Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets Part 7

"Mr. Wycherley," says Packe, "had always laid hold of an opportunity which offered of representing to the Duke of Buckingham how well Mr.

Butler had deserved of the royal family, by writing his inimitable Hudibras, and that it was a reproach to the court that a person of his loyalty and wit should suffer in obscurity, and under the want he did.

The duke always seemed to hearken to him with attention enough; and after some time undertook to recommend his pretensions to his majesty.

Mr. Wycherley, in hopes to keep him steady to his word, obtained of his grace to name a day when he might introduce that modest and unfortunate poet to his new patron. At last an appointment was made, and the place of meeting was agreed to be the Roebuck. Mr. Butler and his friend attended accordingly; the duke joined them; but, as the d--l would have it, the door of the room where they sat was open, and his grace, who had seated himself near it, observing a pimp of his acquaintance--the creature, too, was a knight--trip by with a brace of ladies, immediately quitted his engagement to follow another kind of business, at which he was more ready than at doing good offices to men of desert, though no one was better qualified than he, both in regard of his fortune and understanding, to protect them; and from that time to the day of his death, poor Butler never found the least effect of his promise!"

The brightest gleam of his life would seem to be between his quitting Sir Samuel Luke's and the publication of his Hudibras; but when this exactly took place, and how long this lasted, we are not informed. It must, however, have taken place between the king's return, which was in 1659, and 1664, some five years or so. During this period he was made secretary to the Earl of Carberry, president of the princ.i.p.ality of Wales, who made him steward of Ludlow Castle when the Court of Marches was revived.

This was a post in which a poet might feel himself well placed. This ancient castle of the Lacys and Mortimers stands at the west end of the town of Ludlow, on a bold rock, overlooking the River Corve, and near the confluence of that river and the Teme. Many striking events had occurred here since the time that William the Conqueror bestowed it on Roger de Montgomery, from whose descendants it pa.s.sed successively into the hands of the crown, the Warines, the Lacys, and the Mortimers. On the borders of Wales, it was a strong-hold for the crown of England, and after it fell again into the hands of the king, became the palace of the President of the Marches, and often the residence of princes. Here the young king Edward V. lived, and left it only to proceed to London into the murderous hands of his uncle, Richard III., who, within two months of his quitting this quiet asylum, had him and his brother smothered in the Tower. Here Prince Arthur, eldest son of Henry VII., was married to Catharine of Aragon, who, after his death, was married to his brother, Henry VIII.; her divorce finally leading to the Reformation in England. Here Sir Philip Sidney's father, Sir Henry Sidney, had lived, as President of the Marches; and many a scene of splendor and festivity had lit up the venerable towers, on the occasion of royal visits, and other seasons of rejoicing. Above all, it was for one of those occasions that the youthful Milton had composed his Comus; and on a visit of Charles I., in 1631, to the Earl of Bridgwater, then President of the Marches, it was performed before him, the work being founded on a real incident occurring in the lord president's own family, which is thus related by Nightingale: "When he had entered on his official residence, he was visited by a large a.s.sembly of the neighboring n.o.bility and gentry. His sons, the Lord Brackley and Sir Thomas Egerton, and his daughter, the Lady Alice, being on their journey,

'To attend their father's state, And new intrusted scepter,'

were benighted in Haywood Forest, in Herefords.h.i.+re, and the lady for a short time was lost. The adventure being related to their father on their arrival at the castle, Milton, at the request of his friend, Henry Lawes, who taught music in the family, wrote the Mask. Lawes set it to music, and it was acted on Michaelmas night; the two brothers, the young lady, and Lawes himself, each bearing a part in the representation."

This single circ.u.mstance of being the scene of the first representation of the Mask of Comus, one of Milton's most beautiful compositions, has given a perpetual interest to Ludlow Castle.

