the licence which Mrs. Behn allowed herself of writing loosely, and giving, if I may have leave to say so, some scandal to the modesty of her sex. I confess I am the last man who ought in justice to arraign her, who have been myself too much a libertine in most of my poems: which I should be well contented I had leave either to purge or to see them fairly burned.'

It was thus, too, that he had expressed himself in his lines to Motteux :

"What I have loosely or profanely writ,

Let them to fires, their due desert, commit."

If poverty haunted Dryden in his last months, friends did not fail him. Vanbrugh was not alone in kindness to the aged and invalid poet. George Granville designed in like manner for Dryden's benefit a drama, “The Jew of Venice," adapted from Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice;" and Dryden dying before it was ready for the stage, his son Charles received the author's profits.

During the greater part of the months of March and April, Dryden was confined to his house by gout: the immediate cause of death was neglected inflammation of a toe, which brought on mortification. Hobbs, the famous surgeon of the day, advised at once amputation of the toe, to which Dryden would not consent; and when the evil had spread over the leg, Hobbs again advised amputation of the limb, which the old man refused also. Death was then inevitable. The illness was short. A London newspaper announced on the 30th of April, “John Dryden, Esq., the famous poet, lies a-dying.' At three in the following morning, May 1, he expired. His cousin, Mrs. Creed, who raised the monument to his memory in the church of Tichmarsh, was one of those who saw him on his death-bed: and she has recorded on the monument that, "when nature could be no longer supported, he received the notice of his approaching dissolution with sweet submission and entire resignation to the Divine will; and he took so tender and obliging a farewell of his friends, as none but he himself could have expressed: of which sorrowful number I was one." Words of this sort with reference to such an occasion from a sorrowing and zealous friend must always incur some suspicion of conventionalism: but we may believe that Dryden with his strong intellect and kindly nature, conscious of faults as well as of good qualities, and reviewing his life of industry and good acts humanly mixed with error and sin, was courageous, calm, and courteous on his death-bed.

Dryden died without a will, and his widow having renounced, his son Charles administered on June 10.+ There was little or no personalty; and, indeed, debts of the moment would probably have exceeded any small assets. Dryden had nothing to transmit but his small landed inheritance in Northamptonshire and any small landed property which he may have acquired in Wiltshire. But the poet who died thus poor had a splendid funeral. There appears to have

* The Postboy.

+ There is an entry in the margin of the register in Doctors' Commons: "Administratio de bonis nov. May 1713." This refers to a new administration by Lady Elizabeth Dryden's niece, Anne Sylvius, in 1713, when the balance of payment for the "Fables" was due from Tonson.

been in the first instance an intention of a quiet private interment: the state of his body rendered quick measures necessary: and it is said that Charles Montagu promptly offered to pay the expenses of the burial. But it appeared to others, among whom Lord Jeffries, the son of the chancellor of bad fame, was prominent, and of whom Dryden's lifelong friend, Dorset, was also one, that the poet merited burial in Westminster Abbey and a public funeral: and by their desire the body was embalmed, and application was made through Garth, a poet and physician, to the President and Censors of the College of Physicians for permissior to deposit the body in the College until the funeral. So the body lay

in state for several days in the College of Physicians. The funeral took place on May 13; it was preceded by a ceremony at the College, in the course of which Garth delivered a funeral oration in Latin, and the Ode of Horace beginning “Exegi monumentum ære perennius," was sung to music. Then there was a long procession from the College to Westminster Abbey, Dryden's friends who attended filling nearly fifty carriages, and the whole number of carriages that followed being about a hundred; music preceded the hearse, drawn by six horses. Dryden was buried in Poets' Corner, by the graves of Chaucer and Cowley.*

There had been carried in splendid state to a grave in that honoured spot the remains of one who, at the close of his life, was not only beyond comparison the greatest living British poet, but who had for some thirty years wielded a wide intellectual sway, wider in its scope than that which, after him, Addison, Pope, or Johnson exercised in literature, poetry, or criticism, and embracing, with the drama, all their several dominions. Six and thirty years before his death Pepys had spoken of him as "the poet," and one of "the wits of the town," at that same coffee-house, Will's, where he afterwards was for so many years a literary king, holding a throne independent of royal favour or ministerial patronage, and

