DRYDEN. Of w curiofity which his F the great poet whofe life I am about reputation must excite will require a difplay more ample than can now be given. His contemporaries, however they reverenced his genius, left his life unwritten; and nothing therefore can be known beyond what cafual mention and uncertain tradition have fupplied. JOHN DRYDEN was born August 9, 1631, at Aldwinkle near Oundle, the son of Erasmus Dryden of Tichmersh; who was the third fon of Sir Erafinus Dryden, Ba ronet, of Canons Ashby. All these places are in Northamptonshire; but the original stock of the family was in the county of Huntingdon. He is reported, by his laft biographer, Derrick, to have inherited from his father an estate of two hundred a year, and to VOL. II. have B have been bred, as was faid, an Anabaptift. For either of these particulars no authority is given. Such a fortune ought to have fecured him from that poverty which seems always to have oppreffed him; or, if he had wasted it, to have made him ashamed of publishing his neceffities. But though he had many enemies, who undoubtedly examined his life with a fcrutiny fufficiently malicious, I do not remember that he is ever charged with waste of his patrimony. He was indeed fometimes reproached for his first religion. I am therefore inclined to believe that Derrick's intelligence was partly true, and partly erroneous. From Westminster School, where he was instructed as one of the king's scholars by Dr. Busby, whom he long after continued to reverence, he was in 1650 elected to one of the Westminster scholarships at Cambridge. Of his fchool performances has appeared only a poem on the death of Lord Haftings, compofed with great ambition of fuch conceits as, notwithstanding the reformation * He went off to Trinity College, and was admi tel to a Bachelor's Degree in 1653. H. begun |