DRYDEN. 271 



This place ho lost at the Revolution, and had the mortifica 

 tion to see his old enemy and butt, Shadwell, promoted to it, 

 as the best poet the Whig party could muster. If William 

 \vas obliged to read the verses of his official minstrel, Dryden 

 was more than avenged. From 1688 to his death, twelve 

 years later, he earned his bread manfully by his pen, without 

 any mean complaining, and with no allusion to his fallen 

 fortunes that is not dignified and touching. These latter 

 years, during which he was his own man again, were probably 

 the happiest of his life. In 1664 or 1665 he married Lady 

 Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. 

 About a hundred pounds a-year were thus added to his 

 income. The marriage is said not to have been a happy 

 one, and perhaps it was not, for his wife was apparently a 

 weak-minded woman; but the inference from the internal 

 evidence of Dryden s plays, as of Shakespeare s, is very 

 untrustworthy, ridicule of marriage having always been a 

 common stock in trade of the comic writers. 



The earliest of his verses that have come down to us were 

 written upon the death of Lord Hastings, and are as bad as 

 they can be, a kind of parody on the worst of Donne. 

 They have every fault of his manner, without a hint of the 

 subtile and often profound thought that more than redeems 

 it. As the Doctor himself would have said, here is Donne 

 outdone. The young nobleman died of the small-pox, and 

 Dryden exclaims pathetically, 



&quot; Was there no milder way than the small-pox, 

 The very filthiness of Pandora s box ? &quot; 



He compares the pustules to &quot; rosebuds stuck i the lily 

 skin about,&quot; and says that 



11 Each little pimple had a tear in it 

 To wail the fault its rising did commit.&quot; 



But he has not done his worst yet, by a great deal. What 

 follows is even finer : 



&quot; No comet need foretell his change drew on. 

 Whose corpse might seem a constellation. 



