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Dryden should have been transferred to the volume of the dramatic poets
if the quality of his dramas had borne any relative proportion to their
quantity, or to the quality of his poetry; but it is the latter which
gives him his great and lasting distinction. They are his Satires, and
Fables, and Translations; his Absalom and Achitophel; his Hind and
Panther; his Palemon and Arcite; the Flower and the Leaf; and, in short,
all those racy and beautiful stories which he threw into modern poetry
from Chaucer and Boccacio; with his Virgil, and lyrical compositions,
and, at the head of these, his Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, that stamp his
character with the English public as one of the most vigorous,
harmonious, and truly British writers. Dryden displayed no great powers
of creation; perhaps the literary hurry of his life prevented this; but
he contemplated for years a national epic on Prince Arthur, and
probably, had he possessed perfect leisure for carrying out this design,
he would have astonished us as much with the display of that faculty as
he delights us with the masterly vigor of his reasoning powers; with his
harmony and nerve of style; and with the stiletto stabs of his
annihilating satire. But from any necessity of criticism on his genius,
the familiar acquaintance of every true lover of poetry with the merits
and beauties which have fixed his immortality, fortunately for my space,
fully exempts me. Even over the long succession of literary events in
his life we must pass, and fix our attention on his homes and haunts.
For nearly forty years, from 1660 to 1700, he was before the public as
an active author; and on the disappearance of Milton from the field of
life, he became, and continued to be, the most marked man of his time;
yet it is astonishing how little is known of his town haunts and habits.
Of his publications, the appearance of his dramas, the controversies
into which he fell with his literary cotemporaries, his change of
religion, and his clinging to the despotic government of the Stuarts, we
know enough; but of his home life next to nothing. That he lived in
Gerrard-street, and was a constant frequenter of Will's Coffee-house,
Covent Garden, seems to be almost all that is known of his town resorts.
Like Addison, and most literary men who have married titled ladies, he
did not find it contribute much to his comfort. His wife was Lady
Elizabeth Howard, the eldest daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, and
sister of his friend, Sir Robert Howard. Her temper is said to have been
very peculiar, and that she looked down on Dryden as of inferior rank,
though he was descended from a very old family, mixed with the most
distinguished men of the nobility, and _was_ the _first man_ of his
time; but conceit or the blindness of aristocratic pride do not alter
the real nature or proportion of things, except in the vision of the
person afflicted with them. Dryden was the great personage, and his
titled wife the little one, and on him, therefore, lay the constant
pressure of the unequal yoke he bore.
What, no doubt, rendered the conduct of his wife worse, was the pride
of her family on the one hand, and the unlucky connection of Dryden's
brothers with ordinary trades. His family, and that of his mother, the
Pickerings, had taken a decided part during the civil wars for the
Parliament, while that of his wife had been as zealous on the Royalist
side. Besides this, Erasmus, his immediate younger brother, was in trade
in King-street, Westminster; James, the fourth brother, was a
tobacconist in London; one of his sisters was married to a bookseller in
Little Britain, and another to a tobacconist in Newgate-street; these
would be dreadful alliances to a family proud and poor. "No account,"
says Mitford, in his life of the poet, "has been transmitted of the
person of Dryden's wife, nor has any portrait of her been discovered. I
am afraid her personal attractions were not superior to her mental
endowments; that her temper was wayward, and that the purity of her
character was sullied by some early indiscretions. A letter from Lady
Elizabeth to her son at Rome is preserved, as remarkable for the
elegance of the style as the correctness of the orthography. She says:
'Your father is much at woon as to his health, and his defnese is wosce,
but much as he was when he was heare; give me a true account how my
deare son Charles is head dus.' Can this be the lady who had formerly
held captive in her chains the gallant Earl of Chesterfield?"
"Lady Elizabeth Dryden," says Scott, "had long disturbed her husband's
domestic happiness. 'His invectives,' says Malone, 'against the married
state were frequent and bitter, and were continued till the latest
period of his life;' and he adds, from most respectable authority, that
the family of the poet held no intimacy with his lady, confining their
intercourse to mere visits of ceremony. How could they? how could the
tobacconist, and the other tobacconist's wife, and the little
bookseller's wife of Little Britain, venture under the roof of the proud
lady of the proud house of Howard, with 'her weak intellects and her
violent temper?'"
