and the royal
“Philip’s warlike son,
Aloft in awful state;
The lovely Thais by his side,
—Like a blooming Eastern bride
In flower of youth and beauty’s pride;”
all which we read over and over, always with an ambitious vocalism which the language invites, but, I think, with not much hearty unction.
And yet, notwithstanding the little that we recall of this man’s work, he did write an enormous amount of verse, in all metres, and of all lengths. All the poems that Milton ever published would hardly fill the space necessary for a full synopsis of what John Dryden wrote. But let us begin at the beginning.
This poet, and important man of letters, was born only a year or two later than John Bunyan, and in the same range of country—a little to the northward, in an old rectory of Aldwinckle (Northamptonshire), upon the banks of the river Nen. And this river flows thence northerly, in great loops, where sedges grow, past the tall spire of Oundle—past the grassy ruins of Fotheringay; and thence easterly, in other great loops, through flat lands, under the huge towers of Peterborough Cathedral. But the river singing among the sedges does not come into Dryden’s verse; nor does Fotheringay, with its tragic memories; nor do the noble woods of Lilford Park, or of that Rockingham Forest which, in the days of Dryden’s boyhood, must in many places have brought its spurs of oak timber and its haunts of the red-deer close down to the Nen banks. Indeed, Wordsworth says, with a little exaggeration, it is true, “there is not a single image from nature in the whole body of his [Dryden’s] works.”
He was a well-born boy, with titled kinsfolk, and had money at command for good courses in books. He was at Westminster School under Dr. Busby; was at Cambridge, where he fell one time into difficulties, which somehow angered him in a way that made him somewhat irreverent of his old college in after life. There are pretty traditions that in extreme youth he addressed some very earnest amatory verses to a certain Helen Driden, daughter of his baronet uncle at Canons-Ashby;[90] and there are hints dropped by some biographers of a rebuff to him; which, if it came about, did not pluck away the cheerfulness and self-approval that lay in him. It was in London, however, where he went after his father’s death, and when he was twenty-seven, that the first verse was written by him which made the literary world prick up its ears at sound of a new voice.