* I have not thought it necessary to allude in the text to the fabulous account of Dryden's funeral concocted by Mrs. Thomas, the lady whom Dryden christened Corinna, which was published in the book called "Wilson's Life of Congreve," and which is a discreditable and monstrous tissue of fiction invented for money. Mrs. Thomas, Dryden's young correspondent of his old age, got into discredit and into the Fleet Prison, from which she supplied Curll, the publisher, with a sensational romance about Dryden's death and funeral, the falsehoods and improbabilities of which were effectually exposed by Malone in his Life of Dryden. Farquhar, the dramatic author, who attended the funeral, wrote an ill-natured account of it, which is in print. "I come now from Mr. Dryden's funeral, where we had an Ode on Horace sung instead of David's Psalms; whence you may find that we don't think a poet worth Christian burial. The pomp of the ceremony was a kind of rhapsody, and fitter, I think, for Hudibras than him; because the cavalcade was mostly burlesque: but he was an extraordinary man, and buried after an extraordinary fashion, for I do believe there was never such another burial seen. The oration indeed was great and ingenious, worthy the subject, and like the author, whose prescriptions can restore the living, and his pen embalm the dead. And so much for Mr. Dryden; whose burial was the same as his life, variety and not of a piece: the quality and mob, farce and heroics: the sublime and ridiculous mixed in a piece; great Cleopatra in a hackney coach." This is evidently a letter written for effect, and an ill-natured criticism. It is difficult to eliminate the vulgar and the ludicrous from the solemnity of any funeral: and the more splendour is attempted, the more difficult is perfect congruity.

+Will's Coffee-house was on the north side of Russell Street, Covent Garden, at the corner of Bow Street, kept by William Unwin, familiarly called Will.

glorious

unaffected by change of creed or by worldly adversity; where he sat as John" in his own great arm-chair, regularly placed in winter by the fire and in summer on the balcony; where the younger and less famous visitors, sitting aloof from the chief table, went up to him occasionally to seek, that they might boast of, the honour of a pinch of snuff out of his snuff-box; where, in the last year of his life, was brought, in order to get a sight of the renowned old man, a boy of twelve, who had been born to the Roman Catholic faith which Dryden adopted, and who, but a few years after, began in very early manhood a poetical career, soon leading to a fame which rivals Dryden's. 'Virgilium tantum vidi" is how Pope spoke In nine years after Dryden's death,

afterwards of his one short sight of Dryden. Pope's Pastorals were published in the last volume of that series of Miscellanies of 3 which Tonson had published four under the editorship of Dryden.

A collection of poems on Dryden's death by members of the two Universities and others soon appeared with the title of "Luctus Britannici," and nine ladies combined to make another tribute of poetry to his memory in a book called "The Nine Muses; or Poems written by nine several ladies on the death of the late famous John Dryden, Esq." Neither volume contains any poem of striking merit or by a renowned author; but they serve to show the strong and general sensation excited by Dryden's death.

It was twenty years before any monument was placed over Dryden's grave in Westminster Abbey. There was an expectation at the time of the burial that Montagu and Dorset would erect a monument: but it was not so. In 1717, Congreve, in his dedication to Thomas Pelham, Duke of Newcastle, of his edition of Dryden's plays, complimented his Grace on his having ordered a monument— on his "having from pure regard to merit, from an entire love of learning, and from that accurate taste and discernment which he had so early obtained in the polite arts, given order for erecting, at his own expense, a splendid monument to the memory of a man whom he never saw, but who was an honour to his country."

Samuel Pepys wrote from Clapham to John Jackson, May 9, 1700, about Dryden's death, saying that he will be buried in Chaucer's grave and have his monument erected by Lord Dorset and Mr. Montagu." (Diary and Correspondence of Pepys, ed. 1849, vol. v. p. 336.) In a poem addressed to Garth in the "Luctus Britannici," Montagu's alleged intention is made the medium of a harsh and unjust attack:

"Since generous Montagu a tomb designs

For him he stabbed, when living, with his lines."

The "lines" are of course the burlesque of "The Hind and the Panther," which was principally
in prose
Pope, in his well-known satirical sketch of Montagu as Bufo, has also misrepresented
Montagu's relations with Dryden :

"Dryden alone (what wonder?) came not nigh,
Dryden alone escaped this judging eye:
But still the great have kindness in reserve,
He helped to bury whom he helped to starve."

Montagu evidently had the will to serve Dryden during the reign of William, but it was not possible for him to do so.

But nothing came of the Duke of Newcastle's thus lauded promise or intention. At last, Dryden's old friend and benefactor, Mulgrave, now Duke of Buckinghamshire, roused, it is said, by Pope's lines for an inscription on Rowe's tomb near Dryden's,—

"Thy reliques, Rowe, to this fair urn we trust,
And sacred place by Dryden's awful dust:
Beneath a rude and nameless stone he lies,

To which thy tomb shall guide inquiring eyes,"

The Duke imme

resolved that this reproach and shame should exist no longer. diately gave order for a modest monument, which was erected in 1720, with a short Latin inscription, in which the year of Dryden's birth is wrongly given :

Pope, consulted by Buckinghamshire, had proposed this couplet :

"This Sheffield raised; the sacred dust below

Was Dryden once: the rest who does not know?"

