SET TO MUSIC BY HANDEL.

45

not thought worthy of publication. Then Steele induced Clayton to try his hand; but with no better success. Lastly Handel, in 1736, did it ample justice.

The reception of this ode gratified the failing, infirm poet. 'I am glad,' he wrote to Tonson, 'my ode is esteemed the best of all my poetry, by all the town. I thought so myself when I writ it, but I mistrusted my own judgment.'

A young Templar, named Marlay, hastened to pay his respects to Dryden, at Wills's on the production of this ode. He congratulated Dryden on having written the finest and noblest ode ever produced in any language.

'You are right, young gentleman,' replied Dryden; 'a nobler ode never was produced, and never will.' The expression seems to have burst forth involuntarily, from a man generally modest about his own works.

Of his latter years, what has to be said is painful. ‘I am afraid,' says Johnson, cautious of giving way, even in this instance, to compassion-(no man had really a tenderer heart)

that the greater part of his life was passed in exigencies.' Little is known of the details of his daily life. Perhaps its happiest hours were spent in Wills's Coffee-house. There, in his arm-chair, placed near the fire in winter-and no one dared to interfere with that arrangement-or in the balcony in summer, he sat, judge of all literary works, and arbiter in disputes; gracious, hopeful, venerable. He used to call these two places his winter and his summer residence. He had sorrows enough in his small family, and in his trio of sons, to have overwhelmed many minds. Superstition, astrology, in which more especially he believed, added a gloom to the evil accidents which crushed those whom he best loved. For them he continued the labour of the brain; that organ, when overtasked, produces sensations of misery, which few who have not had to write for money, can comprehend. Charles, his eldest son, who shared sometimes his efforts, was ill at Rome. If I must die of over-study,' Dryden wrote to Tonson (whose heart

46

DEATH OF DRYDEN.

ought to have been wrung by such words), 'I cannot spend my life better than by preserving his.'

6

It is to hours of seclusion, neglect, and even penury,' writes Sir Walter Scott, that we owe the "Paradise Lost," the "Virgil," and the "Fables." It was to such hours that Dryden's release now came.

9

At length, the life so full of brilliant success and of cankering necessities, came to a close. Gout, erisypelas, a corpulent habit, an anxious mind, were enough to overwhelm a frame utterly shattered. Symptoms of gangrene appeared in one of his feet. Hobbes, the surgeon who attended Dryden, proposed amputation in order to prolong existence. But Dryden refused; he answered that he was an old man, and had not long to live by course of nature, and therefore did not care to part with one limb at such an age, to preserve an uncomfortable life on the rest.' He was sensible to 'the last; taking leave of his friends, as one of them relates, in 'so tender and obliging a farewell, as none but he himself could have expressed.' He died in the Roman Catholic faith.

.

The well-known story of Dryden's burial, so often repeated, was the fabrication, according to Malone, of Mrs. Thomas, the Corinne of Pope, who, thirty years after Dryden's death, gave currency to a tale, that Lord Jeffries, meeting with the funeral of Dryden, performed in a poor style, offered to give so great a man a suitable burial; and that, flinging himself on his knees before the Lady Elizabeth Dryden, into whose chamber he rushed, he obtained his request-and afterwards neglected to provide means for the ceremony.

It appears, however, that a contribution was made by Lord Jeffries, in conjunction with others, and that the real and suitable interment of the poet was provided by those means. He was, at all events, carried to Westminster Abbey, and buried close to the tomb of our great poet Chaucer.

Farquhar, the dramatist, wrote a letter describing the

funeral which eventually took place, (after some delay, there is no doubt,) with an attempt to make a solemn scene ludi

crous.

'I now come,' he writes, 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 never was 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 lifevariety 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.**

In one of Dryden's last letters he predicts that his son Charles would, according to his nativity, (which, casting it himself, I am sure is true,') recover his health. That son

was then usher of the palace to Pope Clement the Twelfth; he returned to England, and was drowned, in swimming across the Thames near Windsor, in 1704. So much for the stars.

In his verses to Congreve, on his comedy called 'The Double Dealer,' Dryden had written these lines:

'Be kind to my remains; and O defend,
Against your judgment, your departed friend.
Let not th' insulting foe my name pursue,

But shade those laurels which descend to you.'

The injunction was prompted by the far-seeing mind that belongs to great powers. No sooner was he dead than

* Scott's Dryden, note, 439.

48

ATTACKS ON DRYDEN.

satirical verses on the ceremonial of his funeral were circulated. The specimen offered by Mr. Malone begins thus:

'Before the hearse the mourning coaches go,
And screech a dismal sound of grief and woe,
More dismal notes from bogtrotters may fall,
More dismal plaints at Irish funeral ;

But no such flood of tears e'er stopped on tide

Since Charles, the martyr and the monarch, died.'

Bishop Burnet attacked Dryden, calling him 'the greatest master of dramatic poesy, a monster of immodesty and of impurity of all sorts.'

Granville, Lord Lansdowne, defended his lost friend from this charge, hinting that Dryden's works were likely to last as long as the Bishop's sermons. The gross expressions of Burnet were afterwards stated by his youngest son, Thomas, to apply to Dryden's dramatic works only, but not to his private character as a member of society.

Dryden's letters evince his character in the best light. Actions, more expressive than words, attested his love for his children, his forbearance to his wife, his generous, lofty conduct to the calumnious, his hard work, his self-denial to himself, his liberality to others.

In the time of Malone his little patrimonial estate was tenanted by a farmer named Harriot, grandson of the man who held it in Dryden's lifetime. Harriot related to Malone that his grandfather took great pleasure in talking of the poet. He was,' said the old man, 'the easiest and kindest landlord in the world; and never raised the rent during the whole time that he possessed the estate.' This was great praise to a man who wrote for bread; who had sons depending on him; and Tonson waiting for the last line of the last verse; who lost his laureateship; and died too poor for his relations to pay for a suitable funeral. We wish in one other respect a character so engaging could be wholly justified; but not even the licence of the times can do more

HIS EASY AND KINDLY CHARACTER.

49

than palliate the gross indelicacy of Dryden's comedy. Great minds should lead, not follow the times; by great minds are deeper responsibilities incurred than any worldly considerations can set aside.

With the exception of his 'Virgil,' his general pieces are those only that are now read. Strong sense, penetration into character, a vigorous imagination, sometimes grand thoughts, and beautiful touches of pathos and description cause the modern lover of poetry to confess that Dryden is, as yet, unparalleled by any succeeding poet.

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