John Dryden - Delphi Poets Series

by John Dryden

  ”By long experience, D’Urfey 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.”

  I may conclude this notice of Dryden’s habits, which I have been enabled to give chiefly by the researches of Mr. Malone, with two notices of a minute nature. Dryden was a great taker of snuff, which he made himself. Moreover, as a preparation to a course of study, he usually took medicine, and observed a cooling diet.

  Dryden’s house, which he appears to have resided in from the period of his marriage till his death, was in Gerrard Street, the fifth on the left hand coming from Little Newport Street. The back windows looked upon the gardens of Leicester House, of which circumstance our 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 Driden 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 aiding them. And thus concludes all that we have learned of the private life of Dryden.

  The fate of Dryden’s family must necessarily interest the admirers of English literature. It consisted of his wife, Lady Elizabeth Dryden, and three sons, John, Charles, and Erasmus Henry. Upon the poet’s death, it may be believed, they felt themselves slenderly provided for, since all his efforts, while alive, were necessary to secure them from the gripe of penury.

  Yet their situation was not very distressing. John and Erasmus Henry were abroad; and each had an office at Rome, in which he was able to support himself. Charles had for some time been entirely dependent on his father, and administered to his effects, as he died without a will. The liberality of the Duchess of Ormond, and of Driden of Chesterton, had been lately received, and probably was not expended. There was, besides, the poet’s little patrimonial estate, and a small property in Wiltshire, which the Earl of Berkshire settled upon Lady Elizabeth at her marriage, and which yielded £50 or £60 annually. There was therefore an income of about £100 a year, to maintain the poet’s widow and children; enough in these times to support them in decent frugality.

  Lady Elizabeth Dryden’s temper had long disturbed her husband’s domestic happiness. “His invectives,” says Mr. Malone, “against the married state are frequent and bitter, and were continued to 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. A similar alienation seems to have taken place between her and her own relations, Sir Robert Howard, perhaps, being excepted; for her brother, the Honourable Edward Howard, talks of Virgil, as a thing he had learned merely by common report. Her wayward disposition 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 death in summer 1714, probably, says Mr. Malone, in the seventy-ninth year of her life.

  Dryden’s three sons, says the inscription by Mrs. Creed, were ingenious and accomplished gentlemen. Charles, the eldest, and favourite son of the poet, was born at Charlton, Wiltshire, in 1666. He received a classical education under Dr. Busby, his father’s preceptor, and was chosen King’s Scholar in 1680. Being elected to Trinity College in Cambridge, he was admitted a member in 1683. It would have been difficult to conceive that the son of Dryden should not have attempted poetry; but though Charles Dryden escaped the fate of Icarus, he was very, very far from emulating his father’s soaring flight. Mr. Malone has furnished a list of his compositions in Latin and English. About 1692, he went to Italy, and through the interest of Cardinal Howard, to whom he was related by the mother’s side, he became Chamberlain of the Household; not, as Corinna pretends, “to that remarkably fine gentleman, Pope Clement XI.,” but to Pope Innocent XII. His way to this preferment was smoothed by a pedigree drawn up in Latin by his father, of the families of Dryden and Howard, which is said to have been deposited in the Vatican. Dryden, whose turn for judicial astrology we have noticed, had calculated the nativity of his son Charles; and it would seem that a part of his predictions were fortuitously fulfilled. Charles, however, having suffered, while at Rome, by a fall, and his health, in consequence, being much injured, his father prognosticated he would begin to recover in the month of September 1697. The issue did no great credit to the prediction; for young Dryden returned to England in 1698 in the same indifferent state of health, as is obvious from the anxious solicitude with which his father always mentions Charles in his correspondence. Upon the poet’s death, Charles, we have seen, administered to his effects on 10th June 1700, Lady Elizabeth, his mother, renouncing the succession. In the next year, Granville conferred on him the profits arising from the author’s night of an alteration of Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice;” and his liberality to the son of one great bard may be admitted to balance his presumption in manufacturing a new drama out of the labours of another. Upon the 20th August 1704, Charles Dryden was drowned, in an attempt to swim across the Thames, at Datchet, near Windsor. I have degraded into the Appendix, the romantic narrative of Corinna, concerning his father’s prediction, already mentioned. It contains, like her account of the funeral of the poet, much positive falsehood, and gross improbability, with some slight scantling of foundation in fact.

  John Dryden, the poet’s second son, was born in 1667, or 1668, was admitted a King’s Scholar in Westminster in 1682, and elected to Oxford in 1685. Here he became a private pupil of the celebrated Obadiah Walker, Master of University College, a Roman Catholic. It seems probable that young Dryden became a convert to that faith before his father. His religion making it impossible for him to succeed in England, he followed his brother Charles to Rome, where he officiated as his deputy in the Pope’s household. John Dryden translated the fourteenth Satire of Juvenal, published in his father’s version, and wrote a comedy entitled, “The Husband his own Cuckold,” acted in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1696; Dryden, the father, furnishing a prologue, and Congreve an epilogue. In 1700-1, he made a tour through Sicily and Malta, and his journal was published in 1706. It seems odd, that in the whole course of his journal, he never mentions his father’s name, nor makes the least allusion to his very recent death. John Dryden, the younger, died at Rome soon after this excursion.

