JOHN DRYDEN. JOHN DRYDEN, the subject of this memoir, was born at the parsonage house of Aldwinkle All-Saints, on or about the 9th day of August, 1631; his father Erasmus was the third son of Sir Erasmus Dryden, baronet, of CanonsAshby, in the county of Northampton. The village then belonged to the family of Exeter, as we are informed by the poet himself, in the postscript to his Virgil. That his family were puritans may readily be admitted; but that they were anabaptists, although confidently asserte by some of our author's political or poetical antagonists, appears altogether improbable. Notwithstanding, therefore, the sarcasm of the Duke of Buckingham, the register of Aldwinkle All-Saints parish, had it been in existence, would probably have been found to contain the record of our poet's baptism. Dryden seems to have received the rudiments of his education at Tichmarsh, and was admitted a king's scholar at Westminster, under the tuition of the celebrated Dr. Bushby, for whom he ever afterwards entertained the most sincere veneration. Under so able a teacher, he made rapid progress in classical learning. The bent of the juvenile poet, even at this early period, distinguished itself. He translated the third satire of Persius, as a Thursday night's task, and executed many other exercises of the same nature, in English verse, none of which are now in existence. During the last year of his residence at Westminster, the death of Henry Lord Hastings, a young nobleman of great learning, and much beloved, called forth no less than ninety-eight elegies, one of which was written by our poet, then about eighteen years old. Dryden, having obtained a Westminster scholarship, was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, on the 11th May, 1650, his tutor being the reverend John Templer, M.A., a man of some learning, who wrote a Latin treatise in confutation of Hobbes, and a few theological tracts and single sermons. Of his school performances we have only the Elegy on the death of Lord Hastings, which without his own testimony is enough to assure us that Cowley was his model; he has in it imitated Cowley's points of wit and quirks of epigram, with a similar contempt for the propriety of their application. He took the degree of Bachelor, in January 1653–4, but neither became Master of Arts, nor a Fellow of the university, and certainly never retained for it much of that veneration usually paid by an English scholar to his Alma Mater. In June 1654, the death of his father, Erasmus Dryden, proved a temporary interruption to our author's studies. He left the university, on this occasion, to take possession of his inheritance, consisting of two-thirds of a small estate near Blakesley, in Northamptonshire, worth, in all, about sixty pounds a-year. The other third part of this small property was bequeathed to his mother during her fe, and the property reverted to the poet after her death in 1676. With this little patrimony our author returned to Cambridge, where he continued until the middle of the year 1657. After leaving the university, our author entered the world, supported by friends, from whose character, principles, and situation, it might have been prophesied, with probability, that his success in life, and his literary reputation, would have been exactly the reverse of what they actually proved. Sir Gilbert Pickering was cousin-german to the poet, and also to his mother; thus standing related to Dryden in a double connexion. This gentleman was |