Pope,[1] with boyish enthusiasm, gazed full of reverent admiration on the poet, who was at once his exemplar and his idol. It was probably here that Dryden, after he had read some of the bombastic and obscure Pindaric Odes, which the youthful genius had sent to him, told Swift, with great candour, what Swift never forgave, that he would never be a poet.
His relations to his publisher Tonson are worth a brief notice. Sometimes we find Dryden thanking him for his presents of fruit and wine, and writing to him about his snuff and sherry as Byron did to Murray about his toothpowder. Then again he is quarrelling with Tonson, writing to him to accuse him of meanness and rapacity, abusing Tonson himself, and, among others, one Richard Bentley, who, as Dryden writes to Tonson, "has cursed our Virgil so heartily," and launching anathemas against the whole tribe of publishers. "Upon trial," he says, "I find all your trade are sharpers, and you not more than others; therefore, I have not wholly left you." There is also the rather well-known anecdote of our poet begging Lord Bolingbroke, who was calling on him to outstay Tonson: "I have not completed the sheet which I promised him," said Dryden to his Lordship, "and if you
- ↑ Pope, in writing to Wycherley, speaks of Dryden thus—:"I was not so happy as to know him: 'Virgilium tantum vidi.' Had I been born early enough, I must have known and loved him; for I have been assured, not only by yourself, but by Mr. Congreve and Sir W. Trumbull, that his personal qualities were as amiable as his poetical, notwithstanding the many libellous misrepresentations of them, against which the former of these gentlemen has told me he will one day vindicate him. I suppose these injuries were begun by the violence of party, but it is no doubt they were continued by envy at his success and fame: and those scribblers who attacked him in his latter times, were only gnats in a summer's evening, which are never very troublesome but in the finest and most glorious season; for his fire, like the sun's, shined clearest towards its setting." In strange contrast to this, Gray, in one of his letters, writes:—"Dryden was as disgraceful to the office (of Laureate) from his character, as the poorest scribbler could have been from his verses."