The genius of Butler was of a different stamp. It wanted the sublimity, the pathos, and tender sensibilities of that of Milton; but, on the other hand, for perception of the ridiculous; for a diving into the closest folds of cant and fanatical pretense; for a rough, bold, and humorous power of sketching ordinary life, it was unrivaled. A tower is still shown as the place where he wrote a part of his Hudibras. Whether it be the precise fact or not, it is idle to inquire. There our author has resided; there he is said to have written something or other, and the very room and spot of its composition are pointed out. It is best not to be too critical; and, on the other hand, if we believe, in general, that where a man of genius has lived he has also written, we shall seldom be far wrong. There is little doubt that here Butler, possessed of more leisure and independence than at any other period of his life, did really revise and prepare his work for press, of which the first part was published in 1663, and the second in the year following.

Here he married Mrs. Herbert, a lady of good family, with whom he lived in comfort, if not in affluence. Of the place where Comus was first acted by the real personages of it, and where Butler brought forth his Hudibras, some idea may be gratifying to the reader. It was deserted in the first year of William and Mary, in consequence of the dissolution of the Court of the Marches. From an inventory of the goods found in Ludlow Castle, bearing date 1708, in the eleventh year of Queen Anne, there appeared to be then forty rooms entire. Many of the royal apartments were in that condition; and the couch of state and the velvet hangings were preserved. In the chapel there were still to be seen on the panels many coats of arms; and in the hall many of the same kind of ornaments, together with lances, spears, firelocks, and old armor. On the accession of George I., an order came down to unroof the buildings, and strip them of their lead. Decay consequently ensued. Several panels bearing the arms of the lords president were converted into wainscoting for a public house in the town, a former owner of which enriched himself by the sale of materials clandestinely carried away. There remains, also, a rich embroidered carpet, hung up in the chancel of St.

Lawrence's Church, said to be part of the covering of the council-board.

The Earl of Powis, who previously held the castle in virtue of a long lease, acquired the reversion in fee by purchase from the crown in 1811.

The whole is now a scene of venerable ruin. The castle rises from the point of a headland, and its foundations are ingrafted into a bare gray rock. The north front consists of square towers with high connecting walls, which are embattled with deep interstices; and the old fosse, and part of the rock, have been formed into walks, which in 1722 were planted with beech, elm, and lime trees by the Countess of Powis, and those trees, now grown to maturity, add exceedingly to the dignity and beauty of the scene. Through a chasm on the west runs the broad and shallow River Teme. It were too long to describe all this ma.s.s of ruins, with its various courts, remains of barracks, and escutcheoned walls.

The first view of the interior of the castle is fine. The court is an irregular square area, not very s.p.a.cious, but the lofty embattled structures with which it is surrounded, though in ruin, still preserve their original outlines. The s.p.a.cious hall is of sixty feet by thirty, the height about thirty-five feet, and is ornamented with a door with a beautiful pointed arch. The once elegant saloon, where the splendid scene of Comus was first exhibited; where chivalry exhausted her choicest stores, both of invention and wealth, and where hospitality and magnificence blazed for many ages in succession, without diminution or decay, is now totally dilapidated, and neither roof nor floor remains.

From the time of Butler's quitting this scene of his ease and happiness, he seems to have experienced only poverty and neglect. His wife's fortune is said to have been lost through bad securities; his expectations from the royal person, or the royal party whom he had so immensely served, were wholly disappointed; and in 1680 he died, where, on the authority of the son of his truest friend and benefactor, Mr.

Longueville, he had lived some years, in Rose-street, Covent Garden. Mr.

Longueville exerted himself to raise a subscription for his interment in Westminster Abbey, but in vain; he therefore buried him at his own cost in the church-yard of Covent Garden. About sixty years afterward, Mr.

Bailey, a painter, Mayor of London, and a friend to Butler's principles, bestowed on him that monument in Westminster Abbey, which is well known.

Such were the life, fortunes, and death of the author of Hudibras, whose name, as Johnson justly observes, can only perish with his language. It was his misfortune to look for protection to a monarch, who only protected courtesans, and the most disgusting of libertines. Butler should have been a pimp, and not a poet, and he would soon have found employment enough. His neglect is but one opprobrium more added to the memory of a monarch, whose whole life was a nuisance and a disgrace to the country which tolerated him.

