John Dryden - Delphi Poets Series

by John Dryden

  During this period, the most unfavourable to literature which had occurred for at least two centuries, Dryden, the subject of this memoir, was gradually and silently imbibing those stores of learning, and cultivating that fancy which was to do so much to further the reformation of taste and poetry. It is now time to state his descent and parentage.

  The name of Dryden is local, and probably originated in the north of England, where, as well as in the neighbouring counties of Scotland, it frequently occurs, though it is not now borne by any person of distinction. David Driden, or Dryden, married the daughter of William Nicholson of Staff-hill, in the county of Cumberland and was the great-great-grandfather of our poet. John Dryden, eldest son of David, settled in Northamptonshire, where he acquired the estate of Canons-Ashby, by marriage with Elizabeth, daughter and heiress of Sir John Cope of that county. Wood says, that John Dryden was by profession a schoolmaster, and honoured with the friendship of the great Erasmus, who stood godfather to one of his sons. He appears, from some passages in his will, to have entertained the puritanical principles, which, we shall presently find, descended to his family. Erasmus Driden, his eldest son, succeeded to the estate of Canons-Ashby, was high-sheriff of Northamptonshire in the fortieth year of Queen Elizabeth, and was created a knight baronet in the seventeenth of King James I. Sir Erasmus married Frances, second daughter and co-heiress of William Wilkes of Hodnell, in Warwickshire by whom he had three sons, first, Sir John Driden, his successor in the title and estate of Canons-Ashby; second, William Driden of Farndon, in Northamptonshire; third, Erasmus Driden of Tichmarsh, in the same county. The last of these was the father of the poet.

  Erasmus Driden married Mary, the daughter of the reverend Henry Pickering, younger son of Sir Gilbert Pickering, a person who, though in considerable favour with James I., was a zealous puritan, and so noted for opposition to the Catholics that the conspirators in the Gunpowder Treason, his own brother-in-law being one of the number, had resolved upon his individual murder, as an episode to the main plot; determined so to conduct it, as to throw the suspicion of the destruction of the Parliament upon the puritans. These principles, we shall soon see, became hereditary in the family of Pickering. Mr. Malone’s industry has collected little concerning our author’s maternal grandfather, excepting, that he was born in 1584; named minister of Oldwinkle All-Saints in 1647; and died in 1657. From the time when he attained this preferment, it is highly probable, that he had been recommended to it by the puritanical tenets which he doubtless held in common with the rest of his family.

  Of the poet’s father, Erasmus, we know even less than of his other relations. He acted as a justice of peace during the usurpation, and was the father of no less than fourteen children; four sons and ten daughters. The sons were John, Erasmus, Henry, and James; the daughters, Agnes, Rose, Lucy, Mary, Martha, Elizabeth, Hester, Hannah, Abigail, Frances. Such anecdotes concerning them as my predecessors have recovered, may be found in the note.

  JOHN DRYDEN, the subject of this memoir, was born at the parsonage house of Oldwinkle All-Saints, on or about the 9th day of August 1631. The village then belonged to the family of Exeter, as we are informed by the poet himself in the postscript to his Virgil. That his family were Puritans may readily be admitted; but that they were Anabaptists, although confidently asserted by some of our author’s political or poetical antagonists, appears altogether improbable. Notwithstanding, therefore, the sarcasm of the Duke of Buckingham, the register of Oldwinkle All-Saints parish, had it been in existence, would probably have contained the record of our poet’s baptism.

  Dryden seems to have received the rudiments of his education at Tichmarsh, and was admitted a king’s scholar at Westminster, under the tuition of the celebrated Dr. Bushby, for whom he ever afterwards entertained the most sincere veneration. One of his letters to his old master is addressed, “Honoured Sir,” and couched in terms of respect, and even humility, fully sufficient for the occasion. Another written by Dryden, when his feelings were considerably irritated by a supposed injustice done to his son, is nevertheless qualified by great personal deference to his old preceptor. It may be readily supposed, that such a scholar, under so able a teacher, must have made rapid progress in classical learning. The bent of the juvenile poet, even at this early period, distinguished itself. He translated the third satire of Persius, as a Thursday night’s task, and executed many other exercises of the same nature, in English verse, none of which are now in existence. During the last year of his residence at Westminster, the death of Henry Lord Hastings, a young nobleman of great learning, and much beloved, called forth no less than ninety-eight elegies, one of which was written by our poet, then about eighteen years old. They were published in 1650, under the title of “Lachrymae Musarum.”

