John Dryden - Delphi Poets Series

by John Dryden

  Paul Rycaut.

  Paul Rycaut, secretary to the English ambassador at Constantinople, and author of an exceedingly valuable account of The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1668), should perhaps hardly be reckoned among travellers, as he gives no account of his residence, and merely condenses the results of his observation of Ottoman manners and polity. The book must have been highly important at a time when the Ottoman still menaced Europe, and may be read with pleasure even now for its good sense and varied information, which includes a lively description of a palace revolution, and an account of the chief religious sects among the Turks.

  Edward Browne.

  Doctor Edward Browne, son of Sir Thomas Browne, was a highly accomplished man, whose travels in Eastern Europe (1673) contain a remarkable amount of accurate observation within a surprisingly narrow compass. It seems strange to find him foretelling a great territorial expansion of the Turkish empire at the expense of Christian Europe, but the prophecy came near being fulfilled by the peril of Vienna not long after Browne wrote.

  Foreign Travellers in England.

  This review of English travellers would not be complete without a brief notice of two foreign visitors to the country, whose narratives, translated into English, have probably been more read here than at home, and from whom much valuable information may be derived. Sorbière, a philosopher of Gassendi’s school, a Protestant by birth, but who had become a nominal Catholic, visited England in 1663. Being, as he admits, entirely ignorant of the language, his attention was principally given to the intellectual aspects of the country, which were not unfamiliar to him, from his acquaintance with the works of Englishmen who had written in Latin. His accounts of Oxford and the Royal Society are neither unamusing nor uninstructive; he has a true veneration for English men of science, especially Bacon, whom he pronounces ‘the greatest man for the interest of natural philosophy that ever was.’ Of English letters he can only say that ‘he understands that all English eloquence consists in mere pedantry.’ Writing in the character of a courtier, Sorbière expresses himself antagonistically to the English constitution, but it is difficult to believe that his remarks are not sometimes ironical. He can hardly have thought it a very extravagant idea on the part of the commons ‘that their king ought to apply himself entirely to maintain the public peace, to promote the happiness of his people, and to advance the honour and reputation of his country abroad, as much as possibly he can.’ We are nevertheless informed that this and similar views arise from ‘a particular inclination they have by nature to supply themselves with such disrespectful arguments.’

  The travels in England of Duke Cosmo de’ Medici, heir-apparent to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, were performed in 1669, and described by Signor Magalotti, a member of his suite, whose manuscript account was translated into English, and published in 1821. They are more interesting than most foreign narratives of English travel, in so far as Cosmo, having landed at Plymouth and travelled up to London, and having afterwards made excursions to Oxford, Cambridge, and other places, saw more of English country life than usual, and inasmuch as they are accompanied by excellent sketches taken by artists in his suite. It is most delightful to be thus enabled to see towns and villages and country-houses exactly as they appeared in the days of Charles II., and it is only to be regretted that the artists did not exercise their pencils upon the streets of London. Magalotti is an intelligent and inquisitive traveller; but, voyaging in the train of a prince, and unacquainted with the language, he can tell us little respecting the people. His account of what fell within his sphere is sensible and impartial, with a few errors, such as the strange assertion that Clarendon had been secretly a Presbyterian! He is too much of a courtier to inform us respecting the court of Charles II., except in the enumeration of titled persons and officials, in which he is very exact. He gives a fair account of the Royal Society, and of the theatre; but seems unconscious of the existence of English literature outside the walls of the playhouse.

  We have now accompanied the literature of the Restoration period from its apparently sudden manifestation contemporaneously with the return of the exiled monarch to its transition into what is so appropriately in one point of view, so unaptly in another, termed England’s Augustan age. We have seen that this apparent abruptness was deceptive, arising from the interruption of English literary development by the Civil War and its consequences; and that the Restoration literature represented tendencies which must inevitably have prevailed without the infusion of any French element. The old Elizabethan mode had become inadequate to the vastly extended needs of the time, and we are now able to recognize the literature of the Restoration in its proper connection as a transition to the thoroughly practical and business-like style of the eighteenth century, which, having worked itself out in its turn, and arrived at an impracticable position through the total negation of imagination by its most characteristic representatives, brought about the revival of the Elizabethan spirit in the imaginative, spiritual, and at the same time intensely human literature of the nineteenth century. This in turn seems threatened with decay from the exaggeration of its characteristic qualities; and the antidote might be sought in less hopeful quarters than in the sound sense, manly vigour, and solid execution of the robust if prosaic writers of the Age of Dryden.

