the first lyric poem in our language. Of the composition of this ode, the following story has been related on the authority of Mr. Berenger, many years master of the horse, and first equerry to his present Majesty.

"Mr. St. John, afterwards Lord Bolingbroke, happening to pay a morning visit to Dryden, whom he always respected, found him in an unusual agitation of spirits, even to a trembling. On enquiring the cause, "I have been up all night," replied the old bard, my musical friends made me promise to write them an Ode for their feast of St. Cecilia: I have been so struck with the subject which occurred to me, that I could not leave it, till I had completed it: here it is; finished at one sitting;" and immediately he shewed him this ode, which places the British Lyric poetry above that of any other nation."

This anecdote came from Mr. Pope, who had it, undoubtedly, from Lord Bolingbroke, yet Mr. Malone endeavours to discredit the narrative, because, in a letter written by Dryden to his sons, he says, "I am writing a song for St. Cecilia's feast," which he might well do, and yet the main of the story be true, for it is hardly possible that what he shewed Bolingbroke was the ode in its présent state.

In 1689, Dryden was attacked, in conjunction with Congreve and Vanbrugh, by the learned Jeremy Collier, in his "Short View of the Immoality and Profaneness of the Stage." This divine

made

made his charges good against these dramatic writers, yet the two last were weak enough to vindicate the obscenities scattered throughout their comedies. To the honour of Dryden, he pleaded guilty both in verse and prose.

In an Epistle to Motteux, he says:

What I have loosely or profanely writ,

Let them to fire, their due desert, commit.

. In the preface to his fables, he says:

"I shall say the less of Mr. Collier, because in many things he has taxed me justly, and I have pleaded guilty to all thoughts and expressions of mine, which can be truly arraigned of obscenity, profaneness, or immorality, and retract them. If he be my enemy let him triumph; if he be my friend, as I have given him no personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance. It becomes me not to draw my pen in the defence of a bad cause, when I have so often drawn it for a good one."

Having succeeded so well with Virgil, our poet turned his thoughts to a translation of Homer, of whom he says, "I find him a poet more according to my genius than Virgil, and consequently hope I may do him more justice, in his fiery way of writing; which, as it is liable to more faults, so it is capable of more beauties than the exactness and sobriety of Virgil."

This design, however, he relinquished, and instead of it completed his literary career by a po

2

etical

etical version of ancient fables, printed in folio, in 1699, and several times since in one volume duodecimo. In his agreement with Tonson, for this work he engaged to supply ten thousand verses for the sum of three hundred pounds.

In December of that year he was attacked by an erysipelas in one of his legs. He was also seized with the gout, and at the end of the following April, a mortification ensued, in consequence of his neglecting an inflammation in one of his feet. The surgeon proposed amputation, but Dryden said, that "as by the course of nature he had not many years to live, he would not attempt to prolong an uncomfortable existence, by a painful and uncertain experiment, but patiently submit to death."

He died May 1, 1700, and his remains were interred, with more pomp than solemnity, in Westminster Abbey. A ludicrous account of the funeral having been published by Mrs. Elizabeth Thomas, the last ingenious biographer of Dryden shews its falsity in a variety of particulars, still there seems to be some basis of truth in her general narrative, from wich we learn that "as the corpse was conveying in a private manner to the Abbey, at the expense of Mr. Montague, afterwards Earl of Halifax; the Lords Dorset and Jefferies, and some others, thinking the funeral unworthy of so great a man, prevailed upon the attendants to suffer the body to be taken, for embalment, to an undertaker's, and in the mean

time applied to the College of Physicians, for permission to deposit it in their hall. This was granted, and the body lay there in state ten days, at the expiration of which period, Dr. Garth pronounced a Latin Oration, in honour of the deceased, and then the Ode of Horace, "Exegi monumentum ære perennius," being sung, the company, which was very numerous, moved in procession to the Abbey, where the body was interred, in the grave of Chaucer."

*

Farquhar, the comic writer, gives the following description of this ceremony, in one of his letters:

"I come now from Mr. Dryden's funeral, where we had an ode in 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

Mrs. Thomas says that the Dr. was mounted upon a beer barrel for a rostrum, the head of which gave way in the middle of his speech, which occasioned the malicious report of his enemies, that he was turned a tub-preacher.

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