JOHN DRYDEN.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Dryden should have been transferred to the volume of the dramatic poets if the quality of his dramas had borne any relative proportion to their quant.i.ty, or to the quality of his poetry; but it is the latter which gives him his great and lasting distinction. They are his Satires, and Fables, and Translations; his Absalom and Achitophel; his Hind and Panther; his Palemon and Arcite; the Flower and the Leaf; and, in short, all those racy and beautiful stories which he threw into modern poetry from Chaucer and Boccacio; with his Virgil, and lyrical compositions, and, at the head of these, his Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, that stamp his character with the English public as one of the most vigorous, harmonious, and truly British writers. Dryden displayed no great powers of creation; perhaps the literary hurry of his life prevented this; but he contemplated for years a national epic on Prince Arthur, and probably, had he possessed perfect leisure for carrying out this design, he would have astonished us as much with the display of that faculty as he delights us with the masterly vigor of his reasoning powers; with his harmony and nerve of style; and with the stiletto stabs of his annihilating satire. But from any necessity of criticism on his genius, the familiar acquaintance of every true lover of poetry with the merits and beauties which have fixed his immortality, fortunately for my s.p.a.ce, fully exempts me. Even over the long succession of literary events in his life we must pa.s.s, and fix our attention on his homes and haunts.

For nearly forty years, from 1660 to 1700, he was before the public as an active author; and on the disappearance of Milton from the field of life, he became, and continued to be, the most marked man of his time; yet it is astonis.h.i.+ng how little is known of his town haunts and habits.

Of his publications, the appearance of his dramas, the controversies into which he fell with his literary cotemporaries, his change of religion, and his clinging to the despotic government of the Stuarts, we know enough; but of his home life next to nothing. That he lived in Gerrard-street, and was a constant frequenter of Will's Coffee-house, Covent Garden, seems to be almost all that is known of his town resorts.

Like Addison, and most literary men who have married t.i.tled ladies, he did not find it contribute much to his comfort. His wife was Lady Elizabeth Howard, the eldest daughter of the Earl of Berks.h.i.+re, and sister of his friend, Sir Robert Howard. Her temper is said to have been very peculiar, and that she looked down on Dryden as of inferior rank, though he was descended from a very old family, mixed with the most distinguished men of the n.o.bility, and _was_ the _first man_ of his time; but conceit or the blindness of aristocratic pride do not alter the real nature or proportion of things, except in the vision of the person afflicted with them. Dryden was the great personage, and his t.i.tled wife the little one, and on him, therefore, lay the constant pressure of the unequal yoke he bore.

What, no doubt, rendered the conduct of his wife worse, was the pride of her family on the one hand, and the unlucky connection of Dryden's brothers with ordinary trades. His family, and that of his mother, the Pickerings, had taken a decided part during the civil wars for the Parliament, while that of his wife had been as zealous on the Royalist side. Besides this, Erasmus, his immediate younger brother, was in trade in King-street, Westminster; James, the fourth brother, was a tobacconist in London; one of his sisters was married to a bookseller in Little Britain, and another to a tobacconist in Newgate-street; these would be dreadful alliances to a family proud and poor. "No account,"

says Mitford, in his life of the poet, "has been transmitted of the person of Dryden's wife, nor has any portrait of her been discovered. I am afraid her personal attractions were not superior to her mental endowments; that her temper was wayward, and that the purity of her character was sullied by some early indiscretions. A letter from Lady Elizabeth to her son at Rome is preserved, as remarkable for the elegance of the style as the correctness of the orthography. She says: 'Your father is much at woon as to his health, and his defnese is wosce, but much as he was when he was heare; give me a true account how my deare son Charles is head dus.' Can this be the lady who had formerly held captive in her chains the gallant Earl of Chesterfield?"

"Lady Elizabeth Dryden," says Scott, "had long disturbed her husband's domestic happiness. 'His invectives,' says Malone, 'against the married state were frequent and bitter, and were continued till the latest period of his life;' and he adds, from most respectable authority, that the family of the poet held no intimacy with his lady, confining their intercourse to mere visits of ceremony. How could they? how could the tobacconist, and the other tobacconist's wife, and the little bookseller's wife of Little Britain, venture under the roof of the proud lady of the proud house of Howard, with 'her weak intellects and her violent temper?'"

