greatest prose allegory in the language. Close about the person of the king, too, there were able men and wits, capable of writing themselves, or of criticising what was written by others, from the famous Clarendon down to such younger and lighter men as Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, Sackville, Earl of Dorset, and Sir Charles Sedley. Lastly, not to extend the list farther, there was then in London, aged twenty-nine, and going about in a stout plain dress of grey drugget, a Northamptonshire squire's son, named John Dryden, who, after having been educated at Cambridge, had come up to town in the last year of the Protectorate to push his fortune under a Puritan relative then in office, and who had already once or twice tried his hand at poetry. Like Waller, he had written and published a series of panegyrical stanzas on Cromwell after his death; and, like Waller also, he had attempted to atone for this miscalculation by writing another poem, called _Astræa Redux_, to celebrate the return of Charles. As a taste of what this poet, in particular, could do, take the last of his stanzas on Cromwell:-- "His ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest; His name a great example stands to show How strangely high endeavours may be blessed, Where piety and valour jointly go"; or, in another metre and another strain of politics, the conclusion of the poem addressed to Charles:-- "The discontented now are only they Whose crimes before did your just cause betray: Of those your edicts some reclaim from sin, But most your life and blest example win. Oh happy prince! whom Heaven hath taught the way By paying vows to have more vows to pay! Oh happy age! Oh times like those alone By fate reserved for great Augustus' throne, When the joint growth of arms and arts foreshow The world a monarch, and that monarch you!" Such were the _personal elements_, if we may so call them, available at the beginning of the reign of Charles II. for the commencement of a new era in English literature. Let us see next what were the more pronounced _tendencies_ visible amid these personal elements--in other words, what tone of moral sentiment, and what peculiarities of literary style and method, were then in the ascendant, and likely to determine the character of the budding authorship.