DRUMMONDVILLE 



1867 



DRYDEN 



professor of medical jurisprudence in the Uni- 

 versity of Bishop's College, he never lost his 

 sympathy for these people. He put their 

 stories and their lives into verse, in a broken 

 English which greatly heightens the humor and 

 the pathos. Among the best of these poems 

 are The Habitant; The Last Portage; The 

 Wreck of the Julie Plante; Leetle Bateese; 

 Johnnie Courteau, and The Voyageur. 



Several volumes of his poems were issued 

 during Drummond's life, and in 1912 they were 

 edited by Louis Frechette. G.H.L. 



DRUM' MONO VILLE, the county town of 

 Drummond County, Quebec, sixty-two miles 

 northeast of Montreal and twenty-eight miles 

 northeast of Saint Hyacinthe, on the Saint 

 Francis River and on' the Canadian Pacific and 

 Intercolonial railways. Drummondville is a 

 manufacturing center, its largest establishment 

 being a chemical works, with 800 employees. 

 Other large establishments make boots and 

 shoes, steel and structural iron, foundry prod- 

 ucts, lumber and various wood products, includ- 

 ing sashes, doors, matches and carriages. The 

 Saint Francis River is not navigable, but sup- 

 plies water power at Lord's Falls, near the 

 town. Population in 1911, 1,725; in 1916, esti- 

 mated 2,600. 



DRYADS, dri'adz, or HAMADRYADS, ham' 

 a dri adz, in classical mythology, the wood 

 nymphs who danced with the god Pan. It 

 was believed that with each tree a dryad came 

 into existence and that she, too, perished when 

 the tree died. Purposely to destroy a tree, 

 the house of a dryad, was considered an im- 

 pious act and was punished accordingly. These 

 graceful nymphs of the woodlands at times 

 assumed the forms of followers of the hunt, 

 peasant girls or shepherdesses. See NYMPHS. 



DRYDEN, dri' den, JOHN (1631-1700), a dis- 

 tinguished English poet, dramatist and critic, 

 the greatest writer of the last two decades of 

 the seventeenth century. He was the first poet 

 of the new school whose typical representative 

 was Alexander Pope, and he was also one of 

 the earliest masters of English prose. Dryden, 

 the third son of a baronet, was born in Aid- 

 winkle, a village of Northamptonshire. He 

 studied at Westminster School and at Trinity 

 College, Cambridge, receiving his degree of 

 B. A. at the latter institution in 1654. In 

 1658, the year after his removal to London, 

 he published his first important poem, Heroic 

 Stanzas to the Memory of Oliver Cromwell. 



Though a loyal adherent of Cromwell, Dry- 

 den shared the nation's joy over the restora- 



tion of Charles II (1660), celebrating that his- 

 torical event in two dignified poems entitled 

 Astraea Redux ("The Return of the Heaven- 

 born") and Panegyric on the Coronation. In 

 1663 the perform- 

 ance of the Wild 

 Gallant, at the 

 King's Theater, 

 proclaimed him 

 a dramatist and 

 marked the be- 

 ginning of a series 

 of tragedies and 

 comedies that 

 covered the next 

 twenty years of 

 his literary career. 

 Of these, the best 

 is All for Love, a 

 tragedy written in JOHN DRYDEN 



blank verse and founded on Shakespeare's 

 Antony and Cleopatra. His other tragedies, 

 which are of the type known as the "heroic" 

 play, are written in a form of verse in which 

 the lines rhyme in couplets. In the heroic 

 play there is no attempt to portray real life. 

 The themes are lofty, almost operatic in char- 

 acter, and the work has something of the effect 

 of an epic poem. Of this form of dramatic 

 writing Dryden was the great master. His 

 plays, however, reflect the low moral tone of 

 his age (see DRAMA). 



In 1667 he produced the best of his earlier 

 poems, Annus Mirabilis ("The Wonderful 

 Year"), his theme being the successful war 

 with the Dutch and the great London fire of 

 1666. In 1670 his talents received royal recog- 

 nition in his appointment as poet laureate 

 (which see). Though he was then in the high 

 tide of a successful literary career, his dramas 

 were held up to scorn in a play called The 

 Rehearsal, written in 1671 by the Duke of 

 Buckingham. Dryden obtained his revenge 

 when he wrote his celebrated political satire in 

 verse, Absalom and Achitophel (1681). In this 

 he struck hard at all of his enemies, including 

 the Duke, and ably defended Charles II against 

 the Whigs. In 1682 he published The Medall, 

 a satire on the notorious Earl of Shaftesbury; 

 MacFlecknoe, a scathing attack on a minor 

 contemporary poet, Thomas Shadwell, and the 

 second part of Absalom and Achitophel. In the 

 same year appeared his Religio Laid, a poem 

 defending the doctrines of the Church of Eng- 

 land. 



Dryden's conversion to the Roman Catholic 