  Dryden, having obtained a Westminster scholarship was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge on the 11th May 1650, his tutor being the reverend John Templer, M.A., a man of some learning, who wrote a Latin Treatise in confutation of Hobbes, and a few theological tracts and single sermons. While at college, our author’s conduct seems not to have been uniformly regular. He was subjected to slight punishment for contumacy to the vice-master, and seems, according to the statement of an obscure libeller, to have been engaged in some public and notorious dispute with a nobleman’s son, probably on account of the indulgence of his turn for satire. He took, however, the degree of Bachelor, in January 1653-4, but neither became Master of Arts, nor a fellow of the university and certainly never retained for it much of that veneration usually paid by an English scholar to his Alma Mater. He often celebrates Oxford, but only mentions Cambridge as the contrast of the sister university in point of taste and learning:

  ”Oxford to him a dearer name shall be

  Than his own mother-university:

  Thebes did his green unknowing youth engage,

  He chooses Athens in his riper age.”

  A preference so uncommon, in one who had studied at Cambridge, probably originated in some cause of disgust, which we may now search for in vain.

  In June 1654, the death of his father, Erasmus Dryden, proved a temporary interruption to our author’s studies. He left the university, on this occasion, to take possession of his inheritance, consisting of two-thirds of a small estate near Blakesley, in Northamptonshire, worth, in all, about sixty pounds a year. The other third part of this small property was bequeathed to his mother during her life, and the property reverted to the poet after her death in 1676. With this little patrimony our author returned to Cambridge, where he continued until the middle of the year 1657.

  Although Dryden’s residence at the university was prolonged to the unusual space of nearly seven years, we do not find that he distinguished himself during that time by any poetical prolusions excepting a few lines prefixed to a work, entitled, “Sion and Parnassus; or Epigrams on several Texts of the Old and New Testament,” published in 1650, by John Hoddesdon. Mr. Malone conjectures that our poet would have contributed to the academic collection of verses, entitled, “Oliva Pacis,” and published in 1654, on the peace between England and Holland, had not his father’s death interfered at that period. It is probable, we lose but little by the disappearance of any occasional verses which may have been produced by Dryden at this time. The elegy on Lord Hastings, the lines prefixed to “Sion and Parnassus,” and some complimentary stanzas which occur in a letter to his cousin Honor Driden, would have been enough to assure us, even without his own testimony, that Cowley was the darling of his youth; and that he imitated his points of wit, and quirks of epigram, with a similar contempt for the propriety of their application. From these poems, we learn enough to be grateful, that Dryden was born at a later period in his century; for had not the road to fame been altered in consequence of the Restoration, his extensive information and acute ingenuity would probably have betrayed the author of the “Ode to St. Cecilia,” and the father of English poetical harmony, into rivalling the metaphysical pindarics of Donne and Cowley.

  The v
erses, to which we allude, display their sublety [Transcriber’s note: sic] of thought, their puerile extravagance of conceit, and that structure of verse, which, as the poet himself says of Holyday’s translations, has nothing of verse in it except the worst part of it — the rhyme, and that far from being unexceptionable The following lines, in which the poet describes the death of Lord Hastings by the small-pox, will be probably admitted as a justification of this censure:

  ”Was there no milder way but the small-pox;

  The very filthiness of Pandora’s box?

  So many spots, like naeves, our Venus soil?

  One jewel set off with so many a foil?

  Blisters with pride swelled, which through ‘s flesh did sprout,

  Like rose-buds, stuck i’the lily-skin about.

  Each little pimple had a tear in it,

  To wail the fault its rising did commit,

  Which, rebel-like, with its own lord at strife,

  Thus made an insurrection ‘gainst his life.

  Or were these gems sent to adorn his skin,

  The cabinet of a richer soul within?

  No comet need foretel his change drew on,

  Whose corpse might seem a constellation.”

  This is exactly in the tone of Bishop Corbet’s invective against the same disease:

  ”Oh thou deformed unwoman-like disease,

  Thou plough’st up flesh and blood, and there sow’st pease;

  And leav’st such prints on beauty that dost come,

  As clouted shoon do on a floor of loam.

  Thou that of faces honey-combs dost make,

  And of two breasts two cullenders, forsake

  Thy deadly trade; now thou art rich, give o’er,

  And let our curses call thee forth no more.”

  After leaving the university, our author entered the world, supported by friends, from whose character, principles, and situation, it might have been prophesied, with probability, that his success in life, and his literary reputation, would have been exactly the reverse of what they actually proved. Sir Gilbert Pickering was cousin-german to the poet, and also to his mother; thus standing related to Dryden in a double connection. This gentleman was a staunch puritan, and having set out as a reformer, ended by being a regicide, and an abettor of the tyranny of Cromwell. He was one of the judges of the unfortunate Charles; and though he did not sit in that bloody court upon the last and fatal day, yet he seems to have concurred in the most violent measures of the unconscientious men who did so. He had been one of the parliamentary counsellors of state, and hesitated not to be numbered among the godly and discreet persons who assisted Cromwell as a privy council. Moreover he was lord chamberlain of the Protector’s court, and received the honour of his mock peerage.

