzas_ on the death of Cromwell, the _Astraea Redux_ on the Restoration, the panegyric of Clarendon, and the verses on the Coronation, are greatly marred for modern readers by extravagant conceits, but are sobriety itself compared to the exploits of contemporary poets, especially the Pindaric. In a more important particular, Dryden, as Scott remarks, has observed a singular and happy delicacy. The topic of the Civil War is but slightly dwelt on; and, although Cromwell is extolled, his eulogist abstains from any reflections against those through whom he cut his way to greatness. Isolated couplets in the other poems occasionally display that perfection of condensed and pointed expression which Dryden habitually attained in his later poems: 'Spain to your gift alone her Indies owes; For what the powerful takes not, he bestows: And France, that did an exile's presence fear, May justly apprehend you still too near.'--_Astraea Redux._ These early attempts, however, were completely thrown into the shade by the _Annus Mirabilis_, a poem on the memorable events of 1666, written at Charlton, near Malmesbury, the seat of Lord Berkeley, where Dryden and his family had resorted in 1665 to escape the plague, and published in February, 1667. The author was then thirty-five, and, judged in the light of his subsequent celebrity, had as yet achieved surprisingly little either in quantity or quality. Youth is generally the most affluent season of poetical activity; and those poets whose claim to inspiration is the most unimpeachable--Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley--have irradiated their early writings with flashes of genius which their maturer skill hardly enabled them to eclipse. This cannot be said of Dryden, who of our great poets, unless Pope be an exception, probably owed least to inspiration and most to pains and practice. Even Pope at this age had produced _The Rape of the Lock_, _The Temple of Fame_, _Eloisa to Abelard_, and his translation of the Iliad, enough to have given him a high place among English poets. The _Annus Mirabilis_ was the first production of Dryden that could have insured him remembrance with posterity, and even this is sadly disfigured with conceits. After all, the poet finds only two marvels of his wonderful year worthy of record--the Dutch war, which had been going on for two years, and which produced a much greater wonder in the year ensuing, when the Dutch sailed up to Gravesend and burned the English fleet; and the Great Fire of London. The treatment of the former is very tedious and dragging; there are many striking lines, but more conceits like the following, descriptive of the English attack upon the Dutch East Indiamen: 'Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball, And now their odours armed against them fly; Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall, And some by aromatic splinters die.'