A similar alienation, also, it is said, took place between her and her
relatives, Sir Robert Howard, perhaps, being excepted; for her brother,
the Honorable Edward Howard, talks of Dryden's being engaged in a
translation of Virgil as a thing he had learned merely by common report.
Her wayward disposition, Malone says, was, however, the effect of a
disordered imagination, which, shortly after Dryden's death, degenerated
into absolute insanity, in which state she remained until her own death
in 1714, probably in the seventy-ninth year of her age.
Poor Dryden! what with his wife--consort one can not call her, and
helpmeet she was not--and with a tribe of tobacconist 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. Yet the outside of that life, like many others, would
have deceived an ordinary spectator. There all was brilliant and
imposing. "Whether," says Sir Walter Scott, "we judge of the rank which
Dryden held in society by the splendor of his titled and powerful
friends, or by his connections among men of genius, we must consider him
as occupying at one time as high a station, in the very foremost circle,
as literary reputation could gain for its owner. Independent of the
notice with which he was honored by Charles himself, the poet numbered
among his friends most of the distinguished nobility. The great Duke of
Ormond had already begun that connection which subsisted between Dryden
and three generations of the house of Butler. Thomas Lord Clifford, one
of the Cabal ministry, was uniform in patronizing the poet, and appears
to have been active in introducing him to the king's favor. The Duke of
Newcastle loved him sufficiently to present him with a play for the
stage; the witty Earl of Dorset, then Lord Buckhurst, and Sir Charles
Sedley, admired in that loose age for the peculiar elegance of his loose
poetry, were his intimate associates, as is evident from the turn of The
Essay on Dramatic Poesy, where they are the speakers. Wilmot, earl of
Rochester, soon to act a very different part, was then anxious to
vindicate Dryden's writings; to mediate for him with those who
distributed the royal favor, and was thus careful, not only of his
reputation, but his fortune. In short, the author of what was then held
the first style of poetry, was sought for by all among the great and gay
who wished to maintain some character for literary taste. It was then
Dryden enjoyed those genial nights described in the dedication of the
Assignation, when 'discourse was neither too serious nor too light, but
always pleasant, and for the most part instructive; the raillery neither
too sharp upon the present, nor too censorious upon the absent; and the
cups such only as raised the conversation of the night, without
disturbing the business of the morrow.' He had not yet experienced the
disadvantages attendant on such society, or learned how soon literary
eminence becomes the object of detraction, of envy, of injury, even from
those who can best feel its merit, if they are discouraged by dissipated
habits from emulating its flight, or hardened by perverted feeling
against loving its possessors." But all this came; and, in the mean
time, the poet had to work, like Pegasus in the peasant's cart, for the
means to maintain this intercourse with such lofty society. And what did
all these great friends do for him? They procured him no good post in
return for good services rendered to their party, but the poet's meager
office of the laureateship, which, added to that of historiographer to
royalty, brought him £200 a year, and his butt of canary. Poor Dryden!
with the cross wife, and the barren blaze of aristocracy around him, the
poorest coal-heaver need not have envied him.
