Short answers, pulled from the story.
John Dryden was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who in 1668 became England's first Poet Laureate. He dominated the literary life of Restoration England so completely that the period came to be known as the Age of Dryden, and the heroic couplet he championed became the dominant poetic form of the eighteenth century.
At around 8 pm on the 18th of December 1679, Dryden was beaten by hired thugs in Rose Alley behind the Lamb and Flag pub in Covent Garden. The attack was believed to have been ordered by the Earl of Rochester in retaliation for Dryden's satirical poem "An Essay upon Satire," which attacked Rochester and several courtiers. Dryden offered fifty pounds in the London Gazette for the identities of his assailants; no one claimed the reward.
Dryden's most celebrated works include the mock-heroic satire Mac Flecknoe, the political poem Absalom and Achitophel (1681), the religious poems Religio Laici (1682) and The Hind and the Panther (1687), and his translation of The Works of Virgil (1697). His plays Marriage a la Mode (1673) and All for Love (1678) were his greatest theatrical successes.
Dryden translated the Aeneid into English couplets, expanding Virgil's nearly ten thousand lines into thirteen thousand seven hundred lines. His method aimed at a middle path between strict word-for-word translation and loose paraphrase, prioritising smooth English and presumed authorial intent over literal accuracy. William Congreve checked the translation against the Latin original, and Joseph Addison wrote the prose prefaces for each book.
Dryden lost the Poet Laureateship after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when he refused to swear the oaths of allegiance to the new monarchs William and Mary. Having converted to Roman Catholicism in 1687 and written Britannia Rediviva celebrating the birth of an heir to the Catholic King James II, Dryden could not in conscience support the Protestant succession. Thomas Shadwell, his longtime literary rival, succeeded him in the role.
Dryden is believed to be the first person to assert that English sentences should not end in prepositions, a rule he created in 1672 by objecting to a phrase in Ben Jonson's 1611 writing. He derived the rule by applying Latin grammar to English, a practice rooted in his habit of translating his own prose into Latin to test its conciseness, then rendering it back into English according to Latin usage.