1. Quoted from The Poems of John Dryden , ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958). Further citations to Fables are to this edition: poetry is cited by line number, prose by page number. [BACK]

2. For full analysis of the political meaning of this poem see Jay Arnold Levine, "John Dryden's Epistle to John Driden," JEGP , 63 (1964), 450-474, p. 471; and Elizabeth Duthie, "'A Memorial of My Own Principles': Dryden's 'To My Honor'd Kinsman'." ELH , 47 (1980), 682-704. [BACK]

3. The Letters of John Dryden , ed. Charles E. Ward (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1942), p. 121. [BACK]

4. Letters, p. 120. [BACK]

5. Letters, pp. 123-124. [BACK]

6. Letters, p. 135. [BACK]

7. Arthur W. Hoffman, John Dryden's Imagery (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1962), pp. 130-131; Reuben A. Brower, "Dryden and the Invention of Pope," in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Essays in Honor of Alan Dugald McKillop , ed. Carroll Camden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press for William Marsh Rice University, 1963), 211-233, p. 211; Earl Miner, Dryden's Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), p. 226; George Watson, "Dryden and the

Jacobites," TLS , 16 March 1973, 301-302, p. 302; Thomas H. Fijimura, "Dryden's Virgil: Translation as Autobiography," SP , 80 (1983), 67-83, p. 83. Brower justly observes that "the figure of the 'retired' poet . . . was a cultural metaphor, not a simple fact" (p. 212), but he does not speculate on Dryden's purpose in invoking this metaphor. William J. Cameron, in ''John Dryden's Jacobitism," in Restoration Literature: Critical Approaches , ed. Harold Love (London: Methuen, 1972), 277-308, is unusual in giving the late Dryden a public message. He argues that Dryden's purpose in the late work, especially the Aeneis , was to urge passive obedience to William on the Jacobites. [BACK]

8. See, for example, Levine, pp. 470-471, and Achsah Guibbory, The Map of Time (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 245-247. Guibbory provides an interesting analysis of changes in Dryden's view of history throughout his career, with which I am in substantial agreement, though I see these changes as rhetorical rather than ideological. [BACK]

9. Quoted from The Works of John Dryden , vol. 4, ed. William Frost, A. P. Chambers, and Vinton Dearing (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1974), p. 363. All citations of the Dedication of Examen Poeticum are to this edition. [BACK]

10. Poems , ed. Kinsley, 1. 916. All citations to Dryden's Virgil are to this edition: poetry is cited by line number, prose by page number. [BACK]

11. Levine, p. 471. [BACK]

12. The Works of John Dryden , vol. 3, ed. Earl Miner and Vinton Dearing (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 1. 181. All citations of Eleonora are to this edition. [BACK]

13. Steven N. Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 181-182. [BACK]

14. The Works of John Dryden , ed. Sir Walter Scott, rev. ed. George Saintsbury, vol. 8 (Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1882), p. 427. All citations of Love Triumphant are to this edition. [BACK]

15. Thomas H. Fujimura, "The Personal Element in Dryden's Poetry," PMLA , 89 (1974), 1007-1023, pp. 1007-1008. See also "Dryden's Virgil" (cited above) and "'Autobiography' in Dryden's Later Work," Restoration , 8 (1984), 17-29. [BACK]

16. Works , 3:231. All citations of the Dedication of Eleonora are to this edition. [BACK]

17. Donald R. Benson, in "Space, Time, and the Language of Transcendence in Dryden's Later Poetry," Restoration 8 (1984), 10-16, notes Dryden's emphasis on transcendence but sees it as the effect of a "general ontological shift" in progress during Dryden's age. For a more detailed and rather different reading of politics in Eleonora , see Anne Barbeau Gardiner, "Dryden's Eleonora : Passion for the Public Good as a Sign of the Divine Presence," SP , 84 (1987), 95-117. [BACK]

18. Works , 3:501. [BACK]

19. Dryden's late digressiveness has been remarked by Zwicker, who explains it as a strategy of disguise and a principle of aesthetics. See Politics and Language , pp. 62-63. [BACK]

20. Works , 4:65. All citations of the Discourse of Satire are to this edition. [BACK]

21. Miner, Dryden's Poetry , p. 287. [BACK]

22. For a discussion of Dryden's definition of audience and other rhetorical strategies in his prefaces, see Zwicker, pp. 35-69. [BACK]

24. There have been several attempts to find thematic and structural coherence in Fables . See Miner, Dryden's Poetry , pp. 287-323, Sloman, Dryden , and "An Interpretation of Dryden's Fables," ECS , 4 (1971), 199-211, and James D. Garrison, "The Universe of Dryden's Fables," SEL , 21 (1981), 409-423. Cedric D. Reverand II, in Dryden's Final Poetic Mode: The Fables (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), also reduces Fables to a kind of unity: he finds in them systematic self-contradiction that neatly advances ''subversion" as the final value for Dryden in the 1690s. [BACK]

