He was of a nature exceedingly humane and compassionate; easily forgiving injuries, and capable of a prompt and sincere reconciliation with them who had offended him. . . His His friendship, where he professed it, went much beyond his professions. As his reading

had been very extensive, so was he very happy in memory, tenacious of everything that he had read. He was not more possessed of knowledge than he was communicative of it. But then his communication of it was by no means pedantic, or imposed upon the conversation; but just such, and went so far, as, by the natural turns of the discourse in which he was engaged, it was necessarily promoted or required. He was extreme ready and gentle in his correction of the errors of any writer, who thought fit to consult him; and full as ready and patient to admit of the reprehension of others, in respect of his own oversight or mistakes. He was of very easy, I may say, of very pleasing access; but something slow, and, as it were, diffident in his advances to others. He had something in his nature, that abhorred intrusion into any society whatsoever. Indeed, it is to be regretted, that he was rather blamable in the other extreme; for, by that means, he was personally less known, and, consequently, his character might become liable both to misapprehensions and misrepresentations. -CONGREVE, WILLIAM, 1717, ed., The Works of John Dryden, Dedication.

Mr. John Dryden, the great poet, was buried in Westminster abbey among the old poets in May 1700, being carried from the college of Physicians, where an oration was pronounced by the famous Dr. Garth, in which he did not mention one word of Jesus Christ, but made an oration as an apostrophe to the great god Apollo, to influence the minds of the auditors with a wise, but, without doubt, poetical understanding, and, as a conclusion, instead of a psalm of David, repeated the 30th ode of the third book of Horace's odes, beginning, "Exegi monumentum," &c. He made a great many blunders in the pronunciation.-HEARNE, THOMAS, 1726, Reliquiæ Hearnianæ, ed. Bliss, Nov. 6, vol. II, p. 267.

As we have sometimes great composers of music who cannot sing, we have as frequently great writers that cannot read;

and though without the nicest ear no man can be master of poetical numbers, yet the best ear in the world will not always enable him to pronounce them. Of this truth Dryden, our first great master of verse and harmony, was a strong instance. When he brought his play of "Amphytrion" to the stage, I heard him give it his first reading to the actors, in which, though it is true he delivered the plain sense of every period, yet the whole was in so cold, so flat, and unaffecting a manner, that I am afraid of not being believed when I affirm it.-CIBBER, COLLEY, 1739, An Apology for His Life.

Dryden was not a very genteel man, he was intimate with none but poetical men. -He was said to be a very good man, by all that knew him; he was as plump as Mr. Pitt; of a fresh colour, and a down look, and not very conversible.-POPE, ALEXANDER, 1742-43, Spence's Anecdotes, ed. Singer, p. 197.

Dryden was as disgraceful to the office [of laureat], from his character, as the poorest scribbler could have been from his verses.-GRAY, THOMAS, 1757, Letter to Mason, Dec. 19.

Of

Of his petty habits or slight amusements, tradition has retained little. the only two men whom I have found to whom he was personally known, one told me, that at the house which he frequented, called Will's Coffee-house, the appeal upon any literary dispute was made to him and the other related, that his armed chair, which in the winter had a settled and prescriptive place by the fire, was in the summer placed in the balcony, and that he called the two places his winter and his summer seat. This is all the intelligence which his two survivors afforded me.-JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1779– 81, Dryden, Lives of the English Poets.

We are enabled, from the various paintings and engravings of Dryden, as well as from the less flattering delineations of the satirists of his time, to form a tolerable idea of his face and person. In youth, he appears to have been handsome, and of a pleasing countenance; when his age was more advanced, he was corpulent and florid, which procured him the nickname attached to him by Rochester. In his latter days, distress and disappointment probably chilled the fire of his eye, and the advance of age destroyed the animation

of

his countenance. Still, however, his portraits bespeak the look and features of genius; especially that in which he is drawn with his waving grey hairs. SCOTT, SIR WALTER, 1808-21, Life of Dryden, ed. Saintsbury, p. 371.

Poor Dryden! what with his wife-consort one can not call her, and helpmeet she was not and with a tribe of tobaconist brothers on one hand, and proud Howards on the other; and a host of titled associates, and his bread to dig with his pen, one pities him from one's heart. Well might he, when his wife once said it would be much better for her to be a book than a woman, for then she should have more of his company, reply, "I wish you were, my dear, an almanac, and then I could change you once a year." It is not well to look much into such a home, except for a warning.-HowITT, WILLIAM, 1846, Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, vol. 1, p. 129.