  Erasmus Henry, Dryden’s third son, was born 2d May 1669, and educated in the Charterhouse, to which he was nominated by Charles II., shortly after the publication of “Absalom and Achitophel.” He does not appear to have been at any university; probably his religion was the obstacle. Like his brothers, he went to Rome; and as both his father and mother request his prayers, we are to suppose he was originally destined for the Church. But he became a Captain in the Pope’s guards, and remained at Rome till John Dryden, his elder brother’s death. After this event, he seems to have returned to England, and in 1708 succeeded to the title of Baronet, as representative of Sir Erasmus Driden. the author’s grandfather. But the estate of Canons-Ashby, which should have accompanied the title, had been devised by Sir Robert Driden, the poet’s first cousin, to Edward Dryden, the eldest son of Erasmus, the younger brother of the poet. Thus, if the author had lived a few years longer, his pecuniary embarrassments would have been embittered by his succeeding to the honours of his family, without any means of sustaining the rank they gave him. With this Edward Dryden, Sir Erasmus Henry seems to have resided until his death, which took place at the family mansion of Canons-Ashby in 1710. Edward acted as a manager of his cousin’s affairs; and Mr. Malone sees reason to think, from their mode of accounting, that Sir Erasmus Henry had, like his mother, been visited with mental derangement before his death, and had resigned into Edward’s hands the whole management of his concerns. Thus ended the poet’s family, none of
his sons surviving him above ten years. The estate of Canons-Ashby became again united to the title, in the person of John Dryden, the surviving brother.

  SECTION VIII.

  The State of Dryden’s Reputation at his Death, and afterwards — The

  General Character of his Mind — His Merit as a Dramatist — As a Lyrical

  Poet — As a Satirist — As a Narrative Poet — As a Philosophical and

  Miscellaneous Poet — As a Translator — As a Prose Author — As a Critic.

  If Dryden received but a slender share of the gifts of fortune, it was amply made up to him in reputation. Even while a poet militant upon earth, he received no ordinary portion of that applause, which is too often reserved for the “dull cold ear of death.” He combated, it is true, but he conquered; and, in despite of faction, civil and religious, of penury, and the contempt which follows it, of degrading patronage, and rejected solicitation, from 1666 to the year of his death, the name of Dryden was first in English literature. Nor was his fame limited to Britain. Of the French literati, although Boileau, with unworthy affectation, when he heard of the honours paid to the poet’s remains, pretended ignorance even of his name, yet Rapin, the famous critic, learned the English language on purpose to read the works of Dryden. Sir John Shadwell, the son of our author’s ancient adversary, bore an honourable and manly testimony to the general regret among the men of letters at Paris for the death of Dryden. “The men of letters here lament the loss of Mr. Dryden very much. The honours paid to him have done our countrymen no small service; for, next to having so considerable a man of our own growth, ’tis a reputation to have known how to value him; as patrons very often pass for wits, by esteeming those that are so.” And from another authority we learn, that the engraved copies of Dryden’s portrait were bought up with avidity on the Continent.

  But it was in England where the loss of Dryden was chiefly to be felt. It is seldom the extent of such a deprivation is understood, till it has taken place; as the size of an object is best estimated, when we see the space void which it had long occupied. The men of literature, starting as it were from a dream, began to heap commemorations, panegyrics, and elegies: the great were as much astonished at their own neglect of such an object of bounty, as if the same had never been practised before; and expressed as much compunction, as it were never to occur again. The poets were not silent; but their strains only evinced their woful degeneracy from him whom they mourned. Henry Playford, a publisher of music, collected their effusions into a compilation, entitled, “Luctus Britannici, or the Tears of the British Muses, for the death of John Dryden;” which he published about two months after Dryden’s death. Nine ladies, assuming each the character of a Muse, and clubbing a funeral ode, or elegy, produced “The Nine Muses;” of which very rare (and very worthless) collection, I have given a short account in the Appendix; where the reader will also find an ode on the same subject, by Oldys, which may serve for ample specimen of the poetical lamentations over Dryden.

  The more costly, though equally unsubstantial, honour of a monument, was projected by Montague; and loud were the acclamations of the poets on his generous forgiveness of past discords with Dryden, and the munificence of this universal patron. But Montague never accomplished his purpose, if he seriously entertained it. Pelham, Duke of Newcastle, announced the same intention; received the panegyric of Congreve for having done so; and having thus pocketed the applause, proceeded no further than Montague had done. At length Pope, in some lines which were rather an epitaph on Dryden, who lay in the vicinity, than on Rowe, over whose tomb they were to be placed, roused Dryden’s original patron, Sheffield, formerly Earl of Mulgrave, and now Duke of Buckingham, to erect over the grave of his friend the present simple monument which distinguishes it. The inscription was comprised in the following words: — J. Dryden. Natus 1632. Mortuus I Maii 1700. Joannes Sheffield, Duxx Buckinghamiensis posuit, 1720.

