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The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Volume 1 With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes By: John Dryden (1631-1700) |
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THE POETICAL WORKS
OF JOHN DRYDEN. With Life, Critical Dissertation, and
Explanatory Notes BY THE
REV. GEORGE GILFILLAN. VOL. I.
M. DCCC. LV.
THE LIFE OF JOHN DRYDEN.
John Dryden was born on the 9th of August 1631, at a place variously
denominated Aldwincle, or Oldwincle, All Saints; or at Oldwincle, St
Peter's, in Northamptonshire. The name Dryden or Driden, is from the
North. There are Drydens still in the town of Scotland where we now
write; and the poet's ancestors lived in the county of Cumberland. One
of them, named John, removed from a place called Staff hill, to
Northamptonshire, where he succeeded to the estate of Canons Ashby, by
marriage with the daughter of Sir John Cope. John Dryden was a
schoolmaster, a Puritan, and honoured, it is said, with the friendship
of the celebrated Erasmus, after whom he named his son, who succeeded to
the estate of Canons Ashby, and, besides becoming a sheriff of the
county of Northamptonshire, was created a knight under James I. Sir
Erasmus had three sons, the third of whom, also an Erasmus, became the
father of our poet. His mother was Mary, the daughter of the Rev. Henry
Pickering, whose father, a zealous Puritan, had been one of the marked
victims in the Gunpowder Plot. Dryden thus had connexions both on his
father's and mother's side with that party, by deriding, defaming, and
opposing which he afterwards gained much of his poetical glory. The poet was the eldest of fourteen children four sons and ten
daughters. The honour of his birth is claimed, as already stated, by two
parishes, that of Oldwincle, All Saints, and that of Oldwincle, St
Peter's, as Homer's was of old by seven cities. His brothers and
sisters have been followed, by eager biographers, into their diverging
and deepening paths of obscurity paths in which we do not choose to
attend them. Dryden received the rudiments of his education at Tichmarsh
or at Oundle for here, too, we have conflicting statements. It is
certain, however, that he was admitted a king's scholar at Westminster,
under the tuition of Dr Busby, whom he always respected, and who
discovered in him poetical power. He encouraged him to write, as a
Thursday's night's task, a translation of the third Satire of Persius, a
writer precisely of that vigorously rhetorical, rapidly satirical, and
semi poetical school, which Dryden was qualified to appreciate and to
mirror; besides other pieces of a similar kind which are lost. During
the last year of his residence at Westminster, and when only eighteen
years of age, he wrote one among the ninety eight elegies which were
called forth by the sudden death of Henry Lord Hastings, and published
under the title of "Lachrymæ Musarum." Hastings seems to have been an
amiable person, but he was besides a lord, and hinc illoe lachrymæ .
We know not of what quality the other tears were, but assuredly Dryden's
is one of very suspicious sincerity, and of very little poetical merit.
But even the crocodile tears of a great genius, if they fall into a
fanciful shape, must be preserved; and we have preserved his,
accordingly, notwithstanding the false taste as well as doubtful truth
and honesty of this his earliest poem. Shortly after, Dryden obtained a Westminster scholarship, and on the
11th of May 1650, entered on Trinity College, Cambridge. His tutor was
one John Templer, famous then as one of the many who had attempted to
put a hook in the jaws of old Hobbes, the Leviathan of his time, but
whose reply, as well as Hobbes' own book (like a whale disappearing from
a Shetland "voe" into the deep, with all the hooks and harpoons of his
enemies along with him) has been almost entirely forgotten. At
Cambridge, Dryden was noted for regularity and diligence, and took the
degree of B.A. in January 1653 4, and in 1657 was made A.M. by a
dispensation from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Once, indeed, he was
rusticated for a fortnight on account of some disobedience to the
vice master... Continue reading book >>
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