A similar alienation, also, it is said, took place between her and her relatives, Sir Robert Howard, perhaps, being excepted; for her brother, the Honorable Edward Howard, talks of Dryden's being engaged in a translation of Virgil as a thing he had learned merely by common report.

Her wayward disposition, Malone says, was, however, the effect of a disordered imagination, which, shortly after Dryden's death, degenerated into absolute insanity, in which state she remained until her own death in 1714, probably in the seventy-ninth year of her age.

Poor Dryden! what with his wife--consort one can not call her, and helpmeet she was not--and with a tribe of tobacconist brothers on one hand, and proud Howards on the other; and a host of t.i.tled a.s.sociates, and his bread to dig with his pen, one pities him from one's heart. Well might he, when his wife once said it would be much better for her to be a book than a woman, for then she should have more of his company, reply, "I wish you were, my dear, an almanac, and then I could change you once a year." It is not well to look much into such a home, except for a warning. Yet the outside of that life, like many others, would have deceived an ordinary spectator. There all was brilliant and imposing. "Whether," says Sir Walter Scott, "we judge of the rank which Dryden held in society by the splendor of his t.i.tled and powerful friends, or by his connections among men of genius, we must consider him as occupying at one time as high a station, in the very foremost circle, as literary reputation could gain for its owner. Independent of the notice with which he was honored by Charles himself, the poet numbered among his friends most of the distinguished n.o.bility. The great Duke of Ormond had already begun that connection which subsisted between Dryden and three generations of the house of Butler. Thomas Lord Clifford, one of the Cabal ministry, was uniform in patronizing the poet, and appears to have been active in introducing him to the king's favor. The Duke of Newcastle loved him sufficiently to present him with a play for the stage; the witty Earl of Dorset, then Lord Buckhurst, and Sir Charles Sedley, admired in that loose age for the peculiar elegance of his loose poetry, were his intimate a.s.sociates, as is evident from the turn of The Essay on Dramatic Poesy, where they are the speakers. Wilmot, earl of Rochester, soon to act a very different part, was then anxious to vindicate Dryden's writings; to mediate for him with those who distributed the royal favor, and was thus careful, not only of his reputation, but his fortune. In short, the author of what was then held the first style of poetry, was sought for by all among the great and gay who wished to maintain some character for literary taste. It was then Dryden enjoyed those genial nights described in the dedication of the a.s.signation, when 'discourse was neither too serious nor too light, but always pleasant, and for the most part instructive; the raillery neither too sharp upon the present, nor too censorious upon the absent; and the cups such only as raised the conversation of the night, without disturbing the business of the morrow.' He had not yet experienced the disadvantages attendant on such society, or learned how soon literary eminence becomes the object of detraction, of envy, of injury, even from those who can best feel its merit, if they are discouraged by dissipated habits from emulating its flight, or hardened by perverted feeling against loving its possessors." But all this came; and, in the mean time, the poet had to work, like Pegasus in the peasant's cart, for the means to maintain this intercourse with such lofty society. And what did all these great friends do for him? They procured him no good post in return for good services rendered to their party, but the poet's meager office of the laureates.h.i.+p, which, added to that of historiographer to royalty, brought him 200 a year, and his b.u.t.t of canary. Poor Dryden!

with the cross wife, and the barren blaze of aristocracy around him, the poorest coal-heaver need not have envied him.