  The patronage of such a person was more likely to have elevated Dryden to the temporal greatness and wealth acquired by the sequestrators and committee-men of that oppressive time, than to have aided him in attaining the summits of Parnassus. For, according to the slight records which Mr. Malone has recovered concerning Sir Gilbert Pickering’s character, it would seem, that, to the hard, precise, fanatical contempt of every illumination, save the inward light, which he derived from his sect, he added the properties of a fiery temper, and a rude and savage address. In what capacity Dryden lived with his kinsman, or to what line of life circumstances seemed to destine the future poet, we are left at liberty to conjecture. Shadwell, the virulent antagonist of our author, has called him Sir Gilbert Pickering’s clerk; and it is indeed highly probable that he was employed as his amanuensis, or secretary.

  The next step of advancement you began

  Was being clerk to Noll’s lord chamberlain,

  A sequestrator and committee-man.

  The Medal of John Bayes.

  But I cannot, with Mr. Malone, interpret the same passage, by supposing the third line of the triplet to apply to Dryden. Had he been actually a member of a committee of sequestration, that circumstance would never have remained in the dubious obscurity of Shadwell’s poetry; it would have been as often echoed and re-echoed as every other incident of the poet’s life which was capable of bearing an unfavourable interpretation. I incline therefore to believe, that the terms sequestrator and committee-man apply not to the poet, but to his patron Sir Gilbert, to whom their propriety cannot be doubted.

  Sir Gilbert Pickering was not our author’s only relation at the court of Cromwell. The chief of his family, Sir John Driden, elder brother of the poet’s father, was also a flaming and bigoted puritan, through whose gifts and merits his nephew might reasonably hope to attain preferment In a youth entering life under the protection of such relations, who could have anticipated the future dramatist and poet laureate, much less the advocate and martyr of prerogative and of the Stuart family, the convert and confessor of the Roman Catholic faith? In his after career, his early connections with the puritans, and the principles of his kinsmen during the civil wars and usurpation, were often made subjects of reproach, to which he never seems to have deigned an answer.

  The death of Cromwell was the first theme of our poet’s muse. Averse as the puritans were to any poetry, save that of Hopkins, of Withers, or of Wisdom, they may be reasonably supposed to have had some sympathy with Dryden’s sorrow upon the death of Oliver, even although it vented itself in the profane and unprofitable shape of an elegy. But we have no means of estimating its reception with the public, if, in truth, the public long interested themselves about the memory of Cromwell, while his relations and dependants presented to them the more animated and interesting spectacle of a struggle for his usurped power. Richard perhaps, and the immediate friends of the deceased Protector, with such of Dryden’s relations as were attached to his memory, may have thought, like the tinker at the Taming of the Shrew, that this same elegy was “marvellous good matter.” It did not probably attract much general attention. The first edition, in 1659, is extremely rare: it was reprinted, however, along with those of Sprat and Waller, in the course of the same year. After the Restoration this piece fell into a slate of oblivion, from which it may be believed that the author, who had seen a new light in politics, was by no means solicitous to recall it. His political antagonist did not, however, fail to awaken its memory, when Dryden became a decided advocate for the royal prerogative, and the hereditary right of the Stuarts. During the controversies of Charles the Second’s reign, in which Dryden took so decided a share, his eulogy on Cromwell was often objected to him, as a proof of inconsistence and apostasy. One passage, which plainly applies to the civil wars in general, was wrested to signify an explicit approbation of the murder of Charles the First; and the whole piece was reprinted by an incensed antagonist, under the title of “An Elegy on the Usurper O.C., by the author of Absalom and Achitophel, published (it is ironically added) to show the loyalty and integrity of the poet,” — an odd piece of vengeance, which has perhaps never been paralleled, except in the single case of “Love in a Hollow Tree.” The motives of the Duchess of Marlborough, in reprinting Lord Grimestone’s memorable dramatic essay, did not here apply. The elegy on Cromwell, although doubtless sufficiently faulty, contained symptoms of a regenerating taste; and, politically considered, although a panegyric on an usurper, the topics of praise are selected with attention to truth, and are, generally speaking, such as Cromwell’s worst enemies could not have denied to him. Neither had Dryden made the errors, or misfortunes, of the royal family, and their followers, the subject of censure or of contrast. With respect to them, it was hardly possible that a eulogy on such a theme could have less offence in it. This was perhaps a fortunate circumstance for Dryden at the Restoration; and it must be noticed to his honour, that as he spared the exiled monarch in his panegyric on the usurper, so, after the Restoration, in his numerous writings on the side of royalty, there is no instance of his recalling his former praise of Cromwell.