John Dryden was born at Aldwinkle, near Oundle, in Northamptonshire, August 9, 1631, according to Dr. Johnson; but Mr. Malone raises a doubt concerning the accuracy of this date. The inscription on his monument says, only, natus, 1632. He was educated at Westminster School, under Dr. Busby, and elected Scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1650. The year before he left the university, he wrote a poem on the death of Lord Hastings. Of this production Dr. Johnson says, that “it was composed with great ambition of such conceits as, notwithstanding the reformation begun by Waller and Denham, the example of Cowley still kept in reputation.” Dryden’s vacillation, both in religion and politics, proves, that though perhaps not completely dishonest, he had no firm and well-considered principles. His heroic stanzas on Oliver Cromwell, written after the Protector’s funeral in 1658, were followed on the restoration by his Astrea Redux, and in the same year by a second tribute of flattery to his sacred Majesty, ‘A Panegyric on his Coronation.’ The Annus Mirabilis is one of his most elaborate works; a historical poem in celebration of the Duke of York’s victory over the Dutch. He succeeded Sir William Davenant as poet laureat. He did not obtain the laurel till August 18, 1670; but according to Malone, the patent had a retrospect, and the salary commenced from the Midsummer after Davenant’s death, in 1668. He was also made historiographer to the king, and in the same year published his Essay on Dramatic Poetry.

Among the works of so voluminous a writer, we can only notice those which are distinguished by excellence, or by some strong peculiarity.

Dryden was more than thirty years of age when he commenced dramatic writer. His first piece, the Wild Gallant, met with so mortifying a reception, that he resolved never more to write for the stage. The hasty resolutions of anger are seldom kept, and are seldom worth keeping; but in the present instance it would have been well had he adhered to the first dictates of his resentment. We should not then have had to regret, that so large a portion of a great writer’s life and labour has been wasted on twenty-eight dramas: the comedies exhibiting much ribaldry and but little wit; with neither ingenuity nor interest in the fable; with no originality in the characters: the tragedies for the most part filled with the exaggerations of romance, and the hyperboles of an extravagant imagination, in the place of nature and pathos. His tragedy seldom touches the passions: his staple commodities are pompous language, poetical flights, and picturesque description. His characters all speak in one language—that of the author. Addison says, “It is peculiar to Dryden to make all his personages as wise, witty, elegant, and polite as himself.” In confirmation of the proofs internally afforded by his writings, that his taste for tragedy was not genuine, he expresses his contempt for Otway, master as that poet was of the tender passions. But however uncongenial with his natural talent dramatic composition might be, his temporary disgust soon passed away. In his Essay on Dramatic Poetry, he tells his patron, Dorset, that the writing of that treatise served as an amusement to him in the country, when he was driven from London by the plague; that he diverted himself with thinking on the theatres, as lovers do by ruminating on their absent mistresses. But whatever opinion he might entertain of his own tragic style, he was himself sensible that his talents did not lie in the line of comedy. “Those who decry my comedies do me no injury, except it be in point of profit: reputation in them is the last thing to which I shall pretend.” He retaliated on the criticisms levelled against his extravagances in tragedy, by an ostentatious display of defiance. We find in his Dedication of the Spanish Friar, “All that I can say for certain passages of my own Maximin and Almanzor is, that I knew they were bad enough to please when I wrote them.”

In 1671 he was publicly ridiculed on the stage in the Duke of Buckingham’s comedy of the Rehearsal. The character of Bayes was at first named Bilboa, and meant for Sir Robert Howard; but the representation of the piece in its original form was stopped by the plague in 1665: it was not reproduced till six years afterwards, when it appeared with alterations in ridicule of the pieces brought out in the interval, and with a correspondent change of the hero. Dryden affected to despise the satire. In the Dedication to his Translation of Juvenal, he says, “I answered not to the Rehearsal, because I knew the author sat to himself when he drew the picture, and was the very Bayes of his own farce.”

An Essay on Satire, said to be written jointly by Dryden and Lord Mulgrave, was first printed in 1679. This piece was handed about in manuscript, for some time before its publication. It contained reflections on the Duchess of Portsmouth and Lord Rochester. Anthony Wood says, that suspecting Dryden to be the author, the aggrieved parties hired three ruffians, who cudgelled the poet in Will’s coffee-house.

In 1680 a translation of Ovid’s Epistles into English came out: two of which, together with the Preface, were by Dryden. In the following year he published Absalom and Achitophel; a work of first-rate excellence as a political and controversial poem. Dr. Johnson ascribes to it “acrimony of censure, elegance of praise, artful delineation of character, variety and vigour of sentiments, happy turns of language, and pleasing harmony of numbers; and all these raised to such a height as can scarcely be found in any other English composition.” In the same year, the Medal, a satire, was given to the public. This piece was occasioned by the striking of a medal, on account of the indictment against Lord Shaftesbury being thrown out, and is a severe invective against that celebrated statesman.

