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John Dryden, Esq;

This illustrious Poet was son of Erasmus Dryden, of Tickermish in Northamptonshire, and born at Aldwincle, near Oundle 1631[1], he had his education in grammar learning, at Westminster-school, under the famous Dr. Busby, and was from thence elected in 1650, a scholar of Trinity-College in Cambridge.

We have no account of any extraordinary indications of genius given by this great poet, while in his earlier days; and he is one instance how little regard is to be paid to the figure a boy makes at school:  Mr. Dryden was turned of thirty before he introduced any play upon the stage, and his first, called the Wild Gallants, met with a very indifferent reception; so that if he had not been impelled by the force of genius and propension, he had never again attempted the stage:  a circumstance which the lovers of dramatic poetry must ever have regretted, as they would in this case have been deprived of one of the greatest ornaments that ever adorned the profession.

The year before he left the university, he wrote a poem on the death of lord Hastings, a performance, say some of his critics, very unworthy of himself, and of the astonishing genius he afterwards discovered.

That Mr. Dryden had at this time no fixed principles, either in religion or politics, is abundantly evident, from his heroic stanzas on Oliver Cromwel, written after his funeral 1658; and immediately upon the restoration he published Astraea Redux, a poem on the happy restoration of Charles the IId; and the same year, his Panegyric to the king on his coronation:  In the former of these pieces, a remarkable distich has expos’d our poet to the ridicule of the wits.

  An horrid stillness first invades the ear,
  And in that silence we the tempest hear.

Which it must be owned is downright nonsense, and a contradiction in terms:  Amongst others captain Radcliff has ridiculed this blunder in the following lines of his News from Hell.

  Laureat who was both learn’d and florid,
  Was damn’d long since for silence horrid: 
  Nor had there been such clutter made,
  But that his silence did invade. 
  Invade, and so it might, that’s clear;
  But what did it invade?  An ear!

In 1662 he addressed a poem to the lord chancellor Hyde, presented on new-year’s-day; and the same year published a satire on the Dutch.  His next piece, was his Annus Mirabilis, or the Year of Wonders, 1668, an historical poem, which celebrated the duke of York’s victory over the Dutch.  In the same year Mr. Dryden succeeded Sir William Davenant as Poet Laureat, and was also made historiographer to his majesty; and that year published his Essay on Dramatic Poetry, addressed to Charles earl of Dorset and Middlesex.  Mr. Dryden tells his patron, that the writing this Essay, served as an amusement to him in the country, when he was driven from town by