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If we turn to these ponderous tragedies now, it is principally, however, to study the essays which are prefixed to them. In the general interest awakened concerning the technique of literature, these were frequent; Lestrange, whose business it was to read them, complained that "a man had as good go

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to court without a cravat as appear in print without a preface." But Dryden's, composed, perhaps, in rivalry with the Examens of Corneille, are by far the most important, and form the first body of really serious and philosophical criticism to be discovered in English. We must not expect absolute consistency in these essays. They mark the growth of a mind, not the conditions of a mind settled in a fixed opinion. As fresh lights came up on his horizon, as he read Ben Jonson

John Dryden

After the Portrait by James Maubert

less and Shakespeare more, as Boileau and Bossu affected his taste, as Racine rose into his ken, and as he became more closely acquainted with the poets of antiquity, Dryden's views seem to vacillate, to be lacking in authority. But we err if this remains our final opinion; we mistake the movement of growth for the instability of weakness. To the last, Dryden was a living force in letters, spreading, progressing, stimulating others by the ceaseless stimulus which he himself received from literature.

John Dryden (1631-1700) was the son of Erasmus Dryden and Mary Pickering Dryden his wife, of Tichmarsh, in the county of Northampton. He was born, probably on the 9th of August 1631, in the vicarage of Aldwinkle All Saints, near Oundle. His earliest education was gained in the village schools of Titmarsh and Oundle. He was a King's Scholar at Westminster under the famous Dr. Busby from 1640 to 1650, and matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the summer of the latter year. He got into trouble at college, and was not merely "rebuked on the head," but in 1652 discom

monsed. He took his degree in 1654. Dryden stayed seven years at Cambridge, but he retained against that university a life-long grudge which has never been explained; she was always the "Thebes" of his "green unknowing youth." We have few examples of his early verse-an Elegy on Lord Hastings (1649), a commendatory epistle before Hoddesdon's Sion and Parnassus (1650). In 1654 Erasmus Dryden died, and left the

poet small estates in his native county. It has been supposed that in 1657 Dryden came up to London, and became clerk to his cousin, Sir Gilbert Pickering. In 1659 he published the Heroic Stanzas on the death of Oliver Cromwell, in which his talent as a versifier was earliest displayed. It is strange that, in spite of his extreme celebrity in later years, scarcely anything is known about the early life of Dryden. Two poems, Astraa Redux (1660) and the Coronation Panegyrick (1661), show him an ardent royalist; in 1663 he married Lady Elizabeth Howard, the eldest daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. Not much is known about this person, but her character has been impugned by gossip, and she was evidently no intellectual companion for Dryden. His father-in-law allowed the newly-married couple to share his country house at Charlton, and here they seem to have lived for three or four years. Dryden now began to adopt play-writing as a profession, and his first drama, The Wild Gallant, was acted before his marriage. The Rival Ladies followed later in the same year, 1663. For a long time the personal history of Dryden is confined to a list of his very frequent publications, of which the poem called Annus Mirabilis (1667), and the double heroic tragedy, The Conquest of Granada (1672), seem the most important. He was very actively employed. since, about 1668, he entered into a contract with the actors of the King's Theatre to supply them with three new plays a year at a fixed rate of payment. He was also, in 1670, made poet laureate and historiographer, with £200 a year and a butt of sack. It is supposed that after the Great Fire, Dryden settled in the house in

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Sir Robert Howard, Dryden's Brother-in-law
From Dryden's "Miscellanies"

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