John Dryden was born on the 9th of August, 1631 o, at Aldwincle, a village in Northamptonshire, which was also the birthplace of the Church historian, Thomas Fuller. Both his parents belonged to Northamptonshire families of distinction. His father, Erasmus Dryden, the third son of Sir Erasmus Dryden, Baronet, of Canons Ashby, was a Justice of the Peace for Northamptonshire. The Drydens were all Puritans and Commonwealthmen. Sir Erasmus Dryden, who died in 1632, the year after the birth of his celebrated grandson, was sent to prison, but a few years before his death in old age, for refusing to pay loan-money to Charles the First. To this event Dryden refers in his Epistle to his cousin John Driden of Chesterton, Member for Huntingdonshire, whose public spirit he compares with their common grandfather's :

'Such was your generous grandsire, free to grant
In Parliaments that weighed their Prince's want,
But so tenacious of the common cause
As not to lend the king against his laws;
And in a loathsome dungeon doomed to lie,
In bonds retained his birthright liberty,

And shamed oppression till it set him free.'

The old man was liberated on the eve of the general election for Charles the First's third Parliament in 1628. Sir John

• The year of Dryden's birth is incorrectly given as 1632 in the inscription on the monument in Westminster Abbey.

f Malone and some other biographers have said much about the spelling of Dryden's name, and represented that he early in life deliberately changed the spelling from Driden to Dryden; and Malone has made a statement, which appears to be totally without authority, that the poet gave offence to his uncle, Sir John, by this change of spelling. The spelling of names was very variable in Dryden's time, and I believe there is nothing more than accident in the variations of spelling of his name: Dryden, Driden, and also Dreyden and Dreydon occur. Dryden's name is spelt Driden on title-pages of his works after the Restoration, and in one instance ( Astræa Redux') as late as 1688. I follow other biographers and editors in preserving the spelling Driden for the name of his cousin John, to whom he addressed the beautiful poetical epistle, on account of convenience for distinction.

Dryden, successor to Sir Erasmus, and Dryden's uncle, inherited the Puritan zeal. Dryden's mother was Mary, daughter of the Reverend Henry Pickering, rector of Aldwincle All Saints from 1597 till his death in 1637. The Pickerings were near neighbours of the Drydens, and the two families were connected by marriage before the union of the poet's parents, a daughter of Sir Erasmus Dryden having married Sir John Pickering, Knight, the elder brother of the rector of Aldwincle. Sir Gilbert Pickering, the son and successor of Sir John, was thus doubly related to Dryden. Sir Gilbert, having been made a baronet by Charles the First, became a Cromwellite, and held high office during the Protectorate; he was Chamberlain to Oliver Cromwell, and High Steward of Westminster, and one of the so-called peers of Cromwell's second Chamber of 1658, and afterwards one of Richard Cromwell's chief advisers.

The marriage of Erasmus Dryden and Mary Pickering took place on the 21st of October 1630, in the church of Pilton, a village near Aldwincle. The poet was their first child, the eldest of a family of fourteen. A room in the parsonage-house at Aldwincle All Saints is shown as his birthplace. This tradition, which has been maintained uninterruptedly from Dryden's time till now, is unsupported by positive evidence, but as it necessitates only the probable supposition that his mother was on a visit to her parents at the time of the birth of her first child, there is no reason for not accepting it.

Of the early life of Dryden very little is known. His father possessed a small property at Blakesley in the neighbourhood of Canons Ashby, the seat of the Drydens, and of Tichmarch, the seat of the Pickerings. A monument erected in Tichmarch church to his memory, by his cousin Mrs. Creed, has an inscription which boasts that 'he was bred and had his first learning here.' But the best part of his education was obtained at Westminster, under Dr. Busby. He entered the school as a King's Scholar, but in what year is not known. He retained through life a pleasant remembrance of his Westminster days, and a great respect for Dr.

Busby, to whom in 1693 he dedicated his translation of the Fifth Satire of Persius. He says in the Dedication that he had received from Dr. Busby 'the first and truest taste of Persius.' Two of his sons were educated at Westminster under the same head-master, Dr. Busby. He remembered to the last, but without resentment, Dr. Busby's floggings. In one of his latest letters, written in 1699 to Charles Montagu, Chancellor of the Exchequer, when sending for his inspection some poems before publication, he speaks of having corrected and re-corrected them, and he says, 'I am now in fear that I have purged them out of their spirit as our Master Busby used to whip a boy so long till he made him a confirmed blockhead.' Charles Montagu had been educated at Westminster, but he was thirty years younger than Dryden, and might have been at the school with Dryden's

sons.

