Congreve's comment reveals itself as praise only at the last – at least he did it ‘so well’. The volume of Dryden's achievement is undoubted. It is not so clear how to evaluate his literary career, or indeed to assert that his collected works constitute a literary career at all. Steven Zwicker opens The Cambridge Companion to Dryden with this very point: ‘Who first thought of The Works of John Dryden? Not, I think, the poet himself.’ If the goal is ‘holistic commentary’, then it may be unattainable. When Zwicker faces the challenge of assessing Dryden's poetic career, he emphasizes the role of irony, and finds the author ‘disappearing into his art’. He does not fit the post-Virgilian mould that has dominated career criticism, though he certainly had plans and ambitions. It may be that Dryden actually had multiple careers – epic poet, translator, dramatist, critic, satirist – that overlap at times but cannot feasibly be made to cohere. However, he may also be a significant representative of another sort of literary career: the ‘complete’ career, where many different sorts of writing are attempted in an implicit or explicit project to command as much canonical territory as possible.