[4] Having been re-founded by Elizabeth I, Westminster during this period embraced a very different religious and political spirit encouraging royalism and high Anglicanism.

As a humanist public school, Westminster maintained a curriculum which trained pupils in the art of rhetoric and the presentation of arguments for both sides of a given issue.

[5] Here he would have experienced a return to the religious and political ethos of his childhood: the Master of Trinity was a Puritan preacher by the name of Thomas Hill who had been a rector in Dryden's home village.

[7] Returning to London during the Protectorate, Dryden obtained work with Oliver Cromwell's Secretary of State, John Thurloe.

Shortly thereafter he published his first important poem, Heroic Stanzas (1659), a eulogy on Cromwell's death which is cautious and prudent in its emotional display.

In 1660 Dryden celebrated the Restoration of the monarchy and the return of Charles II with Astraea Redux, an authentic royalist panegyric.

These poems suggest that Dryden was looking to court a possible patron, but he was to instead make a living in writing for publishers, not for the aristocracy, and thus ultimately for the reading public.

In 1667, around the same time his dramatic career began, he published Annus Mirabilis, a lengthy historical poem which described the English defeat of the Dutch naval fleet and the Great Fire of London in 1666.

When the Great Plague of London closed the theatres in 1665, Dryden retreated to Wiltshire where he wrote Of Dramatick Poesie (1668), arguably the best of his unsystematic prefaces and essays.

He felt strongly about the relation of the poet to tradition and the creative process, and his best heroic play Aureng-zebe (1675) has a prologue which denounces the use of rhyme in serious drama.

[citation needed] Dryden's poem "An Essay upon Satire" contained a number of attacks on King Charles II, his mistresses and courtiers, but most pointedly on the Earl of Rochester, a notorious womaniser.

[9] Dryden's greatest achievements were in satiric verse: the mock-heroic Mac Flecknoe, a more personal product of his laureate years, was a lampoon circulated in manuscript and an attack on the playwright Thomas Shadwell.

Dryden's main goal in the work is to "satirize Shadwell, ostensibly for his offenses against literature but more immediately we may suppose for his habitual badgering of him on the stage and in print.

His other major works from this period are the religious poems Religio Laici (1682), written from the position of a member of the Church of England; his 1683 edition of Plutarch's Lives Translated From the Greek by Several Hands in which he introduced the word 'biography' to English readers; and The Hind and the Panther, (1687) which celebrates his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

[citation needed] He wrote Britannia Rediviva celebrating the birth of a son and heir to the Catholic King and Queen on 10 June 1688.

[16] When, later in the same year, James II was deposed in the Glorious Revolution, Dryden's refusal to take the oaths of allegiance to the new monarchs, William and Mary, left him out of favour at court.

Dryden translated works by Horace, Juvenal, Ovid, Lucretius, and Theocritus, a task which he found far more satisfying than writing for the stage.

[18] His final translations appeared in the volume Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), a series of episodes from Homer, Ovid, and Boccaccio, as well as modernised adaptations from Geoffrey Chaucer interspersed with Dryden's own poems.

[citation needed] Dryden died on 12 May 1700, and was initially buried in St. Anne's cemetery in Soho, before being exhumed and reburied in Westminster Abbey ten days later.

In his poems, translations, and criticism, he established a poetic diction appropriate to the heroic couplet—Auden referred to him as "the master of the middle style"[23]—that was a model for his contemporaries and for much of the 18th century.

He did have a committed admirer in George Saintsbury, and was a prominent figure in quotation books such as Bartlett's, but the next major poet to take an interest in Dryden was T. S. Eliot, who wrote that he was "the ancestor of nearly all that is best in the poetry of the eighteenth century", and that "we cannot fully enjoy or rightly estimate a hundred years of English poetry unless we fully enjoy Dryden.

Although he uses formal structures such as heroic couplets, he tried to recreate the natural rhythm of speech, and he knew that different subjects need different kinds of verse.

Van Doren complained that in translating Virgil's Aeneid, Dryden had added "a fund of phrases with which he could expand any passage that seemed to him curt."

Dryden did not feel such expansion was a fault, arguing that as Latin is a naturally concise language it cannot be duly represented by a comparable number of words in English.

Thus having pass'd the night in fruitless pain, I to my longing friends return again[36] Dryden's translation is based on presumed authorial intent and smooth English.

A few lines later, with ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum; ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago, he alters the literal translation "Thrice trying to give arms around her neck; thrice the image grasped in vain fled the hands," in order to fit it into the metre and the emotion of the scene.

(5:529)[37]In a similar vein, Dryden writes in his Preface to the translation anthology Sylvae: Where I have taken away some of [the original authors'] Expressions, and cut them shorter, it may possibly be on this consideration, that what was beautiful in the Greek or Latin, would not appear so shining in the English; and where I have enlarg’d them, I desire the false Criticks would not always think that those thoughts are wholly mine, but that either they are secretly in the Poet, or may be fairly deduc’d from him; or at least, if both those considerations should fail, that my own is of a piece with his, and that if he were living, and an Englishman, they are such as he wou’d probably have written.

The couple met after 1660, when Dryden began lodging in London with her brother, Sir Robert Howard, son of the earl of Berkshire.