This collection of prose writing from the pen of Dryden dates from 1668 to 1691, and contains work that the editors describe as "a sampler of Dryden as biographer-historian, political commentator, religious controversialist, literary polemicist, literary theorist, and practical critic. Among the works contained here is his "Essay of Dramatick Poesie."

For the first time since 1695, a complete text of "De Arte Graphica" as Dryden himself wrote it is available to readers. In all, Volume XX presents six pieces written during Dryden's final decade, each of them either requested by a friend or commissioned by a publisher. Two are translations, three introduce translations made by others, and the sixth introduces an original work by one of Dryden's friends.
The most recent version of "De Arte Graphica," Saintsbury's late nineteenth-century reissue of Scott's edition, based the text of the translated matter on an edition that was heavily revised by someone other than Dryden. In fact, only one of the pieces offered here, the brief "Character of Saint-Evremond," has appeared complete in a twentieth-century edition. The commentary in this volume supplies biographical and bibliographical contexts for these pieces and draws attention to the views on history and historians, poetry and painting, Virgil and translation, which Dryden expresses in them.
Many other volumes of prose, poetry, and plays are available in the California Edition of "The Works of John Dryden,"