Dryden's mixture of simplicity, goodnature, and good opinion of himself is here seen in a very agreeable manner. It must not be omitted that it was to this house [Will's] Pope was taken when a boy, by his own desire, on purpose to get a sight of the great man, which he did. According to Pope, he was plump, with a fresh color, and a down look, and not very conversible. It appears, however, that what he did say was much to the purpose; and a contemporary mentions his conversation on that account as one of the few things for which the town was desirable. He was a temperate man, though he drank with Addison a great deal more than he used to do, probably so far as to hasten his end.-HUNT, LEIGH, 1848, The Town, ch. viii.

He was married by license in the Church of St. Swithin, by London Stone (as appears by the register of that Church), on the 1st December, 1663. The entry of the license, which is dated "ultimo Novembis," 1663, and is in the office of the Vicar-General of the Archbishop of Canterbury, describes him as a parishioner of St. Clement Danes of about the age of thirty, and the Lady Elizabeth [Howard] as twenty-five and of the parish of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. The poet's signature to the entry is written "Driden.". CUNNINGHAM, PETER, 1854, Johnson's Lives of the Poets, note.

Nor

The licentiousness of Dryden's plays admits of no palliation or defence. He wrote for a licentious stage in a profligate age, and supplied, much to his own disgrace, the kind of material the vicious taste of his audiences demanded. will it serve his reputation to contrast his productions in this way with those of others. Shadwell alone transcends him in depravity. But there is some compensation for all his grossness in turning from his plays to his life, and making the contrast. The morality of his life-the practical test of his heart and his understanding was unimpeachable. The ingenuity of slander was exhausted in assailing his principles, and exposing his person to obloquy-but the morality of his life comes pure out of the furnace. The only kind of personal indiscretion ascribed to him is that of having eaten tarts with Mrs. Reeve the actress, in the Mulberry garden. BELL, ROBERT, 1854, ed., Dryden's Poems, Life.

Such was John Dryden's life. It is a life where neither the heroic constancy of the martyr, nor the imaginative seclusion. and loftiness of the idealist, have any place. But it is one not less interesting to those who are not afraid to look closely, yet fairly and temperately, at human nature. For it is the life of a great man who descended into the arena, who mixed with the crowd, who drudged painfully for daily bread, who, in an unpropitious and unhappy age, was forced to keep body and soul together as he best might. That after half a century of ignoble and ill-requited toil he retained a youthful ingenuousness and purity of soul, need not be maintained. But that an evil life had destroyed his manliness, his sincerity, his kindly heart, his natural generosity of temper, and had converted him into a sordid knave and hypocritical adventurer, who sold his birthright for a mess of pottage and his master for thirty pieces of silver, is a view which is refuted by the clearest evidence, internal and external, and which we may safely refuse to entertain. SKELTON, JOHN, 1865-83, John Dryden, Fraser's Magazine, Essays in History and Biography, p. 164.

The Father, as he has been called, of modern English Poetry, was laid almost in the very grave of the Father of Ancient English Poetry, whose gravestone

was actually sawn asunder to make room for his monument. That monument was long delayed. But so completely had his grave come to be regarded as the most interesting spot in Poets' Corner, that when Pope wrote the epitaph for Rowe, the highest honour he could pay to him was that his tomb should point the way to Dryden's. . . The rude and nameless stone" roused the attention of Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, who in consequence raised the present monument. For the inscription, Pope and Atterbury were long in earnest correspondence. Pope improved upon these sug

gestions, and finally wrote

This Sheffield raised: the sacred dust below Was Dryden's once-the rest who does not know?

This was afterwards altered into the present plain inscription; and the bust erected by the Duke was exchanged for a finer one by Scheemakers, put up by the Duchess, with a pyramid behind it, So the monument remained till our own day, when Dean Buckland, with the permission of the surviving representative of the poet, Sir Henry Dryden, removed all except the simple bust and pedestal.-STANLEY, ARTHUR PENRHYN, 1867, Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey.

Some notion of Dryden's personal appearance may be gathered from contemporary notices. He was of short stature, stout, and ruddy in the face. Rochester christened him Poet Squab, and Tom Brown always calls him "little Bayes. Shadwell in his "Medal of John Bayes" sneers at him as a cherry-cheeked dunce; another lampooner calls him "learned and florid."

Pope remembered him as plump and of fresh colour, with a down look. Lady de Longueville, who died in 1763 at the age of 100, told Oldys that she remembered Dryden's dining with her husband, and that the most remarkable part of his appearance was an uncommon distance between his eyes. He had a large mole on his right cheek. The friendly writer of some lines on his portrait by Closterman says:

"A sleepy eye he shows, and no sweet feature."

He appears to have become gray comparatively early, and he let his gray hair grow long. We see him with his long gray locks in the portrait by which through

engravings his face is best known to us, painted by Kneller in 1698. The face, as we know it by that picture and the engravings, is handsome; it indicates intellect, and sensual characteristics are not wanting.-CHRISTIE, W. D., 1870, ed. Poetical Works of John Dryden, Memoir.

