This is true, though it was Blackmore who said it. Dryden's slovenliness, however, consisted not so much in a disposition to spare pains as in a constitutional robustness which rendered artistic perfection all but impossible to him even when he laboured hardest to attain it. One's notion of Dryden is that he was originally a _robust_ man, who, when he first engaged in poetry, could produce nothing better than strong stanzas of rather wooden sound and mechanism, but who, by perseverance and continual work, drilled his genius into higher susceptibility and a conscious aptitude and mastery in certain directions, so that, the older he grew, he became mellower, more musical, and more imaginative, what had been robustness at first having by long practice been subdued into flexibility and nerve. It is stated of Dryden that, in his earlier life at least, he used, as a preparation for writing, to induce on himself an artificial state of languor by taking medicine or letting blood. The trait is characteristic. Dryden's whole literary career was a metaphor of it. Had he died before 1670, or even before 1681, when his _Annus Mirabilis_ was still his most ambitious production, he would have been remembered as little more than a robust versifier; but, living as he did till 1701, he performed work which has entitled him to rank among English poets. As a contributor to the actual body of our literature, and as a man who produced by his influence a lasting effect on its literary methods, Dryden's place is certainly high. DEAN SWIFT. DEAN SWIFT.[7] In dividing the history of English literature into periods it is customary to take the interval between the year 1688 and the year 1727 as constituting one of those periods. This interval includes the reigns of William III., Anne, and George I. If we do not bind ourselves too precisely to the year 1727 as closing the period, the division is proper enough. There _are_ characteristics about the time thus marked out which distinguish it from previous and from subsequent portions of our literary history. Dryden, Locke, and some other notabilities of the Restoration, lived into this period, and may be regarded as partly belonging to it; but the names more peculiarly representing it are those of Swift, Burnet, Addison, Steele, Pope, Shaftesbury, Gay, Arbuthnot, Atterbury, Prior, Parnell, Bolingbroke, Congreve, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, Rowe, Defoe, and Cibber. The names in this cluster disperse themselves over the three reigns which the period includes, some of them having already been known as early as the accession of William, while others survived the first George and continued to add to their celebrity during the reign of his successor; but the most brilliant portion of the period was from 1702 to 1714, when Queen Anne was on the throne. Hence the name of "Wits of Queen Anne's reign," commonly applied to the writers of the whole period.