allowed him to substitute composition in English for composition in Latin and Greek, and he encouraged him to turn portions of Persius and other Roman poets into English verse. Despairing, probably, of ever making him an exact verbal scholar, he was satisfied with enabling him to read Latin, if not Greek, with accuracy and facility. Dryden never forgot his obligations to Busby. Thirty years afterwards, when the Westminster boy had become the first poet and the first critic of his age, he dedicated, with exquisite propriety, to his old schoolmaster his translation of the Satire in which Persius records his reverence and gratitude to Cornutus. From Westminster he proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge. He was entered on the 18th of May, 1650; he matriculated in the following July, and on the 2nd of October in the same year he was elected a scholar on the Westminster foundation. Of his life at Cambridge very little is known. Like Milton before him, and like Gray, Wordsworth, and Coleridge after him, he appears to have had no respect for his teachers, and to have taken his education into his own hands. From independence to rebellion is an easy step, and an entry may still be read in the Conclusion-book at Trinity, which charges him with disobedience to the Vice-Master and with contumacy in taking the punishment inflicted on him. It would seem also from an allusion in a satire of Shadwell's that he got into some scrape for libelling a young nobleman, which, had he not anticipated condemnation by flight, would have ended in his expulsion from the University. But as this is without corroboration of any kind and rests only on the authority of

Shadwell, it is now impossible to disengage the little which is probably true in the story from the greater part which is plainly fictitious. How long Dryden remained at Cambridge is uncertain. He took the degree of B.A. in January, 1654. In June of the same year his father died, and on his father's death he succeeded to a small property. Of his movements during the next three years nothing certain is known. It seems clear that he did not return, as Malone and the biographers who have followed Malone have supposed, to Cambridge. By the middle of 1657 he had in all probability settled in London.

Cromwell was then, though harassed with accumulating difficulties, in the zenith of his power, and Dryden's cousin, Sir Gilbert Pickering, stood high in the Protector's favour. As young Dryden was on friendly terms with Sir Gilbert, who appears to have received him with much kindness, he had good reason for supposing that an opening would soon be found for him. His social and political prospects were indeed far more promising than his prospects as a poet. He was now in his twentyseventh year. At an age when Aristophanes, Catullus, Lucan, Persius, Milton, Tasso, Shelley, Keats, and innumerable others, had won immortal fame, he had evinced no symptom of poetic genius; he had proved, on the contrary, that he was ignorant of the very rudiments of his art, that he had still to acquire what all other poets instinctively possess. A few lines to his cousin, Honor, "so middling bad were better," an execrable elegy on Lord Hasting's death, and a commendatory poem on his friend Hoddesden's Epigrams immeasurably inferior to what Pope and Kirke White produced at twelve, showed

that he had no ear for verse, no command of poetic diction, no sense of poetic taste. The transformation of the author of these poems into the author of Absalom and Achitophel, the Religio Laici, and the Hind and Panther, is one of the most remarkable in the history of literature.

Sir Gilbert was not able to do much for his young relative. In September, 1658, Cromwell died, and at the beginning of the following year Dryden published a copy of verses to deplore the event. The Heroic Stanzas on the Death of the Lord Protector inaugurate his poetical career. His biography from this point may be conveniently divided into four epochs. The first extends to the publication of the Essay of Dramatic Poesy in 1668, the second to the appearance of the Spanish Friar in the autumn of 1681, the third to the publication of the Britannia Rediviva in June, 1688, and the fourth to his death in 1700.

1659-1668.

The death of Cromwell changed the face of affairs, and, after nearly eighteen months of anarchy, Charles II. was on the throne of his ancestors. Dryden lost no time in attempting to ingratiate himself with the Royalists, and the three poems succeeding the Heroic Stanzas, namely, Astræa Redux (1660), the Panegyric on the Coronation (April, 1661), and the Epistle to the Lord Chancellor (New Year's Day, 1662), were written to wel come Charles II. and to flatter his minister Clarendon. These poems are evidently the fruit of much labour, and recall in their versification and tone of thought the characteristics of the masters of the "Critical School"—

Waller, Denham, Cowley, and Davenant, plainly Dryden's models at this time. In November, 1662, Dryden became a member of the newly-founded Royal Society, and in the following year his interest in scientific studies found expression in a copy of verses addressed to Dr. Walter Charleton, and inserted in Charleton's treatise on Stonehenge. This, according to Hallam, is the first of Dryden's poems which "possesses any considerable merit," the first, as Scott observes, in which he threw off the shackles of the "Metaphysical School," as it is certainly the first in which he strikes his own. peculiar note.

Dryden had now seriously commenced his career as a professional man of letters, and attached himself to Herringman, a bookseller in the New Exchange. For some months he appears to have been a kind of hack to Herringman, producing various trifles in current ephemeral publications. In 1663, he took two important steps, which were to affect greatly his future life. In December he married the Lady Elizabeth Howard, the sister of his friend Sir Robert Howard, and one of the daughters of the Earl of Berkshire. She bore him three sons, but it does not appear to have been a happy marriage, and though we need not suppose that Dryden's frequent and bitter sneers at marriage were anything more than a concession to the fashionable cant of the age, it is not unlikely that his own experience, in some degree, flavoured and coloured them. Shortly before his marriage, began his connection with the theatres, and this connection was, with some interruptions, continued till within six years of his death, his first play,

The Wild Gallant, being acted in 1663, his last, Love Triumphant, in 1694. Johnson has lamented the necessity of following the progress of Dryden's theatrical fame, but observes at the same time that the composition and fate of eight and twenty dramas include too much of a poetical life to be omitted. They include, unhappily, the best years of that life; they prevented, as their author pathetically complains, the composition of works better suited to his genius. Had fortune allowed him to indulge that genius Lucretius might have found his equal and Lucan his superior. He had bound himself, however, to the profession of a man of letters; he had taken to literature as a trade, and it was, therefore, necessary for him to supply not the commodities of which he happened to have a monopoly, but the commodities of which his customers had need. Those who live to please must, as he well knew, please to live. His first play, The Wild Gallant (1663), was a failure. "As poor a thing," writes Pepys, "as ever as I saw in my life." [Sc Comedy, indeed, as he soon found, was not within his range, and though he lived to produce five others by dint of wholesale plagiarism from Molière, Quinault, Corneille, and Plautus, and by laboriously interpolating indecency which may challenge comparison with Lindsay's Philotus or Fletcher's Custom of the County, two of them were hissed off the stage, one was indifferently received, and the other two are inferior in comic effect to the poorest of Wycherley's. He says himself in the Defence of the Essay on Dramatic Poesy, I am not so fitted by nature to write comedy. I want that gaiety of humour which is required to it. My conversation is slow and

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