This volume contains Dryden's 1688 translation of Dominiques Bouhours "The Life of St. Francis Xavier," a sixteenth century Jesuit and missionary to the Far East.

Dryden's last three years of published works begin with "Alexander's Feast "and end with "Fables, "his largest miscellany of poetical translations. "Alexander's Feast, "like the earlier "Song for St. Cecilia's Day "("Works, III"), was commissioned by the Musical Society for performance at its annual tribute to sacred music. The "Fables "included selections from Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio, and Chaucer. Extensive and detailed notes to these translations show readers how well Dryden succeeded in transmitting the styles and the very sounds of his originals. "Volume VII "ends with a section of miscellaneous pieces published at other times, including Dryden's only known Latin work. The presentation of the writings in this volume, like that of the entire twenty-volume series, is a tribute not only to Dryden but also to the editors who have guided it through five decades.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1959.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1959.

Volumes V and VI concern Dryden's most involved labor: the complete translation of Virgil into English. Volume V contains The Pastorals and The Georgics in their entirety; the first six books of The Aeneid is contained as well.

In the last decade of Dryden's life, he brought four new works before the theatre-going public: a dramatic opera, a tragedy, a tragicomedy, and a number of appendages to an old comedy by John Fletcher, which was revived partly so that Dryden might have the author's third-night profits. He died that night, but his family received the money. The dramatic opera, "King Arthur," benefited from a fine score by Henry Purcell and has remained in the operatic repertoire to this day. "Cleomenes," the tragedy, was banned until Dryden was able to convince Queen Mary that it did not reflect any seditious sympathy with the exiled James II, after which it was successful. The fate of "Love Triumphant," the tragicomedy, was different; possibly because of a growing swell of moral reform, the play was universally damned, even though its themes of incest and miscellaneous fornication had never brought rejection to Dryden in the past. "The Secular Masque," Dryden's principal contribution to "The Pilgrim" by Fletcher, had undistinguished music, but its lively verse and broad review of the previous century kept the piece on the stage for the next fifty years, and in anthologies up to the present.

The three plays in this volume, composed between 1672 or 1673 and 1675, demonstrate Dryden's versatility and inventiveness as a dramatist. "Amboyna," a tragedy written to stir the English to prosecute the Third Dutch War, describes the destruction by the Dutch of English trading posts on two Indonesian islands. Regarded in its time as sensationalist, it is really a dignified drama that decries violence. "The State of Innocence, " termed an opera, is a rhymed version of Milton's "Paradise Lost." Though never performed or set to music, it became one of Dryden's most widely read dramas. "Aureng-Zebe," the last and generally considered the best of Dryden's rhymed heroic plays, portrays the rise to power of Mogul emperor Aureng-Zebe (1618-1707).

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,"

Volumes V and VI concern Dryden's most involved labor: the complete translation of Virgil into English. Volume VI contains books 7-12 of The Aeneid, as well as commentary and textual notes to the full works of Virgil translated in these two volumes.

Volume XI contains three of Dryden's Plays, along with accompanying scholarly appartus: The Conquest of Granada, Marriage A-la-Mode, and The Assignation.

This volume contains Dryden's 1684 translation of Louis Maimbourg's "The History of the League," a work relating to the religious wars of France in the preceding century, and which Dryden used as a commentary on the religious persecutions of his own time in England.