Among My Books, First Series | Page 5

secretary to his near relative, Sir Gilbert Pickering, at that
time Cromwell's chamberlain, and a member of his Upper House. In
1670 he succeeded Davenant as Poet Laureate,[10] and Howell as
Historiographer, with a yearly salary of two hundred pounds. This
place he lost at the Revolution, and had the mortification to see his old
enemy and butt, Shadwell, promoted to it, as the best poet the Whig
party could muster. If William was obliged to read the verses of his
official minstrel, Dryden was more than avenged. From 1688 to his
death, twelve years later, he earned his bread manfully by his pen,
without any mean complaining, and with no allusion to his fallen
fortunes that is not dignified and touching. These latter years, during
which he was his own man again, were probably the happiest of his life.
In 1664 or 1665 he married Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the
Earl of Berkshire. About a hundred pounds a year were thus added to
his income. The marriage is said not to have been a happy one, and
perhaps it was not, for his wife was apparently a weak-minded woman;
but the inference from the internal evidence of Dryden's plays, as of
Shakespeare's, is very untrustworthy, ridicule of marriage having
always been a common stock in trade of the comic writers.
The earliest of his verses that have come down to us were written upon
the death of Lord Hastings, and are as bad as they can be,--a kind of
parody on the worst of Donne. They have every fault of his manner,
without a hint of the subtile and often profound thought that more than
redeems it. As the Doctor himself would have said, here is Donne

outdone. The young nobleman died of the small-pox, and Dryden
exclaims pathetically,--
"Was there no milder way than the small-pox, The very filthiness of
Pandora's box?"
He compares the pustules to "rosebuds stuck i' the lily skin about," and
says that
"Each little pimple had a tear in it To wail the fault its rising did
commit."
But he has not done his worst yet, by a great deal. What follows is even
finer:--
"No comet need foretell his change drew on, Whose corpse might seem
a constellation. O, had he died of old, how great a strife Had been who
from his death should draw their life! Who should, by one rich draught,
become whate'er Seneca, Cato, Numa, Caesar, were, Learned, virtuous,
pious, great, and have by this An universal metempsychosis! Must all
these aged sires in one funeral Expire? all die in one so young, so
small?"
It is said that one of Allston's early pictures was brought to him, after
he had long forgotten it, and his opinion asked as to the wisdom of the
young artist's persevering in the career he had chosen. Allston advised
his quitting it forthwith as hopeless. Could the same experiment have
been tried with these verses upon Dryden, can any one doubt that his
counsel would have been the same? It should be remembered, however,
that he was barely turned eighteen when they were written, and the
tendency of his style is noticeable in so early an abandonment of the
participial ed in learned and aged. In the next year he appears again in
some commendatory verses prefixed to the sacred epigrams of his
friend, John Hoddesdon. In these he speaks of the author as a
"Young eaglet, who, thy nest thus soon forsook, So lofty and divine a
course hast took As all admire, before the down begin To peep, as yet,
upon thy smoother chin."
Here is almost every fault which Dryden's later nicety would have
condemned. But perhaps there is no schooling so good for an author as
his own youthful indiscretions. After this effort Dryden seems to have
lain fallow for ten years, and then he at length reappears in thirty-seven
"heroic stanzas" on the death of Cromwell. The versification is
smoother, but the conceits are there again, though in a milder form. The

verse is modelled after "Gondibert." A single image from nature (he
was almost always happy in these) gives some hint of the maturer
Dryden:--
"And wars, like mists that rise against the sun, Made him but greater
seem, not greater grow."
Two other verses,
"And the isle, when her protecting genius went, Upon his obsequies
loud sighs conferred,"
are interesting, because they show that he had been studying the early
poems of Milton. He has contrived to bury under a rubbish of verbiage
one of the most purely imaginative passages ever written by the great
Puritan poet.
"From haunted spring and dale, Edged with poplar pale, The parting
genius is with sighing sent."
This is the more curious because, twenty-four years afterwards, he says,
in defending