Wrapt soft and warm your name is sent on high,
As flames do on the waves of incense fly:
Music herself is lost, in vain she brings
Her choicest notes to praise the best of kings;
Her melting strains in you a tomb have found,
And lie like bees in their own sweetness drown’d.”
No wonder that he came ultimately to have the place of Poet-laureate, and thereafter an extra £100 a year with it! No wonder that, with all his cleverness—and it was prodigious—he never did, and never could, win an unsullied reputation for sterling integrity and straightforward purpose.
I know that his latest biographer and advocate, Mr. Saintsbury, whose work you will be very apt to encounter in the little series edited by John Morley, sees poems like those I have cited with other eyes, and fashions out of them an agreeable poetic consistency very honorable to Dryden; but I cannot twist myself so as to view the matter in his way. I think rather of a conscienceless thrifty newspaper, setting forth the average every-day drift of opinion, with a good deal more than every-day skill.
Meantime John Dryden has married, and has married the daughter of an earl; of just how this came about we have not very full record; but there were a great many who wondered why she should marry him; and a good many more, as it appeared, who persisted in wondering why he should marry her. Such wonderments of wondering people overtake a good many matches. It is quite certain that it was not a marriage which went to make a domestic man of him; and I think you will search vainly through his poems for any indication of those home instincts which, like the “melting strains” he flung about King Charles,
“Lie like bees in their own sweetness drown’d.”