[56] The lady to whom this letter is addressed was our author’s first cousin, one of the daughters of his uncle, Sir John Dryden. She probably was born, (says Mr Malone,) about the year 1637, and died, unmarried, some time after 1707.
The seal, (he adds,) under which runs a piece of blue ribband, is a crest of a demi-lion, on a wreath, holding in his paws an armillary sphere at the end of a stand. The letter seems in reply to one from the fair lady, with a present of writing materials. It is a woeful sample of the gallantry of the time, alternately coarse and pedantic.
[57] Person quasi parson, which word was originally so spelled. The custom of preaching by an hour-glass has been before noticed.
[58] A copy of this letter is in the Museum, MSS. Harl. 7003. The Dedication alluded to, must have been that of “Marriage A-la-Mode,” to which Rochester had replied by a letter of thanks; and we have here Dryden’s reply. (See Vol. I. p. 181, and Vol. IV. p. 235.) The date is supplied by Mr Malone from internal evidence.
[59] Lord Rochester translated some part of Lucretius.
[60] In the year 1672, Monsieur Schomberg was invited into England to command the army raised for the Dutch war, then encamped on Blackheath. He was to be joined in this command with Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who held a commission of lieutenant-general only. But when Schomberg arrived, he refused to serve equally with Buckingham, and was made general; on which the other resigned his commission in disgust. (See Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham’s Memoirs, p. 5.) Dryden, still smarting under the “Rehearsal,” just then come out, was probably not sorry to take this opportunity to turn the author’s pretensions into ridicule.
[61] Eight thousand land forces were embarked on board the English fleet to make a descent in Zealand.
[62] Sir John Eaton was a noted writer of songs at the time.
[63] Mr Malone conjectures Tregonwell Frampton, keeper of the royal stud at Newmarket; who was born in 1641, and died in 1727. Brother John must remain in obscurity.
[64] Probably the grandson of Sir George Hume, created Earl of Dunbar by James the First, in 1605.