Neither did "glorious John" escape his share of annoyance from his
cotemporaries of the pen, nor from the publishers. He had a controversy
with his friend and brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, on the true
nature of dramatic poetry, which speedily degenerated into personal
bitterness, and a long estrangement. Then came the Rehearsal, that witty
farce in which he was ridiculed in the character of Bayes, and his
literary productions, as well as personal characteristics, held up to
the malicious merriment of the world by a combination of the wits and
fashionable pen-men of the time; among them the notorious Villiers, duke
of Buckingham, the author of Hudibras, the Bishop of Rochester, and
others. The miserable Elkanah Settle was set up as a rival of him; and
after these rose in succession the hostile train of the licentious Lord
Rochester, Lord Shaftesbury, Milbourne, Blackmore, and others, by whom
every species of spite, misrepresentation, and ridicule were for years
heaped upon him. Nor did his enemies restrain themselves to the use of
the pen in their attacks upon him. One of the most prominent events of
Dryden's life is that of a ruffianly attack upon him as he returned from
his club at Will's Coffee-house, on a winter's night. Lord Mulgrave had
published a satire, called an Essay on Satire, in which Rochester and
other wits and profligates of the time were introduced. The poem was a
wretched affair; but Dryden, to oblige Mulgrave, had undertaken to
revise it. Much labor he could not have bestowed upon it, it was so flat
and poor; but Rochester thought fit to attribute it to Dryden himself;
and a set of ruffians, supposed to be hired by him and the Duchess of
Portsmouth, who had been also reflected on, fell on the poet as he
passed through Rose-street, Covent Garden, on his way from Will's
Coffee-house to his own house in Gerrard-street. A reward of £50 was in
vain offered in the London Gazette and other newspapers for the
discovery of the perpetrators of the outrage. The beating was, in those
loose times, thought a good joke. The Rose Alley ambuscade became
almost proverbial; and even Mulgrave, the real author of the satire, and
upon whose shoulders the blows ought in justice to have descended, in
his Art of Poetry, thus mentions the circumstance with a pitiful sneer:
"Though praised and punished for another's rhymes,
His own deserve as great applause _sometimes_."
Thus attacked with pens and cudgels by the envious writers of the day,
Dryden was nearly starved by the booksellers. On one occasion, provoked
by the refusal of timely supplies by Jacob Tonson, he did not do as
Johnson did by Cave, knock him down with a quarto, but ran him through
with a triplet, describing the bibliopole's person:
"With leering looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair,
With two left legs, and Judas-colored hair,
And frowzy pores that taint the ambient air."
"Tell the dog," said the poet to the messenger by whom he sent these
complimentary lines, "that he who wrote these can write more." But he
needed not to write more; they were as effective as he could desire.
Jacob, however, on his part, could make his tongue as pungent as Dryden
could his verse. Johnson, in the "Life of Dryden," relates that Lord
Bolingbroke one day making a call on Dryden, he heard another person
enter the house. "That," said Dryden, "is Tonson. You will take care not
to depart before he goes away; for I have not completed the sheet which
I promised him; and if you leave me unprotected, I shall suffer all the
rudeness to which his resentment can prompt his tongue."
Perhaps the happiest hours of Dryden's life, next to those spent over
his finest compositions in his study, were passed at Will's
Coffee-house. After dinner, at two o'clock, he used to repair thither,
where assembled all the most famous men of the time. There he reigned
supreme. He had a chair placed for him by the chimney in winter, and
near the balcony in summer; where, says his biographer, he pronounced,
_ex cathedrâ_, his opinions upon new publications, and in general upon
all matters of doubtful criticism. Latterly, all who had occasion to
ridicule and attack him, represent him as presiding in this little
senate. His opinions, however, were not maintained with dogmatism, but
he listened to criticism, provided it was just, from whatever unexpected
and undignified quarter it happened to come. In general, however, it may
be supposed that few ventured to dispute his opinion, or to place
themselves in the gap between him and the object of his censure.
Dryden's house, which he appears to have resided in from the period of
his marriage till his death, was, as I have said, in Gerrard-street; the
fifth on the left hand, coming from Little Newport-street, now No. 43.
The back windows looked upon the gardens of Leicester House, of which
circumstance the poet availed himself to pay a handsome compliment to
the noble owner. His excursions to the country seem to have been
frequent; perhaps the more so, as Lady Elizabeth always remained in
town. In his latter days, the friendship of his relations, John Dryden,
of Chesterton, and Mrs. Steward, of Cotterstock, rendered their houses
agreeable places of abode to the aged poet. They appear, also, to have
had a kind solicitude about his little comforts, of value infinitely
beyond the contributions they made toward aiding him.
