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Updated: June 20, 2025
DRYDEN: but confess, at the same time, I took a great pleasure in doing it; because I knew, in exposing this outrage, I made my court to Mr. ADDISON's commands, in hiding anything he desired to be concealed. The real state of which, this zealot rashly and injudiciously exposes!
In the same year he composed the first theatre pieces he is known to have composed those for Lee's Theodosius. That very trustworthy weathercock John Dryden, Poet Laureate, continued to flatter others for many long days to come. In this same year he composed the first of a long series of odes of welcome, congratulation or condolence for royal or great personages, and about this year he married.
But in all these cases the alteration comes as a thing quite abrupt and unreasonable. We do not feel this acute angle anywhere in Homer or in Virgil or in Chaucer or in Shakespeare or in Dryden; such things as they knew they knew.
I am to rise and speak the epilogue. "This diverting manner was always practised by Mr. Dryden, who, if he was not the best writer of tragedies in his time, was allowed by every one to have the happiest turn for a prologue or an epilogue. The epilogues to 'Cleomenes, 'Don Sebastian, the 'Duke of Guise, 'Aurengezebe, and 'Love Triumphant, are all precedents of this nature.
Argumentative or Didactic Verse. Dryden is a master in arguing in poetry. He was not a whit hampered by the restrictions of verse. They were rather an advantage to him, for in poetry he could make more telling arguments in briefer compass than in prose.
Such a patron of letters England had never seen. His bounty was bestowed with equal judgment and liberality, and was confined to no sect or faction. Men of genius, estranged from each other by literary jealousy or by difference of political opinion, joined in acknowledging his impartial kindness. Dryden owned that he had been saved from ruin by Dorset's princely generosity.
The taste of the Restoration times condemned Dryden to write in a way unworthy of himself for money. "Neither money nor honour that in two words was the position of writers after the Restoration."* *Beljame, Le Public et les Hommes de Lettres in Angleterre.
Congreve says in the dedication of Dryden's works to the duke of Newcastle: Congreve knew him intimately, and as he could have no motive to deceive the world in that particular; and being a man of untainted morals, none can suspect his authority; and by his account we shall see, that Dryden was indeed as amiable in private life, as a Man, as he was illustrious in the eye of the public, as a Poet.
It was not this or that which gave him his weight in council, his swiftness of decision in battle that outran the forethought of other men, it was Hannibal. But this prosaic element in Dryden will force itself upon me.
Dryden was born in the village of Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire, in 1631. His family were prosperous people, who brought him up in the strict Puritan faith, and sent him first to the famous Westminster school and then to Cambridge. He made excellent use of his opportunities and studied eagerly, becoming one of the best educated men of his age, especially in the classics.
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