25. Judith Sloman, in Dryden: The Poetics of Translation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), pp. 3-25. Sloman's contention that the translations somehow embody Dryden's own thought on a wide array of political, religious, philosophical, and aesthetic subjects cannot be disproven, but it is too dependent on arbitrary interpretation of evidence to be convincing. For example, to construct her argument about the philosophical coherence of Fables , Sloman must argue that we read Homer ironically, Ovid straightforwardly, and Boccaccio metaphorically: we are to reject the values of epic (p. 165), accept Ovid's version of Pythagoras's beliefs on time as a direct expression of Dryden's own view (p. 155), and understand Guiscardo's heart in Sigismonda and Guiscardo as symbolic of the eucharist (p. 185). [BACK]

26. Alan Roper, in Dryden's Poetic Kingdoms (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 165-184, provides an excellent discussion of politics in "To Congreve." The fullest analysis of "To Kneller" is Earl Miner's in "Dryden's Eikon Basilike: To Sir Godfrey Kneller ," in Seventeenth-Century Imagery: Essays on Uses of Figurative Language from Donne to Farquhar , ed. Miner (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1971), 150-167. The longest discussion of politics in Alexander's Feast is Bessie Proffitt's in "Political Satire in Dryden's Alexander's Feast, TSLL , 11 (1970), 1307-1316: a briefer but more

likely account is Howard Erskine-Hill's in "John Dryden" in History of Literature in the English Language, Vol. 4 Dryden to Johnson , ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1971), 23-59, pp. 50-51. [BACK]

27. See Miner's commentary in Works , 4:748. Some critics, most notably Cedric D. Reverand in "Dryden on Dryden in 'To Sir Godfrey Kneller'," PLL , 17 (1981), 164-180, argue that Dryden accuses Kneller of compromising his artistic integrity to serve the court. But in the poem, Dryden places the blame squarely on the court; indeed, it is impossible to tell from the poem alone that Kneller enjoys more court favor than Dryden. [BACK]

28. Dryden's Poetry , pp. 268-269. [BACK]

29. "John Dryden," p. 51. [BACK]

30. John Dawson Carl Buck, in "The Ascetic's Banquet: The Morality of Alexander's Feast," TSLL , 17 (1975), 573-589; Ruth Smith, in "The Argument and Contexts of Dryden's Alexander's Feast," SEL 18 (1978), 465-490; and Robert P. Maccubin, in "The Ironies of Dryden's 'Alexander's Feast; or the Power of Musique': Texts and Contexts," Mosaic 18 (1986), 34-47, all suggest that Timotheus is meant to appear morally irresponsible in his manipulation of Alexander. I do not find this argument convincing: nowhere in the poem is Timotheus's moral standing presented for judgment; at the end he is clearly judged according to aesthetic standards and found worthy. [BACK]

31. Unlike the Dedication of the Aeneis , the politics of which has been discussed at some length in the works cited above by Watson, Cameron, and Zwicker, the Discourse of Satire has been treated almost exclusively as a critical treatise. Michael Seidel, in Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 143-144, notes that in discussing Horace as a court poet Dryden is thinking both of his opposition to William and his former service to Charles; and Edward P. Nathan, "The Bench and the Pulpit: Conflicting Elements in the Augustan Apology for Satire," ELH , 52 (1985), 375-396, suggests that in describing Augustus' extension of Lex laesae Majestatis Dryden is attacking contemporary censorship of literature. [BACK]

32. See George R. Noyes, ed. The Poetical Works of Dryden , 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1950), p. 1011, and Poems , ed. Kinsley, p. 2040, for Dryden's borrowing here from Le Bossu. [BACK]

33. The analogy between Dryden-Virgil and Augustus-William has been analyzed by Cameron, Fujimura, in "Personal Element," and, most notably, by Zwicker, to whose account I am much indebted. [BACK]

34. Several critics have discussed the application of the Augustus-Aeneas parallel to William. Watson and Cameron suggest that Dryden is advocating obedience to William; Zwicker argues more plausibly that Dryden condemns Aeneas for William's crimes. I think that contrast is at

least as important here as resemblance: Dryden follows Virgil in celebrating Aeneas and condemns William by enforcing the difference between the pious Trojan and the English parricide. [BACK]

35. Jean Regnauld de Segrais, Traduction de l'Éneïde de Virgile (Paris, 1668), 1:38. [BACK]

36. Politics and Language , p. 188. [BACK]

37. Politics and Language , p. 188. [BACK]