The only positive worldly good which seemed to come of this marriage was an occasional home at Charlton, in Wiltshire—an estate of the Earl of Berkshire, his father-in-law—where Dryden wrote, shortly after his marriage, his Annus Mirabilis, in which he gave to all the notable events of the year 1666 a fillip with his pen; and the odd conceits that lie in a single one of his stanzas keep yet alive a story of the capture by the British of a fleet of Dutch India ships:—
“Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball,
And now their odors armed against them fly;
Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall,
And some by aromatic splinters die.”
There are three hundred other stanzas in the poem, of the same make and rhythm, telling of fire, of plague, and of battles. I am not sure if anybody reads it nowadays; but if you do—and it is not fatiguing—you will find wonderful word-craft in it, which repeats the din and crash of battle, and paints the smouldering rage and the blazing power of the Great Fire of London in a way which certain boys, I well remember in old school days, thought represented the grand climacteric of poetic diction.
The London of Dryden.
But let us not forget where we are in our English story; it is London that has been all aflame in that dreadful year of 1666. Thirteen thousand houses have been destroyed, eighty odd churches, and some four hundred acres of ground in the central part of the city have been burned over. The fire had followed swiftly upon the devastating plague of the previous year, which Dryden had gone into Wiltshire to avoid. It is doubtful, indeed, if he came back soon enough to see the great blaze with his own eyes; “chemical fire,” the poet calls it, and it licked up the poison of the plague; but it did not lick up the leprosy of Charles’ court. There was a demand for plays, and for plays of a bad sort; and Dryden met the demand. Never was there an author more apt to divine what the public did want, and more full of literary contrivances to meet it. Dryden knew all the purveyors of this sort of intellectual repast, and all their methods, and soon became a king among them; and to be a king among the playwrights was to have a very large sovereignty in that time. Everybody talked of the plays; all of Royalist faith went to the plays, if they had money; and money was becoming more and more plentiful. There had been the set-back, it is true, of the Great Fire; but English commerce was making enormous strides in these days. There was a pathetic folding of the hands and dreary forecastings directly after the disaster, as after all such calamities. But straight upon this the city grew, with wider streets and taller houses, and in only a very few years the waste ground was covered again, and the new temple of St. Paul’s rising, under the guidance of Sir Christopher Wren, into those grand proportions of cupola and dome, which, in their smoked and sooty majesty, dominate the city of London to-day.
Houses of nobles and of rich merchants which stood near to Cornhill and Lombard Street, and private gardens which had occupied areas thereabout—now representing millions of pounds in value—were crowded away westward by the new demands of commerce. In Dryden’s day there were ducal houses looking upon Lincoln’s Inn Fields; and others, with pleasure grounds about them, close upon Covent Garden Square. Americans go to that neighborhood now, in early morning, to catch sight of the immense stores of fruit and vegetables which are on show there upon market-days; and they are well repaid for such visit; yet the houses are dingy, and a welter of straw and mud and market débris stretches to the doors; but the stranger, picking his way through this, and through Russell Street to the corner of Bow Street, will find, close by, the site of that famous Will’s Coffee-house, where Dryden lorded it so many years, and whose figure there—in the chimney-corner, with his pipe, laying down the law between the whiffs, and conferring honors by offering a pinch from his snuff-box—Scott has made familiar to the whole world.
It was an earlier sort of club-house, where the news in the Gazette was talked of, and the last battle—if there were a recent one—and the last play, and the last scandal of the court. Its discussions and potations made away with a good many nights, and a good many pipes and bottles, and was not largely provocative of domesticity. But it does not appear that the Lady Elizabeth—Dryden’s wife—ever made remonstrances on this score; indeed, Mr. Green, the historian, would intimate that my lady had distractions of her own, not altogether wise or worthy; but we prefer to believe the best we can of her.