DRYDEN, John (1631-1700), the poet, born on the 9th of August 1631, at Aldwinkle, in Northamptonshire, was of Cumberland stock, though his family had been settled for three generations in Northamptonshire, had acquired estates and a baronetcy, and intermarried with landed families in that county. His great-grandfather, who first carried the name south, and acquired by marriage the estate of Canons Ashby, is said to have known Erasmus, and to have been so proud of the great scholar's friendship that he gave the name of Erasmus to his eldest son. The name Erasmus was borne by the poet's father, the third son of Sir Erasmus Dryden. The leanings and connections of the family were Puritan and anti-monarchical. Sir Erasmus Dryden went to prison rather than pay loan money to Charles I.; the poet's uncle, Sir John Dryden, and his father Erasmus, served on Government commissions during the Commonwealth. His mother's family, the Pickerings, were still more prominent on the Puritan side. Sir Gilbert Pickering, his cousin, was chamberlain to the Protector, and was made a peer in 1658.
Dryden's education was such as became a scion of these respectable families of squires and rectors, among whom the chance contact with Erasmus had left a certain tradition of scholarship. His father, whose own fortune, added to his wife's, the daughter of the rector of Aldwinkle All Saints, was not large, and whose family, of whom the poet was the eldest, amounted to fourteen, procured him admission to Westminster School as a king's scholar, under the famous Dr Busby. Some elegiac verses which Dryden wrote there on the death of a young Lord Hastings, in 1649, had the distinction of being published in a volume called Lacrymæ Musarum, among other elegies by "divers persons of nobility and worth" in commemoration of the same event. He appeared soon after again in print, among writers of commendatory verses to a friend of his, John Hoddesdon, who published a little volume of religious poetry in 1650. Dryden's contribution is signed "John Dryden of Trinity C.," he having gone up from Westminster to Cambridge in May 1650. He was elected a scholar of Trinity on the Westminster foundation in October of the same year, and took his degree of B.A. in 1654. The only recorded incident of his college residence is some unexplained act of contumacy to the vice-master, for which he was "put out of commons" and "gated" for a fortnight. No inference can be built upon this as to Dryden's habits at the university. Contumacy to authorities was not a feature in his later life. His father died in 1654, leaving him master of two-thirds of a small estate near Blakesley, worth about £60 a year. The next three years he is said to have spent at Cambridge. It was then probably that he laid the foundation of that habit of learned discussion of literary methods which is so remarkable a feature in the prefaces to his plays and poems. Not content with doing a thing, like writers who are suddenly placed under the necessity of writing, Dryden must always be arguing as to how it ought to be done, pushing on argumentative justification in advance of execution. Whether or not he spent the three years before 1657 at Cambridge, there can be little doubt, judging from internal evidence, that he spent them somewhere in study; for his first considerable poem bears indisputable marks of scholarly habits, as well as of a command of verse that could not have been acquired without practice.
The middle of 1657 is given as the date of his leaving the university to take up his residence in London. In one of his many subsequent literary quarrels, it was said by Shadwell that he had been clerk to Sir Gilbert Pickering, his cousin, the favourite of Cromwell; and nothing could be more likely than that he obtained some employment under his powerful cousin when he came to London. He first emerged from obscurity with his Heroic Stanzas to the memory of the Protector, who died September 3, 1658. That these stanzas should have made him a name as a poet does not appear surprising when we compare them with Waller's verses on the same occasion. Dryden took some time to consider them, and it was impossible that they should not give an impression of his intellectual strength. Donne was his model; it is obvious that both his ear and his imagination were saturated with Donne's elegiac strains when he wrote; yet when we look beneath the surface, we find unmistakable traces that the pupil was not without decided theories that ran counter to the practice of the master. It is plainly not by accident that each stanza contains one clear-cut brilliant point. The poem is an academic exercise, and it seems to be animated by an undercurrent of strong contumacious protest against the irregularities tolerated by the authorities. Dryden had studied the ancient classics for himself, and their method of uniformity and elaborate finish commended itself to his robust and orderly mind. In itself the poem is a magnificent tribute to the memory of Cromwell. Now that the glittering style of the so-called "metaphysical poets" has gone very far out of fashion, it requires an effort, a deliberate dismissal of prejudice, to enjoy such a poem. A poet writing now on such a man would present his grandeur in a much more direct and simple way. Yet judged in the spirit of its own style, Dryden's is a noble poem. The recognition of Cromwell's greatness is full and ample. The thought in each stanza, the inclosing design of each of the parts of the edifice, is massive and imposing, although the massiveness is not presented in its naked simplicity, so as to hold the foremost place in the eye—the gaze being arrested by glittering accidents, so that the essential grandeur of the mass is disguised and diminished. We are not invited to dwell upon the grand outline; we are not called upon to surrender ourselves to its simple impressiveness; but it is there, although the author does not insist upon it, and rather deprecates it, waves it off, and challenges our admiration of some artificial centre of attraction. It is the ornamental centre upon which the art of the poet has laboured, not the effect of the massive whole; still there is loftiness and nobility in the scope of the work, if our prejudices in favour of a less adorned workmanship permit us to feel it.
From a moral point of view, Dryden's next appearance as a poet is not creditable. To those who regard the poet as a seer with a sacred mission, and refuse the name altogether to a literary manufacturer to order, it comes with a certain shock to find Dryden, the hereditary Puritan, the panegyrist of Cromwell, hailing the return of King Charles in Astræa Redux, deploring his long absence, and proclaiming the despair with which he had seen "the rebel thrive, the loyal crost." From a literary point of view also, Astræa Redux is very inferior to the Heroic Stanzas; Dryden had need of Waller's clever excuse that it is easier to praise a bad man than a good, because the essence of poetry is fiction. And it was not merely in thus hastening to welcome the coming guest, and recant all praise of his rival, that Dryden showed a shamelessly accommodating spirit, and placed himself in such unpleasant contrast to the greater poet who was waiting his fate in all but friendless blindness. It might have been expected of one with his Puritan connections and scholarly training that, if he purposed making a living by the stage, which was restored with Charles, his literary as well as his moral conscience would have required him to make some effort to raise or at least not to lower its tone. But Dryden seems to have had no higher ambition than to make some money by his pen. He naturally first thought of tragedy,—his own genius, as he has informed us, inclining him rather to
