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of volubility which is only witnessed in the south of France, and which never deserted him to his last hour, was no longer to be controlled. His conduct was decisive. He enclosed his poem to Dr. Johnson with an impassioned statement of his case, complaining, which he ever did, that he had never found a counsellor or literary friend. He left his packet himself at Bolt Court [see JOHNSON], where he was received by Mr. Francis Barber, the doctor's well-known black servant, and told to call in a week. Be sure that he was very punctual; but the packet was returned to him unopened, with a message that the illustrious doctor was too ill to read anything. The unhappy and obscure aspirant who received this disheartening message accepted it, in his utter despondency, as a mechanical excuse. But, alas! the cause was too true; and a few weeks after the great soul of Johnson quitted earth.

The various homes of the elder D'Israeli are described in the preceding paper (see the younger DISRAELI, pp. 86-89).

In Bloomsbury Square he wrote 'The Curiosities of Literature,' and kindred works, and remained until he took his family in 1825 to Bradenham House, Buckinghamshire, where he died in 1848. A letter of his was written to the Countess of Blessington, but without date, from No. 1 St. James's Place, St. James's Street; and in 1835 both father and son were at No. 31 A, Park Street, Grosvenor Square, near the corner of King Street, and next door to the White Bear public house. This street has been renumbered.

MICHAEL DRAYTON.

1563-1631.

T is not now known when or under what circumstances Drayton first saw London; and nothing is to be gathered concerning his career here from the occasional personal

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allusions scattered throughout his poems. According to Aubrey he lived at ye bay-windowe house next the east end of St. Dunstan's Church in Fleet Street.' This house, numbered 186 Fleet Street, was standing-in 1885, altered and restored; but its next-door neighbor city-wards still showed what was its appearance when Drayton occupied it, and published in 1608 an edition of his 'Poems'‘at the Shop of John Smithwick, St. Dunstan's Church Yard under the Diall.' This churchyard, facing Fleet Street, was the Paternoster Row of that day, and much frequented by booksellers.

Drayton was buried in Westminster Abbey, according to Fuller in the south aisle near to Chaucer's grave and Spenser's, where his monument stands;' but Dean Stanley believes that he lies near the small north door of the nave. Mr. Marshall, the stonecutter in Fetter Lane, told Aubrey that the lines on his 'pious marble were writ by Francis Quarles, a very good man.' They declare that his name cannot fade; and yet when Goldsmith read them, a century later, he confessed that he had never heard the name before.

DR

JOHN DRYDEN.

1631-1700.

RYDEN was a pupil of Dr. Bushy at Westminster School (see CHURCHILL, p. 51), where is still carefully preserved the old form upon which, in long sprawling schoolboyish letters, is the name I DRYDEN, carved by his own hands. He distinguished himself there as a juvenile poet, and won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge.

6

According to Malone, he returned to London in 1657, when Scott believes that he lodged with Herringman the bookseller, in the then New Exchange, destroyed in 1737. Scott also throws doubt upon the stories of Dryden's dining at a threepenny ordinary' and being 'clad in homely drugget,' as asserted by Shadwell and others. His circumstances were certainly better than his earlier biographers would have us believe, when he married the daughter of the Earl of Berkshire a few years later.

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The date of Dryden's marriage eluded inquiries of Malone
and Scott. He was married by license in the Church of
St. Swithin, by London Stone (as appears by the
Note by
Peter Cun- register of that Church), on the 1st December, 1663.

ningham,
Johnson's
Lives of the
Poets:
Dryden.

The entry of the license, which is dated 'ultimo Novembis,' 1663, and is in the office of the Vicar-General of the Archbishop of Canterbury, describes him as a parishioner of St. Clement Danes of about the age of thirty, and the Lady Elizabeth [Howard] as twenty-five and of the parish of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. The poet's signature to the entry is written Driden.'

Scott gives the date of this marriage as 1665. The Church of St. Swithin, Cannon Street, was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, but rebuilt by Wren.

Peter Cunningham, with his usual care, in his 'Explanatory Notes to Johnson's Lives of the Poets,' traces Dryden to his different London homes, and shows that 'he lived from 1673 to 1682 in the Parish of St. Bride's, Fleet Street, on the water side of the street, in or near Salisbury Court (Rate Booke of St. Bride's, Fleet Street); and from 1682 to 1686 in a house on the north side of Long Acre facing Rose Street.'

The Dryden Press, founded a century and a half ago, stood in 1885 at No. 137 Long Acre, and marked the site of Dryden's house there.

There is a tradition that Dryden lived once in Fetter

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