The principal traits of his domestic life have been collected together
by Malone. From these, and from the pen of Congreve, we learn that he
was, in youth, of handsome form and agreeable countenance; modest in his
manner, reluctant to intrude himself on the notice and company of
others, easily chilled and rebuffed by any thing like a distant
behavior. He is described as most amiable and affectionate in his
family, generous beyond his means, and most forgiving of injuries; all
noble traits of character. Malone related, on the authority of Lady
Dryden, that at that time the poet's little estate at Blakesley was
occupied by one Harriots, grandson of the tenant who held it in
Dryden's time, who stated that his grandfather used to take great
pleasure in talking of him. He was, he said, the easiest and the kindest
landlord in the world; and never raised the rent during the whole time
he possessed the estate. The two most unfortunate circumstances in his
life, next to his marriage, was his going over from Puritanism to
popery, and from the liberal opinions of his family to the adherence of
the worst of kings. For these changes it would be difficult to assign
any better motive than that of mending his fortunes. But if this were
the case, he was bitterly punished for it in both instances. The
monarchs that he flattered were Stuarts, and the last of them being
driven out, left him to encounter all the scorn, the sarcasms and
sacrifices that were sure to come against him with the Dutch monarch of
1688. He was, instead of gaining more from royalty by his change,
deprived of that which he had--the laureateship and office of
historiographer; and saw them conferred, with £300 a year, on his
unworthy rival, Shadwell. The change of his religion was equally
unpropitious. His sons became more connected with Rome than England.
Charles, the eldest, was chamberlain of the household of Pope Innocent
XII., but having suffered by a fall from a horse, he returned to
England, and was drowned in attempting to swim across the Thames at
Datchett, near Windsor, in August, 1704. The second son, John, also went
to Rome, and acted as the deputy of Charles, in the pope's household; he
died at Rome. Both of these sons were poetical, and published. Erasmus
Henry, the third son, went also to Rome, and became a captain in the
pope's guards. He afterward returned to England, and succeeded to the
family title of baronet, but not to the estate of Canons-Ashby, where
he, however, continued to live with the proprietor, Edward Dryden, his
cousin, till his death in 1710. Thus terminated the race of the great
satiric poet.
In the county of Northampton there are various places connected with
Dryden. He was of the old family of the Drydens, or Dridens, of
Canons-Ashby, which family there still remains. The poet was born at the
parsonage-house of Aldwinkle All-Saints. His father was Erasmus Dryden,
and his mother Mary Pickering, the daughter of the rector of Aldwinkle,
a son of the well-known Sir Gilbert Pickering, a zealous Puritan. It
appears that our author's father lived at Tichmarsh, and that his son
was born under his grandfather's roof. At Tichmarsh, accordingly, we
find Dryden receiving his first education, whence he proceeded to
Westminster, and studied under Dr. Busby, and thence to Cambridge.
Scott says, "If we can believe an ancient tradition, the poem of the
'Hind and Panther' was chiefly composed in a country retirement at
Rushton, in Northamptonshire. There was an embowered walk at this place,
which, from the pleasure which the poet took in it, retained the name of
Dryden's Walk; and here was erected, about the middle of the last
century, an urn, with the following inscription: 'In memory of Dryden,
who frequented these shades, and is here said to have composed his poem
of "The Hind and Panther."'"
This spot was, no doubt, the old house and park of the Treshams; that
old, zealous Catholic family, of which one member, Sir Francis Tresham,
played so conspicuous a part in the Gunpowder Plot. This Sir Francis
Tresham had been actively engaged in the affair of the Earl of Essex,
and his head had only been rescued from the block by his father bribing
_a great lady_, and some people about the court, with several thousand
pounds. This business was so closely veiled, that for some time the
direct proofs of Tresham's connection with the business escaped the
hands of the historians. The late examinations into the treasures of the
State Paper Office have, however, made this fact, like so many others,
clear. Long ago, also, original documents, fully proving it, fell into
the hands of Mr. Baker, the excellent historian of Northamptonshire,
including an admirable love-letter by this Sir Francis, who,
notwithstanding his narrow escape, again rushed into the Gunpowder
Treason, being a near relation of Catesby, the prime actor in it. The
movements of Tresham in the matter have all the character of those of an
actor in some strange romance. From the moment that he was admitted to
the secret, Catesby was struck with inward terror and misgivings.
Tresham augmented this alarm by beginning soon to plead warmly for
warning the Lords Stourton and Mounteagle, who had married his sisters.
