Dryden

From Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets series, published in 3 volumes between 1779 and 1781.

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DRYDEN[92].

Of the great poet whose life I am about to delineate, the curiosity which his reputation must excite, will require a display more ample than can now be given. His contemporaries, however they reverenced his genius, left his life unwritten; and nothing, therefore, can be known beyond what casual mention and uncertain tradition have supplied.

John Dryden was born August 9, 1631[93], at Aldwinkle, near Oundle, the son of Erasmus Dryden, of Titchmersh; who was the third son of sir Erasmus Dryden, baronet, of Canons Ashby. All these places are in Northamptonshire; but the original stock of the family was in the county of Huntingdon[94].

He is reported by his last biographer, Derrick, to have inherited, from his father, an estate of two hundred a year, and to have been bred, as was said, an anabaptist. For either of these particulars no authority is given[95]. Such a fortune ought to have secured him from that poverty which seems always to have oppressed him; or, if he had wasted it, to have made him ashamed of publishing his necessities. But, though he had many enemies, who, undoubtedly, examined his life with a scrutiny sufficiently malicious, I do not remember that he is ever charged with waste of his patrimony. He was, indeed, sometimes reproached for his first religion. I am, therefore, inclined to believe that Derrick's intelligence was partly true and partly erroneous[96].

From Westminster school, where he was instructed, as one of the king's scholars, by Dr. Busby, whom he long after continued to reverence, he was, in 1650, elected to one of the Westminster scholarships at Cambridge[97].

Of his school performances has appeared only a poem "On the Death of Lord Hastings", composed with great ambition of such conceits as, notwithstanding the reformation begun by Waller and Denham, the example of Cowley still kept in reputation. Lord Hastings died of the smallpox; and his poet has made of the pustules first rosebuds, and then gems; at last exalts them into stars; and says,

No comet need foretell his change drew on, Whose corpse might seem a constellation.

At the university he does not appear to have been eager of poetical distinction, or to have lavished his early wit either on fictitious subjects, or publick occasions. He probably considered, that he, who proposed to be an author, ought first to be a student. He obtained, whatever was the reason, no fellowship in the college. Why he was excluded cannot now be known, and it is vain to guess; had he thought himself injured, he knew how to complain. In the life of Plutarch he mentions his education in the college with gratitude; but, in a prologue at Oxford, he has these lines:

Oxford to him a dearer name shall be Than his own mother-university: Thebes did his rude,