The bust by Schumacher which now surmounts the monument was placed there in 1731 by the Duke of Buckinghamshire's widow, in substitution for an inferior one furnished in 1720.

Lady Elizabeth Dryden survived her husband several years, and died in June or July 1714. During the last ten or eleven years of her life she was insane. When, in 1713, Jacob Tonson printed a second edition of his Fables, the balance due under the agreement with Dryden of 1699 was paid for the benefit of Lady Elizabeth to her niece, Lady Sylvius, daughter of the Hon. William Howard, who became for this purpose administratrix to Dryden's estate; the eldest son, Charles, who had in the first instance administered, being now dead. Lady Elizabeth Dryden indeed survived not only her husband, but also all her three The eldest, Charles, was drowned in August 1704, when swimming across the Thames near Datchet. John, the second son, died at Rome, very soon after his father's death, in January 1701. Erasmus Henry, the youngest, called “Harry” in his father's letters, succeeded in May 1710 to the baronetcy on the death of his cousin, Sir John Dryden, and died on December 4 of the same year.

sons.

Some notion of Dryden's personal appearance may be gathered from contemporary notices. He was of short stature, stout, and ruddy in the face. Rochester christened him Poet Squab, and Tom Brown always calls him "little Bayes." Shadwell in his "Medal of John Bayes" sneers at him as a cherrycheeked dunce; another lampooner calls him "learned and florid." Pope remembered him as plump and of fresh colour, with a down look. Lady de Longueville, who died in 1763 at the age of 100, told Oldys that she remembered Dryden's dining with her husband, and that the most remarkable part of his appearance was

an uncommon distance between his eyes.* He had a large mole on his right cheek. The friendly writer of some lines on his portrait by Closterman says:

"A sleepy eye he shows, and no sweet feature."

He appears to have become gray comparatively early, and he let his gray hair grow long. We see him with his long gray locks in the portrait by which through engravings his face is best known to us, painted by Kneller in 1698. The face, as we know it by that picture and the engravings, is handsome; it indicates intellect, and sensual characteristics are not wanting.

Congreve, to whom Dryden consigned in beautiful lines the protection of his fame, has given in the dedication of his edition of Dryden's plays an account of his character, which must be read of course with the caution due to a formal eulogy for the public by a warm friend, and which evidently embraces only a part of the subject, but which there is every reason to believe is, so far as it goes, substantially correct. "He was," says Congreve, "of a nature exceedingly humane and compassionate; easily forgiving injuries, and capable of a prompt and sincere reconciliation with those who had offended him. His friendship, when he professed it, went much beyond his professions; and I have been told of strong and generous instances of it by the persons themselves who received them; though his hereditary income was little more than a bare competency." And again : He was of very easy, I may say of very pleasing, access; but something slow and, as it were, diffident in his advances to others. He had something in his nature that abhorred intrusion into any society whatsoever. Indeed, it is to be regretted that he was rather blameable in the other extreme; for by that means he was personally less known, and consequently his character might become liable both to misapprehensions and misrepresentations. To the best of my knowledge and observation he was, of all the men that I ever knew, one of the most modest, and the most casily to be discountenanced in his approaches either to his superiors or his equals.' In several passages of his writings he has spoken of himself as unfitted to shine in conversation, and as bashful in cultivating and in soliciting his superiors. With his familiars he was at ease, and always lively and instructive. He had the shyness of pride with strangers and superiors. He dispensed even the fulsome flatteries of his dedications with the air of a patron. If his ways of living were more expensive

*See extracts from Oldys's notes in "Notes and Queries," Second Series, vol. xi. p. 162. This passage is from Oldys's notes on Langbaine's account of the English dramatists: and I have seen a copy of these notes in MS. with additional notes by Dr. Percy, in the possession of Mr. A. Holt White, of Clements Hall, Rochford.

+ This portrait was painted by Kneller for Jacob Tonson, and is in the possession of Mr. W. R. Baker, of Bayfordbury Hall, Hertfordshire. Kneller is known to have made other portraits of Dryden; one is in the possession of Mr. C. Beville Dryden. Those who wish to know more about the portraits of Dryden are referred to Malone's Life and to a statement appended to Mr. R. Bell's Life. A crayon drawing by Mr. Elstob, mentioned in a letter of Mr. G. Ballard, "as very masterly done, and an extraordinary fine likeness" (Nichols's Illustrations of Literature, iv. 213), is to be added to the lists of Malone and Bell.