In 1682 Dryden published ‘Religio Laici,’ in defence of revealed religion against Deists, Papists, and Presbyterians. Yet soon after the accession of James the Second, he became a Roman Catholic; and in the hope of promoting Popery, was employed on a translation of Maimbourg’s History of the League, on account of the parallel between the troubles of France and those of Great Britain. This extraordinary conversion exposed him to the ridicule of the wits, and especially to the gibes of the facetious and celebrated Tom Brown.

The Hind and Panther, a controversial poem in defence of the Romish church, appeared in 1687. The Hind represents the church of Rome, the Panther the church of England. The first part of the poem consists mostly of general characters and narration; which, says the author, “I have endeavoured to raise, and give it the majestic turn of heroic poetry. The second, being matter of dispute, and chiefly concerning church authority, I was obliged to make as plain and perspicuous as possibly I could, yet not wholly neglecting the numbers, though I had not frequent occasion for the magnificence of verse. The third, which has more of the nature of domestic conversation, is, or ought to be, more free and familiar than the two former. There are in it two episodes, or fables, which are interwoven with the main design; so that they are properly parts of it, though they are also distinct stories of themselves. In both of these I have made use of the commonplaces of satire, whether true or false, which are urged by the members of one church against another.” The absurdity of a fable exhibiting two beasts discoursing on theology, was ridiculed in the City Mouse and Country Mouse, a burlesque poem, the joint production of Montague, afterwards Earl of Halifax, and Prior, who then put forth the first sample of his talents. Dryden is supposed to have been engaged for the translation of Varillas’s History of Heresies, but to have dropped the design, from a feeling of his own incompetency to theological controversy. Bishop Burnet, in his Reflections on the Ninth Book of the first Volume of M. Varillas’s History, classes together that work, and the Hind and Panther, as “such extraordinary things of their kind, that it will be but suitable to see the author of the worst poem become likewise the translator of the worst history that the age has produced.” Dr. Johnson supports the Bishop’s hostile criticism so far as to pronounce the scheme of the work injudicious and incommodious, and to censure the absurdity of making one beast advise another to rest her faith on a pope and council: but he allows it to be written “with great smoothness of metre, a wide extent of knowledge, and an abundant multiplicity of images; the controversy to be embellished with pointed sentences, diversified by illustrations, and enlivened by sallies of invective;” and a poem inlaid with such ornaments, however little worth the solid material might be, was but peevishly represented as “the worst that the age had produced.” Pope, a higher authority than the honest Bishop in such matters, considered it as the most correct specimen of Dryden’s versification. Malone has shown that Burnet was mistaken in attributing to our author the answer to Burnet’s Remarks on the History.

In 1688 Dryden published Britannia Rediviva, a poem on the birth of the Prince afterwards known by the title of the Pretender. The poem is to be noticed only for its extravagant and ill-timed adulation, which deservedly involved the author in the disgrace and fall of his party. But even had he not so identified himself with the ejected dynasty, his conversion to Popery disqualified him for holding his place. He was accordingly dispossessed of it; and the mortification of its being conferred on an object of his confirmed dislike, aggravated the pecuniary loss, which he could ill afford. Shadwell, his successor, was an old enemy, whom he had formerly stigmatized under the name of Og. In consequence of this appointment, Dryden again attacked him in a poem called MacFlecknoe; one of the severest as well as most witty satires in the English language. The poetry of the new laureat was so indifferent, as to give ample scope for ridicule:—

Although these lines be written of Flecknoe, Shadwell is the hero of the piece, introduced as if selected by Flecknoe to succeed him on the throne of dulness. Richard Flecknoe was an Irish priest, well known about the court; but notwithstanding Cibber’s assertion in his Lives of the Poets, he was never poet laureat. The above is the story told by all the biographers; but if Mr. Malone’s laborious and minute researches have been pursued with his usual accuracy, they have been mistaken in the date of the publication, which he fixes in October, 1682. If this be correct, the satire must have been a sportive anticipation of an event, which its author little expected to come to pass; and not the ebullition of revenge for the loss of an honourable and lucrative employment. Taking the earlier as the true date, we might suspect that the prophecy was fulfilled in the person of Shadwell, as a vindictive aggravation of the deposed laureat’s fall. Yet it is difficult to reconcile it to probability that Dryden should have dishonoured an office which he had been holding for the last twelve years, and must then have calculated on holding for his life, by a fictitious successive inauguration of two blockheads, who “never deviated into sense.”

Pope’s Dunciad, though more extended in its plan, and more diversified in its incidents, was professedly written in imitation of this poem. The leisure and pains bestowed on his performance gave the imitator the superiority in point of elaborate execution; but there are bursts of pleasantry in MacFlecknoe, and sallies of wit and humour, equal if not superior to any thing in Pope or Boileau, or perhaps in any poet excepting Horace. Dr. Joseph Warton says of it, that “in point of satire, both oblique and direct, contempt and indignation, clear diction, and melodious versification, this poem is perhaps the best of its kind in any language.”

Dr. Johnson doubts whether Dryden was the translator of the Life of Francis Xavier, by Father Bouhours, to which his name is affixed. The borrowing of popular names for title-pages was very prevalent in those days, and the loan probably not without profit to the lenders.