Neither did "glorious John" escape his share of annoyance from his cotemporaries of the pen, nor from the publishers. He had a controversy with his friend and brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, on the true nature of dramatic poetry, which speedily degenerated into personal bitterness, and a long estrangement. Then came the Rehearsal, that witty farce in which he was ridiculed in the character of Bayes, and his literary productions, as well as personal characteristics, held up to the malicious merriment of the world by a combination of the wits and fas.h.i.+onable pen-men of the time; among them the notorious Villiers, duke of Buckingham, the author of Hudibras, the Bishop of Rochester, and others. The miserable Elkanah Settle was set up as a rival of him; and after these rose in succession the hostile train of the licentious Lord Rochester, Lord Shaftesbury, Milbourne, Blackmore, and others, by whom every species of spite, misrepresentation, and ridicule were for years heaped upon him. Nor did his enemies restrain themselves to the use of the pen in their attacks upon him. One of the most prominent events of Dryden's life is that of a ruffianly attack upon him as he returned from his club at Will's Coffee-house, on a winter's night. Lord Mulgrave had published a satire, called an Essay on Satire, in which Rochester and other wits and profligates of the time were introduced. The poem was a wretched affair; but Dryden, to oblige Mulgrave, had undertaken to revise it. Much labor he could not have bestowed upon it, it was so flat and poor; but Rochester thought fit to attribute it to Dryden himself; and a set of ruffians, supposed to be hired by him and the d.u.c.h.ess of Portsmouth, who had been also reflected on, fell on the poet as he pa.s.sed through Rose-street, Covent Garden, on his way from Will's Coffee-house to his own house in Gerrard-street. A reward of 50 was in vain offered in the London Gazette and other newspapers for the discovery of the perpetrators of the outrage. The beating was, in those loose times, thought a good joke. The Rose Alley ambuscade became almost proverbial; and even Mulgrave, the real author of the satire, and upon whose shoulders the blows ought in justice to have descended, in his Art of Poetry, thus mentions the circ.u.mstance with a pitiful sneer:

"Though praised and punished for another's rhymes, His own deserve as great applause _sometimes_."

Thus attacked with pens and cudgels by the envious writers of the day, Dryden was nearly starved by the booksellers. On one occasion, provoked by the refusal of timely supplies by Jacob Tonson, he did not do as Johnson did by Cave, knock him down with a quarto, but ran him through with a triplet, describing the bibliopole's person:

"With leering looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair, With two left legs, and Judas-colored hair, And frowzy pores that taint the ambient air."

"Tell the dog," said the poet to the messenger by whom he sent these complimentary lines, "that he who wrote these can write more." But he needed not to write more; they were as effective as he could desire.

Jacob, however, on his part, could make his tongue as pungent as Dryden could his verse. Johnson, in the "Life of Dryden," relates that Lord Bolingbroke one day making a call on Dryden, he heard another person enter the house. "That," said Dryden, "is Tonson. You will take care not to depart before he goes away; for I have not completed the sheet which I promised him; and if you leave me unprotected, I shall suffer all the rudeness to which his resentment can prompt his tongue."

Perhaps the happiest hours of Dryden's life, next to those spent over his finest compositions in his study, were pa.s.sed at Will's Coffee-house. After dinner, at two o'clock, he used to repair thither, where a.s.sembled all the most famous men of the time. There he reigned supreme. He had a chair placed for him by the chimney in winter, and near the balcony in summer; where, says his biographer, he p.r.o.nounced, _ex cathedra_, his opinions upon new publications, and in general upon all matters of doubtful criticism. Latterly, all who had occasion to ridicule and attack him, represent him as presiding in this little senate. His opinions, however, were not maintained with dogmatism, but he listened to criticism, provided it was just, from whatever unexpected and undignified quarter it happened to come. In general, however, it may be supposed that few ventured to dispute his opinion, or to place themselves in the gap between him and the object of his censure.

Dryden's house, which he appears to have resided in from the period of his marriage till his death, was, as I have said, in Gerrard-street; the fifth on the left hand, coming from Little Newport-street, now No. 43.

The back windows looked upon the gardens of Leicester House, of which circ.u.mstance the poet availed himself to pay a handsome compliment to the n.o.ble owner. His excursions to the country seem to have been frequent; perhaps the more so, as Lady Elizabeth always remained in town. In his latter days, the friends.h.i.+p of his relations, John Dryden, of Chesterton, and Mrs. Steward, of Cotterstock, rendered their houses agreeable places of abode to the aged poet. They appear, also, to have had a kind solicitude about his little comforts, of value infinitely beyond the contributions they made toward aiding him.

