He was one of the Little Parliament, and helped to break it, as also of all the parliaments since; is one of the Protector’s council (his salary L1000 per annum, besides other places), and as if he had been pinned to this slieve, was never to seek; is become high steward of Westminster; and being so finical, spruce, and like an old courtier, is made lord-chamberlain of the Protector’s household or court; so that he may well be counted fit and worthy to be taken out of the House to have a negative voice in the other House, though he helped to destroy it in the king and lords.  There are more besides him, that make themselves transgressors by building again the things which they once destroyed.”  Quoted by Mr. Malone from a rare pamphlet in his collection entitled “A Second Narrative of the late Parliament, 1658.”

[35] Like Sir Gilbert Pickering, he was a member of the Northamptonshire committee of sequestration, and his deeds are thus commemorated in Walker’s “Sufferings of the Clergy:”—­“Sir J——­ D——­n was never noted for ability or discretion; was a puritan by tenure, his house (Canons Ashby) being an ancient college, where he possessed the church, and abused most part of it to profane uses:  the chancel he turned to a barn; the body of it to a corn-chamber and storehouse, reserving one side aisle of it for the public service of prayers, etc.  He was noted for weakness and simplicity, and never put on any business of moment, but was very furious against the clergy.”

[36] In a satire called “The Protestant Poets,” our author is thus contrasted with Sir Roger L’Estrange.  In levelling his reproaches, the satirist was not probably very solicitous about genealogical accuracy; as, in the eighth line, I conceive Sir John Dryden to be alluded to, although he is termed our poet’s grandfather, when he was in fact his uncle.  Sir Erasmus Dryden was indeed a fanatic, and so was Henry Pickering, Dryden’s paternal and maternal grandfather; but neither were men of mark or eminence: 

  “But though he spares no waste of words or conscience,
  He wants the Tory turn of thorough nonsense,
  That thoughtless air, that makes light Hodge so jolly;—­
  Void of all weight, he wantons in his folly. 
  No so forced BAYES, whom sharp remorse attends,
  While his heart loaths the cause his tongue defends;
  Hourly he acts, hourly repents the sin,
  And is all over grandfather within: 
  By day that ill-laid spirit checks,—­o’ nights
  Old Pickering’s ghost, a dreadful spectre, frights. 
  Returns of spleen his slacken’d speed remit,
  And crump his loose careers with intervals of wit: 
  While, without stop at sense, or ebb of spite,
  Breaking all bars, bounding o’er wrong and right,
  Contented Roger gallops out of sight.”

[37] This piece was called in, and destroyed by the noble author; but Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, when opposing Lord Grimestone at an election, maliciously printed and dispersed a large impression of his smothered performance, with a frontispiece representing an elephant dancing on the slack rope.