A few days after, he suddenly came upon Catesby, Winter, and Fawkes, in
Enfield Chase, and reiterated his entreaty. They refused; and then, on
the 26th of October, as Lord Mounteagle was sitting at supper, at an old
seat of his at Hoxton, which he seldom visited, and to which he had now
come suddenly, a letter was brought in by his page, saying, he had
received it from a tall man whose face he could not discern in the dark,
and who went hastily away. The letter was tossed carelessly by
Mounteagle to a gentleman in his service, who read it aloud. It was the
very warning which Tresham wished so earnestly to convey to him.
Mounteagle, in astonishment, carried the letter to Cecil the next
morning, and thus the secret of the impending catastrophe was out. Once
more Catesby and Winter appointed a meeting with Tresham in Enfield
Chase. Their purpose was to charge him with the warning of Mounteagle,
and, if he were found guilty, to stab him to the heart on the spot. But
while they told him what had been done, they fixed their eyes
searchingly on his countenance; all was clear and firm; not a muscle
moved, not a tone faltered; he swore solemn oaths that he was ignorant
of the letter, and they let him go. This man, when part of the
conspirators were arrested, remained at large; while others fled, he
hastened to the council to offer his services in apprehending the
rebels. Finally, arrested and conveyed to the Tower himself, there,
under torture, he implicated the Jesuits, Garnet and Greenway, in some
treason in Queen Elizabeth's time, then retracted the confession, and
died in agony, as the Catholics believed, of poison. Such was the career
and end of this strange man. The family estate passed away into the
hands of the Cockaynes, and is now the property of Mr. Hope. Could there
be a more inspiring solitude for the composition of a poem, the object
of which was to smooth the way for the return of Catholic ascendency,
and that by a poet warm with the first fires of a proselyte zeal?
Among other places of Dryden's occasional sojourn may be mentioned
Charlton, in Wiltshire, the seat of his wife's father, the Earl of
Berkshire, whence he dates the introduction to his Annus Mirabilis; and
Chesterton, in Huntingdonshire, the seat of his kinsman, John Driden,
where he translated part of Virgil. In the country he delighted in the
pastime of fishing, and used, says Malone, to spend some time with Mr.
Jones, of Ramsden, in Wiltshire. Durfey was sometimes of this party; but
Dryden appears to have underrated his skill in fishing, as much as his
attempt at poetry. Hence Fenton, in his epistle to Lambard:
"By long experience, Durfey may, no doubt,
Ensnare a gudgeon, or sometimes a trout;
Yet Dryden once exclaimed in partial spite,
'He _fish_!' because the man attempts to write."
And, finally, Canons-Ashby connects itself inevitably with his name. It
was the ancient patrimony of the family. It was not his father's, it was
not his, or his sons, though the title generally connected with it fell
to his son, and there his son lived and died; yet, as the place which
gives name and status to the line, it will always maintain an
association with the memory of the poet. These are the particulars
respecting it collected by Mr. Baker. The mansion of the Drydens, seated
in a small deer park, is a singular building of different periods. The
oldest part, as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, or
perhaps earlier, is built round a small quadrangle. There is a
dining-room in the house thirty feet long by twenty feet wide, which is
said to be entirely floored and wainscoted with the timber of one single
oak, which grew in this lordship. In this room are various portraits of
persons of, and connected with, the family. The drawing-room is
traditionally supposed to have been fitted up for the reception of Anne
of Denmark, queen of James I. The estate is good, but not so large as
formerly, owing to the strange conduct of the late Lady Dryden, who cut
off her own children, three sons and two daughters, leaving the whole
ancient patrimonial property from them to the son of her lawyer, the
lawyer himself refusing to have it, or make such a will. The estate here
was, it appears, regained, but only by the sacrifice of one in
Lincolnshire. Such are the strange events in the annals of families
which local historians rarely record. How little could this lady
comprehend the honor lying in the name of Dryden; how much less the
nature and duties of a mother.
The monument of the poet in Westminster Abbey is familiar to the public,
placed there by Sheffield, duke of Buckingham, bearing only a single
word, the illustrious name of--DRYDEN.