Dryden, John

dri'den, John (1631-1700), an English poet. He was of Puritan ancestry and was educated at Cambridge. The Restoration took place just as he was about to enter active life. Doubtless he had expected preferment from influential relatives who now came into disfavor. Dryden seems to have shifted to the winning side. He espoused the royal cause and published an ode of welcome to the returning king. He married an earl's daughter and enjoyed royal patronage. He became poet laureate, a position which he held until the Revolution of 1688. The revival of the drama seemed to offer a lucrative field to a professional author, and Dryden devoted himself with great energy to the stage. He selected popular subjects, aimed to treat them in a popular manner, and sought favor by prefixing to most of his works prefaces in praise of those in power. After the Revolution, having lost favor with royalty, Dryden lived an obscure life, suffering from poverty, ill health, and the hatred and malice of his enemies. His energy, however, was unimpaired. During his last years, he produced translations from the Latin of Juvenal and Virgil. He died in 1700. While his family were preparing to bury him, as their poverty could afford, a large subscription was raised. His body was borne in state to Westminster and laid between the tombs of Chaucer and Cowley.

In religion and politics Dryden may be regarded as the opposite of Milton, upholding Tory and Catholic views as Milton upheld those of Whig and Puritan. Dryden wrote twenty-eight plays and won the reputation of being the first dramatist of his time. In his early plays he is the representative of the change from the Elizabethan drama to that formed on French models. Dryden's plays were written to please the popular taste. They are gross and immoral, and present no fine delineation of character-no humor which is worthy the name. Dryden himself said, "I confess my chief endeavors are to delight the age in which I live. If the humor of this be for low comedy, small accidents, and raillery, I will force my genius to obey it." All for Love is probably the best of these dramas.

Dryden's satires, while most of them are controversial and therefore fail of permanent favor, are of a much higher rank than his dramas. They are written usually in the rhymed couplet, or heroic couplet, as it is called. Absalom and Achitophel is an allegory in defense of the king. His Hind and Panther is another allegory written in defense of the Catholic church. The hind of spotless white is the Roman Church. The panther ready to spring is the English Church established by Henry VIII. The Independent or Puritan church is a bear; the Quaker, a quaking hare; the Baptist, a bristling boar. Dryden's Alexander's Feast, an ode for St. Cecilia's Day, written in old age, is called the noblest ode in the English language. Dryden's prose, in the form of essays, prefaces, or dedications prefixed to his poetical works, is admirable. It is critical in character, in style easy, animated, and vigorous.

Dryden is considered the forerunner of Pope, Addison, and the other classical writers of the Queen Anne age in literature.

Here are a handful of coins from Dryden's mint:

SAID OF DRYDEN.

By Dryden we were taught to think naturally and express forcibly.-Dr. Johnson.

Dryden was incomparably the most distinguished author of his age; but it was not an imaginative age, therefore not an age favorable to the truest and most lasting kind of poetry. In prose he shines, and in his historical and critical judgments of literature he stands forth as the most commanding literary personality of his age.--Gayley and Young.

His plays, excepting a few scenes, are utterly disfigured by vice or folly or both. His translations appear too much the offspring of haste and hunger; even his fables are ill-chosen tales conveyed in an incorrect though spirited versification. Yet amidst this great number of loose productions, the refuse of our language, there are found some small pieces, his "Ode to St. Cecilia," the greater part of "Absalom and Achitophel," and a few more which discover so great genius, such richness of expression, such pomp and vanity of numbers, that they leave us equally full of regret and indignation on account of the inferiority, or rather, great absurdity of his other writings.--David Hume.

I admire Dryden's talents and genius highly; but his is not a poetical genius. The only qualities I can find in Dryden that are essentially poetical are a certain ardor and impetuosity of mind with an excellent ear. . . . There is not a single image from nature in the whole of his works.-William Wordsworth.

Mr. St. John, afterwards Lord Bolingbroke, happening to pay a morning visit to Dryden, whom he always respected, found him in an unusual agitation of spirits, even to a trembling. On inquiring the cause--"I have been up all night," replied the old bard; "my musical friends made me promise to write them an ode for the Feast of St. Cecilia; I have been so struck with the subject which occurred to me, that I could not leave it till I had completed it-here it is, finished at one sitting."--Warton.

His (Dryden's) indelicacy was like the forced impudence of a bashful man.--Walter Scott.

Without either creative imagination or any power of pathos, he is in argument, in satire, and in declamatory magnificence, the greatest of our poets.--G. L. Craik.

Dryden's faults are numberless, and so are his beauties.--Cowper.