written by his old antagonist, Tom Brown, and published in June, 1700. Men of wit, if they can but amuse the fancy by pleasant images and a lively picturesque relation, it is well known, are seldom very solicitous about truth. The writer of this poem, however, has rarely advanced any direct falsehood; but, with a view of depreciating Dryden, has contented himself with distorting and disfiguring all the honourable circumstances attending the last tribute of respect paid by his countrymen to that great poet, in such a manner as must have completely deceived those at a distance from the metropolis, while those who had been present at the ceremony would not recognize in this ridiculous and sarcastick misrepresentation any kind of resemblance to the truth. In most great funerals, persons of various conditions and ranks of life are assembled, and form a very promiscuous train: in that of an author, who for many years had been esteemed by some of the highest

mixture of mob, or of the various classes and characters who respected the deceased, render it, what Farquhar, for the entertainment of the lady to whom this Epistle is addressed, has in vain endeavoured to represent it.

8 "A Description of Mr. D-n's Funeral, a poem," was advertised (as then published) in THE POSTMAN, Saturday, June 22, 1700. A second edition of the same poem appeared on the 29th of June. The original edition ended with the words-Fairy Queen. In a third edition enlarged, which was published on the 1st of August, thirty-one new lines were added. b b

VOL. I.

characters in the state, and had long been connected with the stage, and the subordinate agents of literature, the attendants would of course be still more heterogeneous; and nobles and actors, physicians and statesmen, poets and divines, actresses and criticks, musicians and booksellers, town wits and country cousins, would be found blended together. This, therefore, is the chief circumstance, of which the writer of this ludicrous description has availed himself. If you will allow him the advantage of exaggeration and caricature, and permit him only to place a duchess and a chambermaid in the same coach, he asks no more; his work is then easily performed; and if you will but laugh with him, he is sufficiently rewarded. To elevate and sur

9 The following lines may serve as a specimen of this artifice :

"Before the hearse the mourning hautboys go,
"And screech a dismal sound of grief and woe:
"More dismal notes from bogtrotters may fall,
"More dismal plaints at Irish funeral;

"But no such floods of tears e'er stopp'd our tide,
"Since Charles, the Martyr and the Monarch, died.-
"The decency and order first describe,
"Without regard to either sex or tribe.
"The sable coaches lead the dismal van,

"But by their side, I think, few footmen ran; "Nor needed these; the rabble fill the streets,

"And mob with mob in great disorder meets.
"See next the coaches, how they are accouter'd,
"Both in the inside, eke and on the outward;

prise the reader, Mrs. Thomas thought it expedient to go much further; and to authenticate her account by the minuteness and particularity of circumstantial falsehood.

The plain and simple fact, however, on which she constructed her narrative, was this. Dryden, as has been already mentioned, expired on Wednesday morning, the first of May.' Having died of a gangrene, it was necessary that he should be buried speedily; and accordingly, two days after

"One py spark, one sound as any roach, "One poet and two fidlers in a coach:

"The playhouse drab, that beats the beggar's bush,

"By every body kiss'd, good truth, but such is
"Now her good fate, to ride with Mistress Duchess.
"Was e'er immortal poet thus buffoon'd?
"In a long line of coaches thus lampoon'd!
"A man with gout and stone quite wearied,
"Would rather live, than thus be buried."

I THE POSTBOY, on the following Tuesday, May 7, 1700, thus announces the honours then intended to be paid to the deceased poet :

"The corps of John Dryden, Esq. is to lye in state for some time, in the Colledge of Physicians; and on Monday next he is to be conveyed from thence in a hearse, in great splendour, to Westminster-Abbey, where he is to be interred with Chaucer, Cowley, and the rest of the renowned poets; and I am assured that a person of great quality, who has a mighty esteem for the works of that ingenious gentleman, will erect, at his own proper charge, a noble monument upon him, and so perpetuate the name of that great man."

wards, on Friday morning, (not Saturday, as Mrs. Thomas states,) his corpse, at the expence of Mr. Montague, afterwards Lord Halifax, was carried from his house in a very private manner, to be interred, probably in the church-yard of the neighbouring parish. The Earl of Dorset, Lord Jefferies, and some others, either hearing of his intention on that day, or meeting the procession as it moved along, and thinking so great a poet entitled to a more splendid funeral, prevailed on the relations and friends who attended his remains, to consent that the body should be carried for the purpose of embalment, to the house of Mr. Russel, a celebrated undertaker; and the same day,

2

2 In a letter from the Rev. Thomas Tanner, (afterwards Lord Bishop of St. Asaph,) to Dr. Arthur Charlett, Master of University College, Oxford, dated [London, Monday,] May 6, 1700, is the following paragraph:

"Mr. Dryden died a papist, if at all a Christian. Mr. Montague had given orders to bury him; but some Lords, (my Lord Dorset, Jefferies, &c.) thinking it would not be splendid enough, ordered him to be carried to Russel's: there he was embalmed; and now lies in state at the Physicians' College, and is to be buried with Chaucer, Cowley, &c. at Westminster-Abbey, on Munday next."

MSS. Ballard. in Bibl. Bodl. vol. iv. p. 29.

The foregoing paragraph I transcribed several years ago from the original in the Bodleian Library; which I mention, because an inaccurate transcript of it some time since appeared in a periodical miscellany, in which the writer's name is mistaken.

Tanner's uncharitable doubt whether our author was at

with the assistance probably of Dr. Garth, they applied to the President and Censors of the College

all a Christian, seems to have been adopted from Milbourne, who in his Notes on the Translation of Virgil, (p. 9.) says," for aught I know, his very Christianity may be questionable." To which Dryden probably alludes in his Preface to the FABLES: "May I have leave to do myself the justice, since my enemies will do me none, and are so far from granting me to be a good poet, that they will not allow me so much as to be a Christian, or a moral man, may I have leave, I say," &c. See vol. iii. p. 630.

Ward's account of this transaction is as follows:

"Notwithstanding his merits had justly entitled his corpse to the most magnificent and solemn interment the beneficence of the greatest spirits could have bestowed on him, yet 'tis credibly reported, the ingratitude of the age is such, that they had like to have let him pass in private to his grave, without those funeral obsequies suitable to his greatness, had it not been for that true British worthy, who, meeting with the venerable remains of the neglected bard passing silently in a coach, unregarded, to his last home, ordered the corpse, by the consent of his few friends that attended him, to be respited from so obscure an interment; and most generously undertook, at his own expence, to revive his worth in the minds of a forgetful people, by bestowing on his peaceful dust a solemn funeral, answerable to his merit. The management - - - of the funeral was left to Mr. Russel, pursuant to the directions of that honourable great man, the Lord Jef feries, concerned chiefly in the pious undertaking.' LONDON SPY, p. 419, 5th edit. 1718.

John, the second Lord Jefferies, the person here meant, was the only son of the Chancellor. He was himself a writer of verse. In the STATE POEMS, vol. iii. p. 380, we