But his _Essay of Dramatic Poesie_, which Dr. Johnson called our "first
regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing," was in the shape
of a Platonic dialogue. When not misled by the French classicism of his
day, Dryden was an admirable critic, full of penetration and sound
sense. He was the earliest writer, too, of modern literary prose. If the
imitation of French models was an injury to poetry it was a benefit to
prose. The best modern prose is French, and it was the essayists of the
gallicised Restoration age--Cowley, Sir William Temple, and above all,
Dryden--who gave modern English prose that simplicity, directness, and
colloquial air which marks it off from the more artificial diction of
Milton, Taylor and Browne.
A few books whose shaping influences lay in the past belong by their
date to this period. John Bunyan, a poor tinker, whose reading was
almost wholly in the Bible and Fox's _Book of Martyrs_, imprisoned for
twelve years in Bedford jail for preaching at conventicles, wrote and,
in 1678, published his _Pilgrim's Progress_, the greatest of religious
allegories. Bunyan's spiritual experiences were so real to him that they
took visible concrete shape in his imagination as men, women, cities,
landscapes. It is the simplest, the most transparent of allegories.
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