The princ.i.p.al traits of his domestic life have been collected together by Malone. From these, and from the pen of Congreve, we learn that he was, in youth, of handsome form and agreeable countenance; modest in his manner, reluctant to intrude himself on the notice and company of others, easily chilled and rebuffed by any thing like a distant behavior. He is described as most amiable and affectionate in his family, generous beyond his means, and most forgiving of injuries; all n.o.ble traits of character. Malone related, on the authority of Lady Dryden, that at that time the poet's little estate at Blakesley was occupied by one Harriots, grandson of the tenant who held it in Dryden's time, who stated that his grandfather used to take great pleasure in talking of him. He was, he said, the easiest and the kindest landlord in the world; and never raised the rent during the whole time he possessed the estate. The two most unfortunate circ.u.mstances in his life, next to his marriage, was his going over from Puritanism to popery, and from the liberal opinions of his family to the adherence of the worst of kings. For these changes it would be difficult to a.s.sign any better motive than that of mending his fortunes. But if this were the case, he was bitterly punished for it in both instances. The monarchs that he flattered were Stuarts, and the last of them being driven out, left him to encounter all the scorn, the sarcasms and sacrifices that were sure to come against him with the Dutch monarch of 1688. He was, instead of gaining more from royalty by his change, deprived of that which he had--the laureates.h.i.+p and office of historiographer; and saw them conferred, with 300 a year, on his unworthy rival, Shadwell. The change of his religion was equally unpropitious. His sons became more connected with Rome than England.

Charles, the eldest, was chamberlain of the household of Pope Innocent XII., but having suffered by a fall from a horse, he returned to England, and was drowned in attempting to swim across the Thames at Datchett, near Windsor, in August, 1704. The second son, John, also went to Rome, and acted as the deputy of Charles, in the pope's household; he died at Rome. Both of these sons were poetical, and published. Erasmus Henry, the third son, went also to Rome, and became a captain in the pope's guards. He afterward returned to England, and succeeded to the family t.i.tle of baronet, but not to the estate of Canons-Ashby, where he, however, continued to live with the proprietor, Edward Dryden, his cousin, till his death in 1710. Thus terminated the race of the great satiric poet.

In the county of Northampton there are various places connected with Dryden. He was of the old family of the Drydens, or Dridens, of Canons-Ashby, which family there still remains. The poet was born at the parsonage-house of Aldwinkle All-Saints. His father was Erasmus Dryden, and his mother Mary Pickering, the daughter of the rector of Aldwinkle, a son of the well-known Sir Gilbert Pickering, a zealous Puritan. It appears that our author's father lived at Tichmarsh, and that his son was born under his grandfather's roof. At Tichmarsh, accordingly, we find Dryden receiving his first education, whence he proceeded to Westminster, and studied under Dr. Busby, and thence to Cambridge.

Scott says, "If we can believe an ancient tradition, the poem of the 'Hind and Panther' was chiefly composed in a country retirement at Rushton, in Northamptons.h.i.+re. There was an embowered walk at this place, which, from the pleasure which the poet took in it, retained the name of Dryden's Walk; and here was erected, about the middle of the last century, an urn, with the following inscription: 'In memory of Dryden, who frequented these shades, and is here said to have composed his poem of "The Hind and Panther."'"

This spot was, no doubt, the old house and park of the Treshams; that old, zealous Catholic family, of which one member, Sir Francis Tresham, played so conspicuous a part in the Gunpowder Plot. This Sir Francis Tresham had been actively engaged in the affair of the Earl of Ess.e.x, and his head had only been rescued from the block by his father bribing _a great lady_, and some people about the court, with several thousand pounds. This business was so closely veiled, that for some time the direct proofs of Tresham's connection with the business escaped the hands of the historians. The late examinations into the treasures of the State Paper Office have, however, made this fact, like so many others, clear. Long ago, also, original doc.u.ments, fully proving it, fell into the hands of Mr. Baker, the excellent historian of Northamptons.h.i.+re, including an admirable love-letter by this Sir Francis, who, notwithstanding his narrow escape, again rushed into the Gunpowder Treason, being a near relation of Catesby, the prime actor in it. The movements of Tresham in the matter have all the character of those of an actor in some strange romance. From the moment that he was admitted to the secret, Catesby was struck with inward terror and misgivings.

Tresham augmented this alarm by beginning soon to plead warmly for warning the Lords Stourton and Mounteagle, who had married his sisters.

