BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.
John Dryden was born on the 9th of August, 1631, at Aldwincle All Saints, near Oundle in Northamptonshire. He was educated at Westminster School, under the famous Dr. Busby, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. At the age of twenty-six he went up to London with the intention of devoting himself to literature and politics. During the brief remaining years of the Commonwealth (1657-1660) he was nominally a friend to the Puritan party; and one of the first poems written by him was a series of "Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell." At the Restoration he at once espoused the cause of the Royalists; and his recent panegyric on the Protector did not prevent him from writing a poem, "Astræa Redux," in honor of the return of Charles the Second. In 1663 he married the Lady Elizabeth Howard, a daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, a Royalist nobleman. For several years he devoted himself chiefly to the writing of plays,—comedies, tragedies, and tragi-comedies. The comedies he wrote in prose; the earliest tragedies in blank verse, followed by several in rhyme, and, after these, others in blank verse. In 1670 he was appointed Poet-Laureate. In 1681, when nearly fifty years old, by the publication of "Absalom and Achitophel," he suddenly became famous as a satirical poet. He soon afterwards wrote "The Medal," another satire, directed against the Earl of Shaftesbury, and "Mac Flecknoe," aimed at Shadwell, the chief poet of the Opposition. At about the same time he produced "Religio Laici," a didactic poem explaining his religious opinions and defending the Church of England against dissenters, atheists, and Catholics. Not long after the accession of James II., Dryden, true to his policy of being always on the side of the ruling party, became a Catholic, and wrote "The Hind and the Panther," in which he eulogized many things that, in the former poem, he had ridiculed. His political career ended with the overthrow of James II., in 1688; but his literary activity continued unabated. The last years of his life were occupied in translating the works of Persius and Juvenal and the Æneid of Virgil. In 1697 he wrote "Alexander's Feast"; and his "modernizations" of some of Chaucer's poems appeared in 1700, the year of his death.
"If there is grandeur in the pomp of kings and the march of hosts," says A. W. Ward, "in the 'trumpet's loud clangor' and in tapestries and carpetings of velvet and gold, Dryden is to be ranked with the grandest of English poets. The irresistible impetus of an invective which never falls short or flat, and the savor of a satire which never seems dull or stale, give him an undisputed place among the most glorious of English wits."
"His descriptive power was of the highest," says Hales. "Our literature has in it no more vigorous portrait-gallery than that he has bequeathed it. His power of expression is beyond praise. There is always a singular fitness in his language: he uses always the right word. He is one of our greatest masters of metre: metre was, in fact, no restraint to him, but rather it seems to have given him freedom. It has been observed that he argues better in verse than in prose; verse was the natural costume of his thoughts."
Professor Masson says: "Not only is Dryden the largest figure in one era of our literature: he is a very considerable figure also in our literature as a whole. Of all that he wrote, however, there is but a comparatively small portion that has won for itself a permanent place in our literature."
Other Poems to be Read: Absalom and Achitophel; Mac Flecknoe; Religio Laici; Threnodia Augustalis.
References: Johnson's Lives of the Poets; Hazlitt's English Poets; Lowell's Among My Books; Macaulay's Essay on John Dryden; Taine's English Literature; Masson's Three Devils and Other Essays; Thackeray's English Humorists.
