Dryden thought that Epicoene was the best of Jonson's comedies. In the Essay of Dramatick Poesy, Neander claims that ‘there is more wit and acuteness of Fancy in it than in any [other] of Ben Johnson's’. In the ‘Examen’, he analyses it as a model for later dramatists. Neander, who on the whole speaks for Dryden himself throughout the Essay, praises Epicoene for its obedience to the unities, for the variety of its characters and action, and for its intrigue, which he describes, rather startlingly, as ‘the greatest and most noble of any pure unmixed comedy in any language’. Twentieth-century critics and theatre directors have concentrated far more upon Volpone and The Alchemist than upon the prose comedy which Jonson wrote in between the two, and Dryden's verdict now tends to seem eccentric. The Essay of Dramatick Poesy appeared in 1668, the year of Etherege's She Wou'd If She Cou'd, the first distinctively Restoration comedy. Dryden himself, in The Wild Gallant (1663) and Secret Love (1667) had already been feeling his way towards the new comic mode. His preference for Epicoene is to be explained in part by the fact that it anticipates the comedy of the Restoration as Jonson's other plays do not. Indeed, Dryden implies this when he makes the significant claim that Jonson ‘has here described the conversation of gentlemen in the persons of Truewit and his friends, with more gaiety, air, and freedom, than in the rest of his comedies’.