In 1650 Dryden left Westminster with a scholarship, for Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1649 he had written his first poem, which gave little promise of the smoothness and harmony of versification to which he afterwards attained. Lord Hastings, the subject of it, the eldest son of the Earl of Huntingdon, had been educated at Westminster, and his rare attainments had raised among his friends high hopes of future eminence. When these hopes were destroyed by his untimely death from small pox, when he was just of age, in 1649, the event was lamented in as many as thirty-three elegies by different authors, which were collected and published in 1650 by Richard Brome, with the title of 'Lacrymæ Musarum, the Tears of the Muses; exprest in Elegies written by divers Persons of nobility and worth upon the death of Henry Lord Hastings, only son of the Right Honourable Ferdinando Earl of Huntingdon, heir-general of the high-born Prince George, Duke of Clarence, brother to King Edward the Fourth s.' Among the contributors to this volume were three who were already known as poets, and whose

g Sir Walter Scott, who had not seen this little volume, erroneously gives ninety-eight as the number of the elegies.

fame has survived them, Denham, Herrick, and Andrew Marvel. Dryden's second known poem, a short complimentary address prefixed to a little volume of sacred poetry by John Hoddesden, a friend and schoolfellow, was probably written at the beginning of Dryden's residence at Cambridge. Hoddesden's little volume bore the title 'Sion and Parnassus,' and was published in 1650.

Dryden was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, on the 18th of May, 1650; he matriculated July 16, and was elected a scholar of the college on the Westminster foundation, October 2, 1650. He took his degree of Bachelor of Arts in January 1654. Beyond these dates very little is known of his college life. With the exception of a single passage in his life of Plutarch, where he mentions having read that author in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, and adds that to that foundation he gratefully acknowledges the debt of a great part of his education, there is no mention of his Cambridge days in his writings; and this silence has created an impression that in after life he regarded Cambridge with aversion. Some lines in one of his Oxford Prologues, written in 1681, have seemed further proof of such a feeling— 'Oxford to him a dearer name shall be

Than his own mother university;

Thebes did his green unknowing youth engage,
He chooses Athens in his riper age.'

But these lines prove nothing, being probably prompted by no other motive than the desire of the moment to please an Oxford audience. A passage in a letter from Dryden to Wilmot Earl of Rochester, written in 1675, in which he sends him copies of a Prologue and Epilogue for Oxford, composed on another occasion, shows that all he wrote for Oxford may not be sincere. He tells Rochester that the pieces were approved, 'and by the event your lordship will judge how easy 'tis to pass anything upon an University, and what gross flattery the learned will endure.'

But Dryden's life at Cambridge had not passed always pleasantly. In the second year of his residence at Trinity,

he had incurred the displeasure of the authorities for 'disobedience to the Vice-Master, and his contumacy in taking of his punishment.' What the disobedience was is not known; the ultimate sentence assigned was 'that Dryden be put out of commons for a fortnight at least, and that he go not out of the college during the time aforesaid, excepting to sermons, without express leave from the Master or Vice-Master, and that at the end of the fortnight he read a confession of his crime in the Hall at dinner-time at the three Fellows' tables.' And there may be some truth, with exaggeration also, in a taunt of Shadwell, that he left Cambridge suddenly in consequence of a quarrel.

Dryden's father died in June 1654, a few months after he had taken his B.A. degree. By his father's death he inherited two-thirds of a small estate at Blakesley, which gave him an income of about 40l. a year. The remaining third of the property was left to his mother for her life, and she lived till 1676. It is calculated that 40l. a year in Dryden's time would have been equal to four times as much now. Dryden's income would therefore have been sufficient to support him decently with economy.

He ceased to be a scholar of Trinity in April, 1655, before the natural expiry by time of his scholarship, on account of his having ceased to reside at Cambridge. This appears from the following entry in the college Conclusion Book of April 23, 1655, 'That scholars be elected into the places of Sr. Hooker, Sr. Sawies, Sr. Driden, Sr. Quincey, Sr. Burton; with this proviso, that if the said Bachelors shall return to the College at or before Midsummer next, to continue constantly according to statute, then the scholars chosen into their places respectively shall recede and give place to them, otherwise to stand as proper scholars.' It further appears

that a young man named Wilford was elected into Dryden's place on the above-mentioned condition. The Senior Bursar's book shows that neither Dryden nor any of the others for whom as scholars successors were elected at the same time, re-entered into their scholarships. They all received the scholars' stipends up to Michaelmas 1655, and no further