A few days after, he suddenly came upon Catesby, Winter, and Fawkes, in Enfield Chase, and reiterated his entreaty. They refused; and then, on the 26th of October, as Lord Mounteagle was sitting at supper, at an old seat of his at Hoxton, which he seldom visited, and to which he had now come suddenly, a letter was brought in by his page, saying, he had received it from a tall man whose face he could not discern in the dark, and who went hastily away. The letter was tossed carelessly by Mounteagle to a gentleman in his service, who read it aloud. It was the very warning which Tresham wished so earnestly to convey to him.

Mounteagle, in astonishment, carried the letter to Cecil the next morning, and thus the secret of the impending catastrophe was out. Once more Catesby and Winter appointed a meeting with Tresham in Enfield Chase. Their purpose was to charge him with the warning of Mounteagle, and, if he were found guilty, to stab him to the heart on the spot. But while they told him what had been done, they fixed their eyes searchingly on his countenance; all was clear and firm; not a muscle moved, not a tone faltered; he swore solemn oaths that he was ignorant of the letter, and they let him go. This man, when part of the conspirators were arrested, remained at large; while others fled, he hastened to the council to offer his services in apprehending the rebels. Finally, arrested and conveyed to the Tower himself, there, under torture, he implicated the Jesuits, Garnet and Greenway, in some treason in Queen Elizabeth's time, then retracted the confession, and died in agony, as the Catholics believed, of poison. Such was the career and end of this strange man. The family estate pa.s.sed away into the hands of the c.o.c.kaynes, and is now the property of Mr. Hope. Could there be a more inspiring solitude for the composition of a poem, the object of which was to smooth the way for the return of Catholic ascendency, and that by a poet warm with the first fires of a proselyte zeal?

Among other places of Dryden's occasional sojourn may be mentioned Charlton, in Wilts.h.i.+re, the seat of his wife's father, the Earl of Berks.h.i.+re, whence he dates the introduction to his Annus Mirabilis; and Chesterton, in Huntingdons.h.i.+re, the seat of his kinsman, John Driden, where he translated part of Virgil. In the country he delighted in the pastime of fis.h.i.+ng, and used, says Malone, to spend some time with Mr.

Jones, of Ramsden, in Wilts.h.i.+re. Durfey was sometimes of this party; but Dryden appears to have underrated his skill in fis.h.i.+ng, as much as his attempt at poetry. Hence Fenton, in his epistle to Lambard:

"By long experience, Durfey may, no doubt, Ensnare a gudgeon, or sometimes a trout; Yet Dryden once exclaimed in partial spite, 'He _fish_!' because the man attempts to write."

And, finally, Canons-Ashby connects itself inevitably with his name. It was the ancient patrimony of the family. It was not his father's, it was not his, or his sons, though the t.i.tle generally connected with it fell to his son, and there his son lived and died; yet, as the place which gives name and status to the line, it will always maintain an a.s.sociation with the memory of the poet. These are the particulars respecting it collected by Mr. Baker. The mansion of the Drydens, seated in a small deer park, is a singular building of different periods. The oldest part, as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, or perhaps earlier, is built round a small quadrangle. There is a dining-room in the house thirty feet long by twenty feet wide, which is said to be entirely floored and wainscoted with the timber of one single oak, which grew in this lords.h.i.+p. In this room are various portraits of persons of, and connected with, the family. The drawing-room is traditionally supposed to have been fitted up for the reception of Anne of Denmark, queen of James I. The estate is good, but not so large as formerly, owing to the strange conduct of the late Lady Dryden, who cut off her own children, three sons and two daughters, leaving the whole ancient patrimonial property from them to the son of her lawyer, the lawyer himself refusing to have it, or make such a will. The estate here was, it appears, regained, but only by the sacrifice of one in Lincolns.h.i.+re. Such are the strange events in the annals of families which local historians rarely record. How little could this lady comprehend the honor lying in the name of Dryden; how much less the nature and duties of a mother.

The monument of the poet in Westminster Abbey is familiar to the public, placed there by Sheffield, duke of Buckingham, bearing only a single word, the ill.u.s.trious name of--DRYDEN.

JOSEPH ADDISON.

[Ill.u.s.tration]