The Works of John Dryden, Now First Collected in Eighteen Volumes. Volume 18

This eighteenth volume reveals Dryden not as the coroneted poet of empire but as something rarer: a sharp, restless critic wrestling with the boundaries of taste, gender, and literary legacy. The collection opens with a striking defense of women's virtues, a preface to William Walsh's "Dialogue concerning Women" that pushes back against the prevailing snark of male literary culture. Dryden's essays then sweep through figures as varied as the historian Polybius and the satirist Lucian, offering character studies that feel surprisingly modern in their psychological curiosity. Here is Dryden the literary journalist, the cultural commentator, the man who took breaks from composing "Mac Flecknoe" to ponder what makes a life worth recording. For scholars of Restoration literature, these pages offer essential evidence of how Dryden positioned himself in the literary debates of his age. For patient readers willing to meet an archaic style on its own terms, there is genuine intellectual pleasure in watching one of English literature's great formal innovators think out loud about books, authors, and the eternal question of who deserves to be taken seriously.