  BRIEF LIFE OF JOHN DRYDEN by George Gilfillan

  John Dryden was born on the 9th of August 1631, at a place variously denominated Aldwincle, or Oldwincle, All Saints; or at Oldwincle, St Peter’s, in Northamptonshire. The name Dryden or Driden, is from the North. There are Drydens still in the town of Scotland where we now write; and the poet’s ancestors lived in the county of Cumberland. One of them, named John, removed from a place called Staff-hill, to Northamptonshire, where he succeeded to the estate of Canons-Ashby, by marriage with the daughter of Sir John Cope. John Dryden was a schoolmaster, a Puritan, and honoured, it is said, with the friendship of the celebrated Erasmus, after whom he named his son, who succeeded to the estate of Canons-Ashby, and, besides becoming a sheriff of the county of Northamptonshire, was created a knight under James I. Sir Erasmus had three sons, the third of whom, also an Erasmus, became the father of our poet. His mother was Mary, the daughter of the Rev. Henry Pickering, whose father, a zealous Puritan, had been one of the marked victims in the Gunpowder Plot. Dryden thus had connexions both on his father’s and mother’s side with that party, by deriding, defaming, and opposing which he afterwards gained much of his poetical glory.

  The poet was the eldest of fourteen children — four sons and ten daughters. The honour of his birth is claimed, as already stated, by two parishes, that of Oldwincle, All Saints, and that of Oldwincle, St Peter’s, as Homer’s was of old by seven cities. His brothers and sisters have been followed, by eager biographers, into their diverging and deepening paths of obscurity — paths in which we do not choose to attend them. Dryden received the rudiments of his education at Tichmarsh or at Oundle — for here, too, we have conflicting statements. It is certain, however, that he was admitted a king’s scholar at Westminster, under the tuition of Dr Busby, whom he always respected, and who discovered in him poetical power. He encouraged him to write, as a Thursday’s night’s task, a translation of the third Satire of Persius, a writer precisely of that vigorously rhetorical, rapidly satirical, and semi-poetical school, which Dryden was qualified to appreciate and to mirror; besides other pieces of a similar kind which are lost. During the last year of his residence at Westminster, and when only eighteen years of age, he wrote one among the ninety-eight elegies which were called forth by the sudden death of Henry Lord Hastings, and published under the title of “Lachrymæ Musarum.” Hastings seems to have been an amiable person, but he was besides a lord, and hinc illoe lachrymæ. We know not of what quality the other tears were, but assuredly Dryden’s is one of very suspicious sincerity, and of very little poetical merit. But even the crocodile tears of a great genius, if they fall into a fanciful shape, must be preserved; and we have preserved his, accordin
gly, notwithstanding the false taste as well as doubtful truth and honesty of this his earliest poem.

  Shortly after, Dryden obtained a Westminster scholarship, and on the 11th of May 1650, entered on Trinity College, Cambridge. His tutor was one John Templer, famous then as one of the many who had attempted to put a hook in the jaws of old Hobbes, the Leviathan of his time, but whose reply, as well as Hobbes’ own book (like a whale disappearing from a Shetland “voe” into the deep, with all the hooks and harpoons of his enemies along with him) has been almost entirely forgotten. At Cambridge, Dryden was noted for regularity and diligence, and took the degree of B.A. in January 1653-4, and in 1657 was made A.M. by a dispensation from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Once, indeed, he was rusticated for a fortnight on account of some disobedience to the vice-master. He resided, however, at his university three years after the usual term; and although he did not become a Fellow, and made no secret, in after days, of preferring Oxford to Cambridge, yet the reason of this seems to have lain, not in any personal disgust, but in some other cause, which, says Scott, “we may now search for in vain.”

  Up till June 1654, his father had continued to reside at his estate at Blakesley, in Northamptonshire, when he died, leaving Dryden two-thirds of a property, which was worth, in all, only £60 a-year. The other third was bequeathed to his mother, during her lifetime. With this miserable modicum of £40 a-year, the poet returned to Cambridge, and continued there, doing little, and little known as one who could do anything, till the year 1657. The only records of the diligence of his college years, are the lines on the death of Lord Hastings, and one or two other inconsiderable copies of verses. He probably, however, employed much time in private study.

  While at Cambridge, he met with a young lady, a cousin of his own — Honor Driden, daughter of Sir John Driden of Chesterton — of whom he became deeply enamoured. His suit was, however, rejected, although he continued all his life on intimate terms with the family. Miss Driden died unmarried, many years after her poet lover; and like the “Lass of Ballochmyle” with Burns’ homage, learned to value it more after he became celebrated, and carefully preserved the solitary letter which Dryden wrote her.

