270 DRYDEN. 



men commonly do, interpreted his boyish turn of mind by 

 later self-knowledge. We thus get a glimpse of him 

 browsing for, like Johnson, Burke, and the full as distin 

 guished from the learned men, he was always a random 

 reader* in his father s library, and painfully culling here 

 and there a spray of his own proper nutriment from among 

 the stubs and thorns of Puritan divinity. After such 

 schooling as could be had in the country, he was sent up to 

 Westminster School, then under the headship of the 

 celebrated Dr. Busby. Here he made his first essays in 

 verse, translating, among other school exercises of the same 

 kind, the third satire of Persius. In 1650 he was entered 

 at Trinity College, Cambridge, and remained there for 

 seven years. The only record of his college life is a dis 

 cipline imposed, in 1652, for &quot;disobedience to the Vice- 

 Master, and contumacy in taking his punishment, inflicted 

 by him.&quot; Whether this punishment was corporeal, as 

 Johnson insinuates in the similar case of Milton, we are 

 ignorant. He certainly retained no very fond recollection 

 of his Alma Mater, for in his &quot; Prologue to the University 

 of Oxford &quot; he says : 



&quot; Oxford to him a dearer name shall be 

 Than his own mother university ; 

 Thebes did his green, unknowing youth engage, 

 He chooses Athens in his riper age.&quot; 



By the death of his father, in 1654, he came into possession 

 of a small estate of sixty pounds a-year, from which, how 

 ever, a third must be deducted, for his mother s dower, till 

 1676. After leaving Cambridge he became secretary to his 

 near relative, Sir Gilbert Pickering, at that time Cromwell s 

 chamberlain, and a member of his Upper House. In 1670 

 he succeeded Davenant as Poet Laureate,! and Ho well as 

 Historiographer, with a yearly salary of two hundred pounds. 



* &quot; For my own part, who must confess it to my shame that I never 

 read anything but for pleasure.&quot; Life of Plutarch (1683). _ 



t Gray says petulantly enough that &quot; Dryden was as disgraceful to 

 the office, from his character, as the poorest scribbler could have been 

 from his verses.&quot; GRAY to MASON, 19th December, 1757. 