He flung himself, like the men of his day, into the reaction against Puritanism. His life was that of a libertine, and his marriage with a woman of fashion, who was more dissolute than himself, only gave a new spur to his debaucheries. Large as was his income from the stageand it equalled for many years the income of a country squire he was always in debt, and forced to squeeze gifts from patrons by fulsome adulation. Like the rest of the fine gentlemen about him, he aired his Hobbism in sneers at the follies of religion and the squabbles of creeds. The grossness of his comedies rivalled that of Wycherley himself. But it is the very extravagance of his coarseness which shows how alien it was to the real temper of the man. Dryden scoffs at priests and creeds, but his greater poetry is colored throughout with religion. He plays the rake, but the two pictures which he has painted with all his heart are the pictures of the honest country squire and the poor country parson. He passes his rivals in the grossness of his comedies; he flings himself recklessly into the evil about him, because it is the fashion and because it pays; but he cannot sport lightly and gayly with what is foul. He is driven, if he is coarse at all, to be brutally coarse. . . . No man denounced the opponents of the crown with more ruthless invective. No man humbled himself before the throne with more fulsome adulation. Some of this no doubt was mere flattery, but not all of it. Dryden, like his age, was conscious that new currents of feeling and opinion were sweeping him from the old moorings of mankind; but he shrank in terror from the wide ocean over whose waters he drifted. In religion he was a rationalist, a sceptic, whether he would or no; but he recoiled from the maze of "anxious thoughts" which spread before him-of thoughts

"That in endless circles roll,

Without a centre where to fix the soul."

and clung to the church that would give him, if not peace, at least quiet. In

politics he was as much a rationalist as in religion, but he turned horror-struck from the sight of a "State drawn to the dregs of a democracy," and in the crisis of the popish plot he struck blindly for the crown.-GREEN, JOHN RICHARD, 1877-80, History of the English People.

In private life a very respectable, a very amiable, and very generous man. He was, indeed, always going out of his way to do a kindness to his fellowlabourers in literature. He welcomed Wycherley with open arms, though he knew that Wycherley's success must be, to some extent, based on his own depression. Dennis, Shere, Moyle, Motteaux, and Walsh were constantly assisted by him. By his patronage Addison, then a diffident lad at Oxford, and Congreve, a timid aspirant for popular favour, came into prominence. When Southerne was smarting under the failure of his comedy, Dryden was near to cheer and condole with him.

He helped Prior, and he was but ill rewarded. He did what he could for young Oldham; and when the poor fellow buried in his premature grave abilities which might have added to the riches of our literature, he dedicated a touching elegy to his memory. Lee and Garth were among his disciples; and, if he was at first blind or unjust to Otway's fine genius, he afterwards made ample amends. He gave Nell Gwynn a helping hand at the time when she sorely needed it. His letters to Mrs. Thomas still testify not only of his willingness to oblige, but the courtesy and kindliness with which he proffered his services. He was, we are told, beloved by his tenants in Northamptonshire for his liberality as a landlord. The few private letters which have been preserved to us clearly indicate that, if he was not happy with his wife, he was a forbearing and kindly husband, and his devotion to his children is touching in the extreme.-COLLINS, JOHN CHURTON 187895, Dryden, Quarterly Review; Essays and Studies, p. 84.

Several of the Dryden's biographers, in their anxiety to screen the poet, have endeavored to paint him blameless as a man.

Surely it is possible to admire the poetry of Dryden, without seeking to justify its licentiousness, or its sickening adulation of the predominant faction. What need to distort facts with a view of

proving Dryden to have been a spotless, innocent, and all contemporary writers, liars?-HAMILTON, WALTER, 1879, The Poets Laureate of England.

Dryden seems to have borne a fair character in general and family morals; but he is numbered, apparently with reason, among those poets who have found little heartfelt satisfaction in marriage. His wife, it seems, thought him capricious and neglectful, she not making sufficient allowance for his literary pursuits and poetic variability of mood; and recrimination was frequently between them. He wrote an anticipative epitaph for his wife, who, however, survived him; if it is genuine and I am not aware that this has ever been questioned-it speaks volumes for his disesteem of her, and very little for his own good-feeling or courtesy. It has, at any rate, the merit of terseness: "Here lies my wife; here let her lie: Now she's at rest-and so am I." -ROSSETTI, WILLIAM MICHAEL, 1881. The Wives of Poets, Atlantic Monthly, vol. 47, p. 389.

