THE class of our English poets to which Dryden belongs is not the highest; it must be placed below the class comprising Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton; but he is the founder of his own school, and, on the whole, perhaps he may be allowed to stand at its head in the order of excellence as well as in the order of time. the least, he stands there with only Pope by his side.

At

John Dryden was born in 1631, it is conjectured on or about the 9th of August, at the parsonage house of Oldwinkle (or Aldwinkle) All-Saints, a village a few miles to the north-west of the town of Oundle, in Northamptonshire. The family of Dryden, or Driden, as the name used more commonly to be spelt, is traced to the county of Cumberland. John Dryden, the great-grandfather of the poet, was the first of them who settled in Northamptonshire, where he acquired the estate of Canons Ashby by marriage with Elizabeth, daughter and heiress of Sir John Cope. It is said that this John

Dryden enjoyed the friendship of Erasmus, and that the illustrious scholar stood godfather to one of his sons. If so, it was probably to the eldest, who received the name of Erasmus, and who was made a baronet by James I. His third son also bore the name of Erasmus. This was the father of the poet, of another Erasmus, who eventually inherited the baronetcy and family estate, and of two more sons and ten daughters. Their mother was Mary, daughter of the Reverend Henry Pickering, who is stated to have been minister of Aldwinkle, from 1647 to 1657, when he died at the age of seventy-three. But the circumstance of Dryden having been born in the parsonage-house would seem to indicate that his maternal grandfather's incumbency had begun many years earlier than this account would make it to have done. The Reverend Henry Pickering was the younger son of a Sir Gilbert Pickering, who is said to have been in considerable favour with James I.Yet the Pickerings were furious puritans, and the Drydens also held the same principles. The families were connected otherwise as well as through the poet's mother; a sister of his father had married Sir John Pickering, the eldest brother of the minister of Aldwinkle. Sir Gilbert Pickering, son of Sir John, was one of the judges of Charles I., and was afterwards made by Cromwell Lord Chamberlain of the Household and a member of his House of Peers.

Dryden is believed to have been first sent to school at Tichmarsh, or Tickmarsh, in his native county. He was afterwards admitted a king's scholar at Westminster, under Dr. Busby; and he was still there when in 1649 he produced his first performance in verse, his poem on the Death of Henry, Lord Hastings. It was one of ninetyeight elegies on the same subject, which were all published together the following year, under the title of Lachrymae Musarum.'

Dryden's verses are highly curious. At his age he inevitably imitated the reigning style, which was what he himself afterwards baptized the metaphysical style of poetry-originally, perhaps, a derivation from the subtleties and refinements of the scholastic philosophy, through

the medium of the punning and quibbling divines, casuists, and other prose writers of the time of Elizabeth and James-and first brought into vogue by Donne in the last age, from whom it was now perpetuated by Cleveland, Cowley, and their imitators. It caught and enveloped almost everybody as well as Dryden-writers and readers, young and old alike. Milton alone entirely escaped; by nothing else is it shown more strikingly that his soul was like a star, and moved apart."

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Per

haps what put it down at last was its lucky adoption by Butler in his Hudibras, for the subject and sort of writing to which it is really appropriate. After such an example, it could not long continue to be employed in serious composition.

The truest description that can be given of Dryden's poem is to say, that it is a serious poem in the style of Hudibras. The principal difference is that the lines are of ten syllables instead of eight. The thoughts are quite as far-fetched, the images as multifarious and grotesque, as those which Butler accumulates for the purposes of satire and drollery.

Lord Hastings was cut off by small-pox, on the eve of his intended nuptials; and the verses are in part addressed to his betrothed bride. Here are some of them:

Was there no milder way but the small-pox,

The very filthiness of Pandora's box?

So many spots, like naeves on Venus' soil,

One jewel set off with so many a foil;

Blisters with pride swelled, which through's flesh did sprout,

Like rose-buds stuck i' the lily skin about.
Each little pimple had a tear in it,

To wail the fault its rising did commit;
Which, rebel-like, with its own lord at strife,
Thus made an insurrection 'gainst his life.
Or were these gems sent to adorn his skin,
The cabinet of a richer soul within?
No comet need foretell his change drew on,
Whose corpse might seem a constellation.

Yet, with all its extravagance and absurdity, the poem

could not be read without its being felt to betoken no common power, especially in so young a writer. The absurdity, in such a case, must be laid to the charge of the time, not of the poet. And the very height to which Dryden here carried his imitation of his bad models gave proof of the fervour and boldness of his genius.

Ere long, too, he broke away from the enticements of this fantastic, unnatural, and false style. After his first perpetration he sinned no more in the same way, or at least to the same excess. In May, 1650, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, on a Westminster scholarship; and he remained at the University till the summer of 1657. Meanwhile the death of his father, in June, 1654, had put him in possession of a small landed property near Blakesley, in Northamptonshire, which yielded him about sixty pounds a year for the present, besides about half as much more which he would inherit on the death of his mother. The only degree he took at Cambridge, notwithstanding the length of his residence, is stated to have been that of Bachelor of Arts, in January, 1654. Yet in the patent appointing him Poet Laureat (1670) he is styled “John Dryden, Master of Arts."

On leaving college Dryden seems to have come up to London, and to have taken up his residence for a time with his flourishing relative Sir Gilbert Pickering. It has been supposed that he was employed by Sir Gilbert in the capacity of amanuensis or secretary.

His next poem was produced in the latter end of the year 1658, his 'Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell.' Its style is wholly free from the peculiar vices of the elegy on Lord Hastings; but if it has none of the forced thought and expression of his earliest manner, it wants also the force of thought and expression of his latest. The form, too, is one to which his genius was ill-suited. The confinement of the heroic line in quatrains each complete in itself, is almost as destructive of its animation and variety, its " full resounding march and energy divine,” as would be the making every couplet a

distinct stanza. The quatrain may suit a trim, precise, step-picking, poetical genius, such as that of Sir John Davies; but is not nearly spacious enough for the impetuosity and splendid recklessness of Dryden. To afford full scope for a style of any breadth or abundance, it requires to be expanded into the interwoven double quatrain and annexed couplet of Spenser or Byron, where the regular flow of the melody is varied ever and anon, by the prolonged swell or the sudden break.

This poem upon the death of Cromwell, however, may be regarded as exemplifying Dryden's second manner. It is substantially the same with that of his 'Astraea Redux; or the Happy Restoration and Return of his Sacred Majesty, Charles II. ;' 1660; his ' Panegyric of the Coronation of Charles the same year; and his Annus Mirabilis; the Year of Wonders,' 1666; although only the last is written in quatrains or the elegiac stanza. It is a careful and occasionally stately manner, but without much life or fire at the best, and becoming not unfre quently ponderous, languid, and drawling. The Annus Mirabilis, however, contains a good deal of elaborate and ambitious writing, and was by much the highest effort its author had yet made. It appears to have been the first of his poems that brought him into general notice.

It will be perceived from the titles of some of the pieces we have just named that Dryden had now left his original political party. The Restoration had of course terminated his secretaryship with Sir Gilbert Pickering; and he probably worked for a time for the booksellers; but he was soon fortunate enough to find a new patron in Sir Robert Howard, a younger son of the Earl of Berkshire, who, besides the influence that his services and connections gave him under the new state of things, was himself a person of literary and poetical tastes, and as such capable of appreciating the merits of the young poet. The Annus Mirabilis' was prefaced by a long letter to Howard, giving an account of the poem, in which Dryden says: "You have not only been careful of my fortune, which was the effect of your nobleness,