DRYDEN. 269 



him is, that he was thoroughly manly ; and while it may 

 be disputed whether he was a great poet, it may be said of 

 him, as Wordsworth said of Burke, that &quot;he was by far 

 the greatest man of his age, not only abounding in know 

 ledge himself, but feeding, in various directions, his most 

 able contemporaries.&quot;* 



Dryden was born in 1631. He was accordingly six years 

 old when Jonson died, was neary a quarter of a century 

 younger than Milton, and may have personally known 

 Bishop Hall, the first English satirist, who was living till 

 1656. On the other side, he was older than Swift by 

 thirty-six, than Addison by forty-one, and than Pope by 

 fifty-seven years. Dennis says that &quot; Dryden, for the last 

 ten years of his life, was much acquainted with Addison, 

 and drank with him more than he ever used to do, probably 

 so far as to hasten his end,&quot; being commonly &quot; an extreme 

 sober man.&quot; Pope tells us that, in his twelfth year, he 

 &quot;saw Dryden,&quot; perhaps at Will s, perhaps in the street, as 

 Scott did Burns. Dryden himself visited Milton now and 

 then, and was intimate with Davenant, who could tell him 

 of Fletcher and Jonson from personal recollection. Thus 

 he stands between the age before and that which followed 

 him, giving a hand to each. His father was a country 

 clergyman, of Puritan leanings, a younger son of an ancient 

 county family. The Puritanism is thought to have come 

 in with the poet s great-grandfather, who made in his will 

 the somewhat singular statement that he was &quot; assured by 

 the Holy Ghost that he was elect of God.&quot; It would 

 appear from this that Dryden s self-confidence was an 

 inheritance. The solid quality of his mind showed itself 

 early. He himself tells us that he had read Polybius &quot; in 

 English, with the pleasure of a boy, before he was ten years 

 of age, and yet even then had some dark notions of the 

 prudence with which he conducted his design&quot;^ The con 

 cluding words are very characteristic, even if Dryden, as 



* &quot; The great man must have that intellect which puts in motion 

 the intellect of others.&quot; LANDOR, Itn. Con., Diogenes and Plato, 

 f Character of Polybius (1692). 