We have seen what foundation there is for this gross charge against Lady Elizabeth; now let us see what ground there is for the charge against Dryden. There are the libels of Shadwell and the rest of the crew, to which not even Mr. Christie, a very severe judge of Dryden's moral character, assigns the slightest weight; there is the immorality ascribed to Bayes. in the Rehersal a very pretty piece of evidence indeed, seeing that Bayes is a confused medley of half-a-dozen persons; there is a general association by tradition of Dryden's name with that of Mrs. Reeve, a beautiful actress of the day; and finally there is a tremendous piece of scandal which is the battle-horse of the devil's advocates. A curious letter appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1745, the author of which is unknown, though conjectures, as to which there are difficulties, identify him with Dryden's youthful friend Southern. "I remember, "I remember," says this person "plain John Dryden before he paid his court with success to the great, in one uniform clothing of Norwich drugget. I have ate tarts with him and Madam Reeve at the Mulberry Garden, when our author advanced to a sword, and a Chedreux wig." Perhaps there is no more curious instance of the infinitesimal foundation on which

scandal builds than this matter of Dryden's immorality. Putting aside mere vague libellous declamation, the one piece of positive information on the subject that we have is anonymous, was made at least seventy years after date, and avers that John Dryden, a dramatic author, once ate tarts with an actress and a third person. This translated into the language of Mr. Green becomes the dissoluteness of a libertine, spurred up to new debaucheries.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1881, Dryden (English Men of Letters), p. 25.

One of the most famous of these houses of entertainment was "Wills'," rendered celebrated by being the haunt of the great Dryden; and here it was he gathered around him the wits and men of letters and culture of his day. In the principal room of "Wills'," there was a great armchair specially reserved for "the old man venerable," which, during the winter, was placed by the fireside, and, during the summer, in the balcony, and these spots he used to refer to as his winter and summer residences. In the great room at "Wills'," common to all, the old man, grown garrulous in his latter days, would talk to any chance visitor who interested him, and tell anecdotes of blind John Milton, whom he had known, and of all the rare events which had happened during

his life. Two men, whose names afterwards became famous, first saw Dryden at "Wills'," one of whom was Alexander Pope, then about twelve years of age, who, at his entreaty, as brought by Sir Charles Wogan from the Forest of Windsor for this purpose; the other being Dean Lockier, who has fortunately left us his first impressions of the poet, whom Colley Cibber used to speak of as "a decent old man."--MOLLOY, J. FITZGERALD, 1882, Court Life Below Stairs, p. 260.

The house in Fetter Lane known as Dryden's house, has just been demolished. It was visited by a good many poeple, and I daresay it may have existed in Dryden's time, but there is considerable doubt whether he was ever inside of it. However, it had a good reputation among lovers of antiquity, and I daresay its woodwork, if the woodwork happened to be sound, will be converted into book covers for future editions of Dryden. I understand the balustrades of the staircase

realized a good price, and it will probably reach even a higher figure among reliclovers. STERRY, J. ASHBY, 1887, English Notes, The Book Buyer, vol. 4, p. 191.

The affection of his contemporaries and literary disciples proves, as well as their direct testimony, that in his private relations Dryden showed a large and generous nature. Congreve dwells especially upon his modesty, and says that he was the "most easily discountenanced" of all men he ever knew. The absence of arrogance was certainly combined with an absence of the loftier qualities of character. Dryden is the least unworldly of all great poets. He therefore reflects most completely the characteristics of the society dominated by the court of Charles II, which in the next generation grew into the town of Addison and Pope.-STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1888, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XVI, p. 73.

Asaph.-Bayes.-Glorious John.-Ignoramus. Matthew Coppinger.-Neander.Old Squab.-Poet Squab.-Reverend Ler. -Shimei.-FREY, ALBERT R., 1888, Sbriquets and Nicknames, p. 401.

On the whole, we may say that he was one whom we would probably have esteemed if we could have known him; but in whom, apart from his writings, we should not have discovered the first liter

ary figure of his generation.-GARNETT, RICHARD. 1895, The Age of Dryden, p. 16.

DRAMAS

I don't think Dryden so bad a dramatic writer as you seem to do. There are as many things finely said in his plays, as almost by anybody. Beside his three best, ("All for Love," "Don Sebastian," and the "Spanish Fryar,") there are others. that are good: as, "Sir Martin Mar-all," "Limberham," and "The Conquest of Mexico." His "Wild Gallant" was written while he was a boy, and is very bad. --All his plays are printed in the order they were written.-POPE, ALEXANDER, 1734-36, Spence's Anecdotes, ed. Singer, p. 128.

Dryden's comedies have all the point that there is in ribaldry, and all the humour that there is in extravagance. I am sorry I can say nothing better of them. He was not at home in this kind of writing, of which he was himself conscious. His play was horse-play. His wit (what