DRYDEN. 291 



commonplace atmosphere, and among those easy levels of 

 sentiment which befitted Will s Coffee-house and the Bird 

 cage Walk, was a damage to his poetry. Solitude is as 

 needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the 

 character. He cannot always distinguish between enthusi 

 asm and extravagance when he sees them. But apart from 

 these influences which I have adduced in exculpation, 

 there was certainly a vein of coarseness in him, a want 

 of that exquisite sensitiveness which is the conscience of 

 the artist. An old gentleman, writing to the Gentleman s 

 Magazine in 1745, professes to remember &quot;plain John 

 Dryden (before he paid his court with success to the great) 

 in one uniform clothing of Norwich drugget. I have eat 

 tarts at the Mulberry Garden with him and Madam Reeve, 

 when our author advanced to a sword and Chadreux wig.&quot;* 

 I always fancy Dryden in the drugget, with wig, lace 

 ruffles, and sword superimposed. It is the type of this 

 curiously-incongruous man. 



The first poem by which Dryden won a general acknow 

 ledgment of his power was the &quot; Annus Mirabilis,&quot; written 

 in his thirty-seventh year. Pepys, himself not altogether a 

 bad judge, doubtless expresses the common opinion when he 

 says &quot; I am very well pleased this night with reading a 

 poem I brought home with me last night from Westminster 

 Hall, of Dryden s, upon the present war ; a very good 



* Both Malone and Scott accept this gentleman s evidence without 

 question, but I confess suspicion of a memory that runs back more 

 than eighty-one years, and recollects a man before he had any claim to 

 remembrance. Dryden was never poor, and there is at Oxford a por 

 trait of him painted in 1664, which represents him in a superb periwig 

 and laced band. This was &quot; before he had paid his court with success 

 to the great.&quot; But the story is at least ben trovato, and morally true 

 enough to serve as an illustration. Who the &quot; old gentleman &quot; was has 

 never been discovered. Of Crowne (who has some interest for us as a 

 sometime student at Harvard) he says &quot;Many a cup of metheglin 

 have I drank with little starch d Johnny Crown ; we called him so, 

 from the stiff, unalterable primness of his long cravat.&quot; Crowne re 

 flects no more credit on his Alma Mater than Downing. Both were 

 sneaks, and of such a kind as, I think, can only be produced by a de 

 bauched Puritanism. Crowne, as a rival of Dryden, is contemptuously 

 alluded to by Gibber in his &quot; Apology.&quot; 