  In the school of reformed English poetry, of which Dryden must be acknowledged as the founder, there soon arose disciples not unwilling to be considered as the rivals of their muster. Addison had his partisans, who were desirous to hold him up in this point of view; and he himself is said to have taken pleasure, with the assistance of Steele, to depreciate Dryden, whose fame was defended by Pope and Congreve. No serious invasion of Dryden’s pre-eminence can be said, however, to have taken place, till Pope himself, refining upon that structure of versification which our author had first introduced, and attending with sedulous diligence to improve every passage to the highest pitch of point and harmony, exhibited a new style of composition, and claimed at least to share with Dryden the sovereignty of Parnassus. I will not attempt to concentrate what Johnson has said upon this interesting comparison: —

  “In acquired knowledge, the superiority must be allowed to Dryden, whose education was more scholastic, and who, before he became an author, had been allowed more time for study, with better means of information. His mind has a larger range, and he collects his images and illustrations from a more extensive circumference of science. Dryden knew more of man in his general nature, and Pope in his local manners. The notions of Dryden were formed by comprehensive speculation, and those of Pope by minute attention. There is more dignity in the knowledge of Dryden, and more certainty in that of Pope.

  “Poetry was not the sole praise of either; for both excelled likewise in prose; but Pope did not borrow his prose from his predecessor. The style of Dryden is capricious and varied, that of Pope is cautious and uniform. Dryden obeys the motions of his own mind, Pope constrains his mind to his own rules of composition. Dryden is sometimes vehement and rapid; Pope is always smooth, uniform, and gentle. Dryden’s page is a natural field, rising into inequalities, and diversified by the varied exuberance of abundant vegetation; Pope’s is a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe, and levelled by the roller.

  “Of genius, that power which constitutes a poet; that quality, without which judgment is cold, and knowledge is inert; that energy, which collects, combines, amplifies, and animates; the superiority must, with some hesitation, be allowed to Dryden. It is not to be inferred, that of this poetical vigour Pope had only a little, because Dryden had more; for every other writer, since Milton, must give place to Pope: and even of Dryden it must be said, that if he has brighter paragraphs, he has not better poems. Dryden’s performances were always hasty, either excited by some external occasion, or extorted by domestic necessity; he composed without consideration, and published without correction. What his mind could supply at call, or gather in one excursion, was all that he sought, and all that he gave. The dilatory caution of Pope enabled him to condense his sentiments, to multiply his images, and to accumulate all that study might produce, or chance might supply. If the flights of Dryden, therefore, are higher, Pope continues longer on the wing. If of Dryden’s fire the blaze is brighter, of Pope the heat is more regular and constant. Dryden often surpasses expectation, and Pope never falls below it. Dryden is read with frequent astonishment, and Pope with perpetual delight.”

  As the eighteenth century advanced, the difference between the styles of these celebrated authors became yet more manifest. It was then obvious, that though Pope’s felicity of expression, his beautiful polish of sentiment, and the occasional brilliancy of his wit, were not easily imitated, yet many authors, by dint of a good ear, and a fluent expression, learned to command the unaltered sweetness of his melody, which, like a favourite tune, when descended to hawkers and ballad-singers, became disgusting as it became common. The admirers of poetry then reverted to the brave negligence of Dryden’s versification, as, to use Johnson’s simile, the eye, fatigued with the uniformity of a lawn, seeks variety in the uncultivated glade or swelling mountain. The preference for which Dennis, asserting the cause of Dryden, had raved and thundered in vain, began, by degrees, to be assigned to the elder bard; and many a poet sheltered his harsh verses and inequalities under an assertion that he belonged to the school of Dryden. Churchill —

  ”Who,
born for the universe, narrowed his mind,

  And to party gave up what was meant for mankind,” —

  Churchill was one of the first to seek in the “Mac-Flecknoe,” the “Absalom,” and “The Hind and Panther,” authority for bitter and personal sarcasm, couched in masculine, though irregular versification, dashed from the pen without revision, and admitting occasional rude and flat passages, to afford the author a spring to comparative elevation. But imitation always approaches to caricature; and the powers of Churchill have been unable to protect him from the oblivion into which his poems are daily sinking, owing to the ephemeral interest of political subjects, and his indolent negligence of severe study and regularity. To imitate Dryden, it were well to study his merits, without venturing to adopt the negligences and harshness, which the hurry of his composition, and the comparative rudeness of his age, rendered in him excusable. At least, those who venture to sink as low, should be confident of the power of soaring as high; for surely it is a rash attempt to dive, unless in one conscious of ability to swim. While the beauties of Dryden may be fairly pointed out as an object of emulation, it is the less pleasing, but not less necessary, duty of his biographer and editor, to notice those deficiencies, which his high and venerable name may excuse, but cannot render proper objects of applause or imitation.