... if I had confidence enough, my Lord, I would presume to mind you of a favour which your Lordship formerly gave me some hopes of from the Queen; but if it be not proper or convenient for you to ask, I dare give your Lordship no further trouble in it, being on so many other accounts already your Lordship’s most obliged obedient servant,
JOHN DRYDEN.
We know that Dryden was a constant visitor at Knole; we have even an anecdote of one of his visits. It is related that someone proposed that each member of the party should write an impromptu, and that Dryden, when the allotted time had expired, should judge between them. Silence ensued while each guest wrote busily, or laboriously, upon the sheet of paper provided: Dorset scribbled a couple of lines and threw it down on the table. At the end of the time the umpire rose, and said that after careful consideration he awarded the prize to their host; he would read out what his Lordship had written; it was: “I promise to pay Mr. John Dryden or order five hundred pounds on demand. DORSET.”
It would be interesting to know who were the other members of the party; perhaps Tom Durfey, perhaps Lady Dorset, who is described as “jeune, belle, riche, et sage,” perhaps Rochester, whose portrait hangs in the Poets’ Parlour—and I imagine the Poets’ Parlour to have been the scene of this little incident, “a chamber of parts and players,” says Horace Walpole, “which is proper enough in that house”—a portrait of a young man in a heavy wig, labelled “died repentant after a profligate life,” as I, not understanding the long words, used to gabble off to strangers along with other piteous little shibboleths when showing the house. Certainly Shadwell was not there, for he and Dryden were at mortal enmity; Shadwell, his successor in the Laureateship, another friend and protégé of Dorset’s, described by Dryden as being
Round as a globe, and liquored every chink,
Goodly and great, he sails behind his link.
For all this bulk there’s nothing lost in Og,
For every inch that is not fool is rogue,
and who writes of Dorset that he was received by him as a member of his family, and furthermore, rather plaintively, in a letter at Knole, beseeching Lord Dorset’s intervention, as “they have put Durfey’s play before ours, and this day a play of Dryden’s is read to them and that is to be acted before ours too.”
Tom Durfey, whose portrait is upstairs in Lady Betty’s room, painted in profile, with surely the most formidable of all hooked noses, was almost a pensioner at Knole, having his own rooms over the dairy, and is guilty of these execrable verses in praise of his second home: