And mixing with buffoons and pimps profane, The sin was of our native growth, 'tis true; Towards the end of 1698 Dryden began his 'Fables,' or translations from Chaucer and Boccaccio, which were published only a few months before his death, in a folio volume entitled, 'Tales, Ancient and Modern, Translated into Verse from Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio and Chaucer; with Original Poems.' While engaged on this work, Dryden entertained hopes of obtaining some favour from the government, chiefly through the good offices of his friend and connexion Charles Montagu, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He sent to Montagu for perusal some of the poems designed for this last of his publications, and he rather pressingly solicited his patronage. But his hopes were disappointed, and shortly after he writes to his cousin Mrs. Steward despondingly: 'The court rather speaks kindly of me than does anything for me, though they promise largely.' And again, ‘I doubt I am in no condition of having a kindness done me, having the Chancellor for my enemy.' The Lord Chancellor whom he suspected of hindering his advancement was the great Lord Somers. The 'Fables' were published in November 1699, and Dryden had the gratification of seeing this, his last work, well received. The epistle to his cousin John Driden appeared for the first time in this volume, and Dryden thought this poem 'the best of the whole'; and it is an excellent poem. Dryden's health had now been failing for some time. In the 'preface to the 'Fables,' published in November 1699, he speaks of himself as a cripple in his limbs, and alludes to interruptions in his work from 'various intervals of sickness.' But he congratulates himself on being as vigorous as ever in the faculties of his mind, and says that he intends, if longer life and moderate health be granted to him, to translate the whole of Homer. This design was not accomplished. During the winter of 1699-1700 his infirmities increased. He had been long a martyr to gout and gravel. In December the appearance of erysipelas in his legs added to his sufferings, and during the months of March and April he was mostly confined to his house by gout. At last mortification set in on one of his legs, and amputation of the limb was recommended as the only possible means of averting death, but this operation Dryden refused to submit to, and on the 1st of May 1700 he expired at his house in Gerrard Street. At the time of his death he was within three months of completing his sixty-ninth year. His body was embalmed, and lay in state for several days at the College of Physicians. Thence it was removed on May 13, and carried with great pomp and with all the honours of a public funeral to Westminster Abbey, to be buried in Poet's Corner beside the graves of Chaucer and Cowley. There appears to be no doubt that Lord Jefferies, son of the Lord Chancellor Jefferies of bad repute, was principally instrumental in securing for Dryden the honour of a public funeral; and the Earl of Dorset, and Charles Montagu, who is said to have offered in the first instance to pay the expenses of a private interment, doubtless zealously seconded the proposal of Jefferies. Garth, a poet of no mean skill, and President of the College of Physicians, placed the College building at the disposal of Dryden's friends, and he delivered a Latin oration before the body left the College. Thence some fifty carriages, filled with distinguished friends, followed the hearse to Westminster Abbey. Among these would be some who had been friends from early days, and who for the greater part of half a century had watched his literary careerDorset, Mulgrave (now Marquis of Normanby), Sir Charles Sedley, and Samuel Pepys; and other younger men, distinguished in literature, wit and politics, who had been attracted to him by his fame and by their literary sympathies -Charles Montagu, already a leading statesman, Laurence Hyde Earl of Rochester, son of the Lord Chancellor Clarendon, Southerne, Congreve, Wycherly, Vanbrugh, d Creech, the translator of Lucretius, Walsh, an accomplished man of letters, who was afterwards prominent among Pope's friends, Sir Godfrey Kneller the painter, Betterton the actor, and the young St. John, destined to a fame brilliant but irregular under the title of Lord Bolingbroke It was expected that Montagu and Dorset would erect a monument to Dryden in Westminster Abbey, but this expectation was not realized; and it was not till twenty years after his death that a monument was placed over his grave. This was done in 1720 by his old friend Mulgrave, now Duke of Buckinghamshire, who died a few months after he had discharged this duty to friendship and public desert. Two years later another monument to the poet and his family was erected in the church of Tichmarsh, in Northamptonshire, by his cousin, Mrs. Creed, who describes Dryden, in the elaborate inscription, as 'the celebrated poet and laureat of his time,' and proceeds to say that 'his bright parts and learning are best seen in his own excellent writings on various subjects: we boast that he was bred and had his first learning here, where he has often made us happy by his kind visits and most delightful conversation.' Dryden died without a will. He had little to leave beyond the small estate at Blakesley, which he had received from his father, and probably some small landed property which he had acquired in Wiltshire through his marriage. The expenses of his mode of living and of his family had never, in his most prosperous days, been below his income, and of late years he had had great difficulty, even with kind aid from many friends, in meeting his expenses. Lady Elizabeth Dryden, the widow, survived her husband for several years. Soon after his death she became insane, and she continued so till her death in 1714. The three sons all died before their mother. The eldest, Charles, was drowned in the Thames, near Datchet, in August 1704; John, the second son, had died at Rome, in January 1701; and Erasmus Henry, the youngest, died in December 1710, a few months after he had succeeded to the family baronetcy on the death of his cousin, Sir John Dryden. In person Dryden was short and stout, with a ruddy face. Pope, who when a boy saw Dryden once in his old age, describes him as plump and fresh-coloured, with a down look. His hair is said by an enemy to have inclined to red, but it early became gray, and he wore it long and flowing. He had a large mole on one of his cheeks. His eyes were far apart. In a poem on a portrait of him, written by a friend in 1700, his eye is called 'sleepy.' His expressive face, without being regularly handsome, was winning. He says of himself in one of his early writings, not meaning probably all that is said, 'My conversation is slow and dull, my humour saturnine and reserved; in short, I am none of those who endeavour to break jests in company or make reparteesi.' An adversary took him at his word, and has made him say,— Nor wine nor love could ever make me gay, To writing bred, I knew not what to say.' But if his conversation was not brilliant, it was agreeable among friends of congenial spirits, and he was a favourite companion. We learn from Pope, through Spence, how Dryden's days were generally passed. He lived for many years before his death in Gerrard Street, Soho, where he died. The room in which he sat and wrote was on the ground floor, looking into the street. He spent his mornings in writing, dined early with his family, and after dinner went to Will's coffee-house in Russell Street, where he spent the evening. 'It was Dryden,' says Pope, 'who made Will's coffee-house the great resort for the wits of his time 1.' At Will's Dryden was, during the latter part of his life, a literary monarch, and he was a genial and kindhearted ruler. There is a story, not quite certain to be true, that he gave the boy Pope a shilling for translating the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. Dean Lockier describes his goodnatured way of taking an interruption and correction h Tom Brown, in The Reasons for Mr. Bayes changing his Religion.' i Defence of the Essay on Dramatic Poesy. A Satire to his Muse. 1 Spence's Anecdotes. from himself, a youth of seventeen, and a stranger to Dryden, while he was discoursing at Will's with authority on his own 'Mac Flecknoe.' 'If anything of mine is good,' said Dryden, "it is my "Mac Flecknoe," and I shall value myself the more on it, because it is the first piece of ridicule written in heroics.' The boy Lockier said audibly that 'Mac Flecknoe' was a fine poem, but not the first written that way. Dryden turned to him and asked how long he had been a dealer in poetry?' and added smilingly, 'pray, sir, what is that you did imagine to have been writ so before?' Lockier named Boileau's 'Lutrin' and Tassoni's 'Secchia Rapita.' 'It is true,' said Dryden, 'I had forgot them': and as Dryden left the coffee-house that evening, he went up to the youth who had corrected him, and asked him to come and visit him. Dryden's kindness to younger authors is one of his distinguishing attributes, and one of several proofs of an amiable nature. It was thus that he attracted and retained the friendship of Southerne, Congreve, and many others, whose respectful attention and genial kindness solaced and softened the sorrows of his latter years. Congreve, to whom, in lines which have been already quoted, Dryden bequeathed the care of his reputation, has left an account of Dryden's character which is true, if not complete. He was of a nature,' says Congreve, 'exceedingly humane and compassionate; easily forgiving injuries, and capable of a prompt and sincere reconciliation with them who had offended him. . . . . His friendship, where he professed it, went much beyond his professions, and I have been told of strong and generous instances of it, by the persons themselves who received them; though his hereditary means was little more than a bare competency. . . . . He was of very easy, I may say of very pleasing access, but something slow, and as it were diffident in his advances to others. He had something in his nature that abhorred intrusion into any society whatsoever.... To the best of my knowledge and observation he was of all the men that ever I knew one of the most modest, and the most easily to be discountenanced in his approaches to his superiors or his equals.' |