he taught his children himself, with a strict charge not to stir out of the room till his return; well knowing the task he had set him would take up longer time.  Charles was performing his duty, in obedience to his father, but as ill fate would have it, the stag made towards the house; and the noise alarming the servants, they hasted out to, see the sport.  One of them took young Dryden by the hand, and led him out to see it also, when just as they came to the gate, the stag being at bay with the dogs, made a bold push and leaped over the court wall, which was very low, and very old; and the dogs following, threw down a part of the wall ten yards in length, under which Charles Dryden lay buried.  He was immediately dug out, and after six weeks languishing in a dangerous way he recovered; so far Dryden’s prediction was fulfilled:  In the twenty-third year of his age, Charles fell from the top of an old tower belonging to the Vatican at Rome, occasioned by a swimming in his head, with which he was seized, the heat of the day being excessive.  He again recovered, but was ever after in a languishing sickly state.  In the thirty-third year of his age, being returned to England, he was unhappily drowned at Windsor.  He had with another gentleman swam twice over the Thames; but returning a third time, it was supposed he was taken with the cramp, because he called out for help, tho’ too late.  Thus the father’s calculation proved but too prophetical.

Mr. Dryden died the first of May 1701, and was interred in Westminster Abby.  On the 19th of April he had been very bad with the gout, and erisipelas in one leg; but he was then somewhat recovered, and designed to go abroad; on the Friday following he eat a partridge for his supper, and going to take a turn in the little garden behind his house in Gerard-street, he was seized with a violent pain under the ball of the great toe of his right foot; that, unable to stand, he cried out for help, and was carried in by his servants, when upon sending for surgeons, they found a small black spot in the place affected; he submitted to their present applications, and when gone called his son Charles to him, using these words.  ’I know this black spot is a mortification:  I know also, that it will seize my head, and that they will attempt to cut off my leg; but I command you my son, by your filial duty, that you do not suffer me to be dismembered:’  As he foretold, the event proved, and his son was too dutiful to disobey his father’s commands.

On the Wednesday morning following, he breathed his last, under the most excruciating pains, in the 69th year of his age; and left behind him the lady Elizabeth, his wife, and three sons.  Lady Elizabeth survived him eight years, four of which she was a lunatic; being deprived of her senses by a nervous fever in 1704.

John, another of his sons, died of a fever at Rome; and Charles as has been observed, was drowned in the Thames; there is no account when, or at what place Harry his third son died.