Is there a writer in the history of English letters who more completely defines an age than John Dryden? His writing life coincides exactly with the second half of the seventeenth century: he was eighteen in 1649 when he published his first poem; his last work was finished a few weeks before his death in May 1700. Between the elegy for Lord Hastings and The Secular Masque, Dryden created what we have come to know as Restoration literature. He wrote in every mode and genre that thrived in these years; in most cases, Dryden's contributions outgo all rivals. The creation of the poetry and drama, the translations and literary criticism, what we have come to know as The Works of John Dryden, is an incomparable achievement from a writer whose early verse gave little indication of incomparability and whose career was variously driven by partisanship and faction, by professional alliance and literary rivalry, and by the incursion of something like a modern commercial market into the aristocratic precincts of literary patronage.