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Updated: June 20, 2025
For his pieces at Windsor alone he received seven thousand pounds, a sum then sufficient to make a gentleman of moderate wishes perfectly easy for life, a sum greatly exceeding all that Dryden, during a literary life of forty years, obtained from the booksellers. Verrio's assistant and successor, Lewis Laguerre, came from France. The two most celebrated sculptors of that day were also foreigners.
But although The Tempest, as re-written by Dryden, is bad, one of the best of his plays is founded upon another of Shakespeare's. This play is called All for Love or the World Well Lost, and is founded upon Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. It is not written in Dryden's favorite heroic couplet but in blank verse.
Brilliant interval in the History of our National Manners, when even the courtier dreaded to be dull, and Sir Fopling raised himself on tiptoe to catch the ear of a wit; when the names of Devonshire and Dorset, Halifax and Carteret, Oxford and Bolingbroke, unite themselves, brotherlike, with those of Hobbes and of Dryden, of Prior and Bentley, of Arbuthnot, Gay, Pope, and Swift; and still, wherever we turn, to recognize some ideal of great Lord or fine Gentleman, the Immortals of Literature stand by his side.
Noctes vigilabat ad ipsum Mane: Diem totam stertebat. Nil fuit unquam Sic impar sibi ... Hor. 'Sat. 3', Lib. 1. Instead of translating this Passage in Horace, I shall entertain my English Reader with the Description of a Parallel Character, that is wonderfully well finished by Mr. Dryden , and raised upon the same Foundation.
Side by side, however, with the baser sort of comparisons, we find in the Restoration critics no small use of the kind that profits and delights. Rymer's Remarks on the Tragedies of the Former Age are an instance of the comparative method, in its just sense, as employed by a man of talent. The essays of Dryden abound in passages of this nature, that could only have been written by a man of genius.
Hawkins guesses that Purcell was married young, because at the age of twenty-five he was advertising the sale of his first sonatas at his own house; also that, musician-like, he left his family dependent upon the favour of his benefactors, particularly upon the graciousness of his pupil and patroness, Lady Elizabeth Howard, who placed on his tomb in Westminster Abbey the famous inscription often credited to Dryden: "Here lyes Henry Purcell, Esq.; who left this life, and is gone to that blessed place, where only his harmony can be exceeded."
This was All for Love, which was written in blank verse, most of the others being in rimed couplets. During this time Dryden had become the best known literary man of London, and was almost as much a dictator to the literary set which gathered in the taverns and coffeehouses as Ben Jonson had been before him.
The favourite glade, which formerly she thought the very spot so beautifully described by Dryden, as the scene of his "Flower and the Leaf," even this she found had lost its charm. New to love, Caroline was not till now aware, that it throws a radiance upon every object, which, when passed away, seems to leave all nature changed.
Among the inauspicious circumstances is the feebleness of the first attempts; and we must not decide on the talents of a young man by his first works. DRYDEN and SWIFT might have been deterred from authorship had their earliest pieces decided their fate.
The same year saw the publication of his elaborate ed. of Dryden with a Life, and was also marked by a rupture with Jeffrey, with whom he had been associated as a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, and by the establishment of the new firm of J. Ballantyne and Co., of which the first important publication was The Lady of the Lake, which appeared in 1810, The Vision of Don Roderick following in 1811.
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