  But now the university was to lose, and the world of London to receive, the poet. In the year 1657, when about six-and-twenty years of age, Dryden repaired to London, “clad in homely drugget,” and with more projects in his head than pence in his pocket. He was first employed by his relative, Sir Gilbert Pickering — called the “Fiery Pickering,” from his Roundhead zeal — as a clerk or secretary. Here he came in contact with Cromwell; and saw very clearly those great qualities of sagacity, determination, courage, statesmanship, insight and genuine godliness, which made him, next to Alfred the Great, the first monarch who ever sat on the English throne. Two years after Dryden came to London, Cromwell expired, and the poet wrote and published his Heroic Stanzas on the hero’s death, which we consider really his earliest poem. When Richard resigned, Dryden, in common with the majority of the nation, saw that the Roundhead cause was lost, and hastened to carry over his talents to the gaining side. For this we do not blame him very severely, although it certainly had been nobler if, like Milton, he had clung to his party. Sir Walter Scott remarks, that Dryden never retracted the praise he gave to Cromwell. In “Absalom and Achitophel” he sneers at Richard as Ishbosheth, but says nothing against the deceased giant Saul. It is clear, too, that at first his desertion of the Cromwell party was a loss to the poet. He lost the chance of their favour, in case a reaction should come, his situation as secretary, and the shelter of Pickering’s princely mansion. As might have been expected, his ancient friends were indignant at the change, and not less so at the alteration he thought proper at the same time to make in the spelling of his name — from Driden to Dryden.

  He went to reside in the obscure house of one Herringman, a bookseller, in the New Exchange, and became for life a professional author. His enemies afterwards reproached him bitterly for his mean circumstances at this period of his life, and asserted that he was a mere drudge to Herringman. He, at all events, did little in his own proper poetic calling for two years. A poem on the Coronation of Charles, well fitted to wipe away the stain of Cromwellism, and to attract upon the poet the eye of that Rising-Sun, whose glory he sang with more zeal than truth; a panegyric on the Lord Chancellor; and a satire on the Dutch; were all, and are all short, and all savour of a vein somewhat hide-bound. He planned, indeed, too, and partly wrote, one or more plays, and was considered of consequence enough to be elected a member of the Royal Society in 1662. Previous to this he had been introduced, through Herringman, to Sir Robert Howard, son of the first Earl of Berkshire, and a relation of Edward Howard, the author of “British Princes,” and the object of the witty wrath of Butler. Sir Robert, too, had a poetical propensity, and Dryden and he became and continued intimate for a number of years, the poet assisting the knight in his literary compositions, particularly in a play entitled “The Indian Queen;” and the latter inviting the former to the family seat at Charlton, where Dryden met in an unlucky hour his future wife, Lady Elizabeth Howard, the sister of Sir Robert. It was on the 1st of December 1663, in St Swithin’s, London, and with the consent of the Earl, who settled about £60 a-year on his daughter, that this unhappy union took place. The lady seems to have had absolutely none of the qualities which tend either to command a husband’s respect or to conciliate his regard, but is described as a woman of violent temper and weak understanding. Much of the bitterness of Dryden’s satire, some of the coarse licentiousness of his plays, and all the sarcasms at matrimony which he has scattered in multitudes, throughout his works, may be traced to his domestic unhappiness.

  Otherwise, the match had some advantages. It broke up, for a time at least, some licentious connexions he had formed, particularly, after a time, one with Mrs Reeves the actress, with whom, having laid aside his Norwich drugget, he used to eat tarts at the Mulberry Gardens, “with a sword and a Chadreux wig.” It secured to him, including his own property, an income of about £100 a-year — a sum equal to £300 now — and which, on the death of his mother, three years later, was increased by £20 more, or £60 at the present value of money. He was thus protected for life against the meaner and more miserable necessities of the literary man, under which many of his unfortunate rivals were crushed; and if he could not always command luxuries, he was always sure of bread.

  To improve his circumstances, however, and to enable him to keep up a style of living in unison with his lady’s rank, he must write, and the question arose, what mode of composition was likely to be the most lucrative? Were he to continue to indite panegyrical verses, like those to Clarendon, he stood a chance of having a few guineas tossed to him now and then by a patron, like a crust to an unfortunate cur. Were he to translate, or write prefaces for the booksellers, he might pay his bill for salt, if diligent enough. For Satires as yet there was little demand. The follies of the more fanatical of the Puritans were too recent, although they were beginning to ripen for the hand of Butler; and the far grosser absurdities of the Cavaliers were yet in blossom. There remained nothing for an aspiring author but the stage, which during the previous regime had been abolished. While the French Revolution was in progress, ay, even in the depths of the reign of terror, the theatres were all open, and all crowded; but when Cromwell was enacting his solemn and solitary part, before God, angels, and men, the petty potentates — the gods and goddesses of the stage — vanished into thin air. At his tremendous stamp their cue had been “Exeunt omnes” and if the spirit of Shakspeare himself had witnessed the departure, he would have added his Amen. And had he watched in their stead the gigantic actor treading his trembling stage alone, with all the world looking on, he might have remembered and re-applied his own magnificent words —