Among My Books, First Series | Page 4

whatever period of his life we look at Dryden, and whatever, for
the moment, may have been his poetic creed, there was something in
the nature of the man that would not be wholly subdued to what it
worked in. There are continual glimpses of something in him greater
than he, hints of possibilities finer than anything he has done. You feel
that the whole of him was better than any random specimens, though of
his best, seem to prove. Incessu patet, he has by times the large stride
of the elder race, though it sinks too often into the slouch of a man who
has seen better days. His grand air may, in part, spring from a habit of
easy superiority to his competitors; but must also, in part, be ascribed to
an innate dignity of character. That this pre-eminence should have been
so generally admitted, during his life, can only be explained by a
bottom of good sense, kindliness, and sound judgment, whose solid
worth could afford that many a flurry of vanity, petulance, and even
error should flit across the surface and be forgotten. Whatever else
Dryden may have been, the last and abiding impression of him is, that
he was thoroughly manly; and while it may be disputed whether he was
a great poet, it may be said of him, as Wordsworth said of Burke, that

"he was by far the greatest man of his age, not only abounding in
knowledge himself, but feeding, in various directions, his most able
contemporaries."[7]
Dryden was born in 1631. He was accordingly six years old when
Jonson died, was nearly a quarter of a century younger than Milton, and
may have personally known Bishop Hall, the first English satirist, who
was living till 1656. On the other side, he was older than Swift by
thirty-six, than Addison by forty-one, and than Pope by fifty-seven
years. Dennis says that "Dryden, for the last ten years of his life, was
much acquainted with Addison, and drank with him more than he ever
used to do, probably so far as to hasten his end," being commonly "an
extreme sober man." Pope tell us that, in his twelfth year, he "saw
Dryden," perhaps at Will's, perhaps in the street, as Scott did Burns.
Dryden himself visited Milton now and then, and was intimate with
Davenant, who could tell him of Fletcher and Jonson from personal
recollection. Thus he stands between the age before and that which
followed him, giving a hand to each. His father was a country
clergyman, of Puritan leanings, a younger son of an ancient county
family. The Puritanism is thought to have come in with the poet's
great-grandfather, who made in his will the somewhat singular
statement that he was "assured by the Holy Ghost that he was elect of
God." It would appear from this that Dryden's self-confidence was an
inheritance. The solid quality of his mind showed itself early. He
himself tells us that he had read Polybius "in English, with the pleasure
of a boy, before he was ten years of age, and yet even then had some
dark notions of the prudence with which he conducted his design."[8]
The concluding words are very characteristic, even if Dryden, as men
commonly do, interpreted his boyish turn of mind by later
self-knowledge. We thus get a glimpse of him browsing--for, like
Johnson, Burke, and the full as distinguished from the learned men, he
was always a random reader[9]--in his father's library, and painfully
culling here and there a spray of his own proper nutriment from among
the stubs and thorns of Puritan divinity. After such schooling as could
be had in the country, he was sent up to Westminster School, then
under the headship of the celebrated Dr. Busby. Here he made his first
essays in verse, translating, among other school exercises of the same
kind, the third satire of Persius. In 1650 he was entered at Trinity

College, Cambridge, and remained there for seven years. The only
record of his college life is a discipline imposed, in 1652, for
"disobedience to the Vice-Master, and contumacy in taking his
punishment, inflicted by him." Whether this punishment was corporeal,
as Johnson insinuates in the similar case of Milton, we are ignorant. He
certainly retained no very fond recollection of his Alma Mater, for in
his "Prologue to the University of Oxford," he says:--
"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."
By the death of his father, in 1654, he came into possession of a small
estate of sixty pounds a year, from which, however, a third must be
deducted, for his mother's dower, till 1676. After leaving Cambridge,
he became