John Dryden

John Dryden was born in 1631 at Aldwinkle All Saints in Northamptonshire, of a family which certainly came from North. He was educated at Westminster,and at Trinity collage ,Cambridge.We know extremely little of his beginnings in literature; but in 1663, having succeeded to a small property, he married Lady Elizabeth Howard,eldest daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. In 1670 he was made poet-Laureate and Historiographer- Royal in succession,to Davenant and Howell ,but for ten years more he wrote little plays. The ferments of the Popish  plot induced his great political satires. 

john Dryden

 Dryden did much poorly-paid work for the court, drudging translations and writing The Hind and the Panther (  the greatest poem ever written in the teeth of his subjects) , and when revolution came he was faithful to his cause, and lost everything but his small private fortune. He returned to play-writing, and after a time made inadequate but not inconsiderable  his gains by   translations of Virgil.

His last, and almost his best work contained in the volume of Fables, which was published (1699-1700). He had three sons, the youngest of whom succeeded to the to the baronetcy.  Dryden's change of faith, the questionable shape of a good deal of his dramatic writing.
His intellectual and his literary greatness have seldom been denied .He did not show his great powers very early , and indeed the amount of work that we have from him till after thirtieth year is extremely small.
 Dryden was greatest poet of his own day and style by such a distance that know second can be placed to him. He was the chief agent of in the shaping and the popularising of the new prose. And if one or two tragedies of others have been thought , and several comedies certainly are , better than any plays of his,yet no one did both so well, while he also exceeds all in the volume of his dramatic work and in the variety of its forms.