In 1693 a translation of Juvenal and Persius appeared. The first, third, sixth, tenth, and sixteenth satires of Juvenal, and the whole of Persius, are Dryden’s: also the Dedication to Lord Dorset, a long and ingenious discourse, in which the writer gives an account of a design, which he never carried into effect, of writing an epic poem either on Arthur or the Black Prince. Lord Dorset well deserved the compliment of so masterly a dedication; for he continued to patronise the poet in the reverse of his fortunes, and allowed him an annuity equal to the salary which he had lost.

In 1694 Dryden published a prose translation of Du Fresnoy’s Art of Painting, with a Preface, exhibiting a parallel between painting and poetry. Pope addressed a copy of verses to Jervas, the painter, in praise of this work.

The most laborious of Dryden’s works, the translation of Virgil, was given to the world in 1697. The Pastorals were dedicated to Lord Clifford, the Georgics to Lord Chesterfield, and the Æneid to Lord Mulgrave: an economical and lucrative combination of flattery which the wits suffered not to pass unnoticed. The translation had an extensive sale, and has since passed through many editions. Like most of Dryden’s longer productions, it has many careless passages, which do not well accord with an original so remarkable for finish and correctness; but it still stands its ground, and is a stock-book in the face of the more careful and perhaps more scholarlike performances of Warton, Sotheby, and Pitt.

Besides the original pieces and translations already mentioned, Dryden wrote many others, the most important of which were published in six volumes of Miscellanies, to which he was the principal contributor. They consist of translations from the Greek and Latin poets; epistles, prologues, and epilogues; odes, elegies, epitaphs, and songs. Alexander’s Feast, an ode for Saint Cecilia’s Day, displays one of the highest flights within the compass of lyric poetry. Dryden, although no lover of labour, is said to have devoted a fortnight to this masterpiece. Yet the poetic fervour is so supported throughout, that it reads as if struck off at a heat; so much so, that the few negligences which escaped the enthusiasm of the writer are scarcely ever noticed. Dr. Johnson, seldom carried beyond the wariness of criticism by the inspiration of his author, did not discover that some of the lines are without correspondent rhymes, till after an acquaintance with it of many years. The splendour of this poem eclipsed that of his first ode for Saint Cecilia’s Day, which would have fixed the fame of any other poet. In Alexander’s Feast the versification is brilliantly worked up, and abruptly varied, according to the rapid transitions of the subject; the language is natural though elevated, and the sentiments are suited to the age and occasion. Had Dryden never written another line, his name would yet be as undying as the tongue in which he wrote. His Fables in English verse from Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio, and Chaucer, were his last work; they were published in 1698. The preface gives a critical account of the authors from whom the Fables are translated. In this work he furnished us with the first example of the revival of ancient English writers by modernizing their language. Yet those readers who can master Chaucer’s phraseology, and have an ear so practised as to catch the tune of his verse, will like him better in the simplicity of his native garb, than in the elaborate splendour of his borrowed costume.

Dryden was a voluminous writer in prose as well as in verse, and quite as great a master of the English language in the former as in the latter. His performances in prose consist of Dedications, Prefaces, and controversial pieces; the Lives of Plutarch and Lucian, prefixed to the translation of those authors by several hands; the Life of Polybius, prefixed to the translation of that historian by Sir Henry Shears; and the Preface to Walsh’s Dialogue concerning Women.

Dryden died on the 1st of May, 1701, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. He married Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter to the Earl of Berkshire. He had three sons by this lady; Charles, John, and Henry. They were all educated at Rome, where John died of a fever. He translated the fourteenth satire of Juvenal, and was author of a comedy. Charles translated the seventh satire. There is a confused story respecting some vexatious and tumultuary incidents occurring at Dryden’s funeral, which rests on no satisfactory authority; and, even if true, would occupy more room in the detail, than would square either with our limits or its own importance.

Dryden was the father of English criticism; and his Essay on Dramatic Poetry is the first regular and judicious treatise in our language on the art of writing. Although, after so many valuable discourses have been delivered to the public on the same subject during the century and a half which has elapsed since his original attempts, his prose works may now be read more for the charm of their pure idiomatic English, than for their novelty or instructive matter, yet the merits of a discoverer must not be underrated because his discoveries have been extended, or his inventions improved upon. Before his time, those who wished to arrive at just principles of taste, or a rational code of criticism, if they were unacquainted with the works of the ancients and the modern languages of Italy and France, had no guides to lead them on their way. Dryden communicated to his own learning, which, though not deep nor accurate, was various and extensive, the magic of his style and the popular attraction of his mother tongue: the Spectator followed his lead, in essays less diffusive, and therefore more within the reach of the million: in our day, such is the accumulation of material, and so cheap and copious the power of circulating knowledge, that the poorest man who can read may inform his mind on subjects of general literature, to the enlargement of his understanding, and the improvement of his morals. But we must not forget our obligations to those who began that hoard, whence we have the privilege of drawing at will.

With respect to those prose works of our author which are devoted to controversy, their interest has quite passed away, farther than as they may evince his powers in argument, or command of language. Dr. Johnson gives a just estimate of his general character. “He appears to have a mind very comprehensive by nature, and much enriched with acquired knowledge. His compositions are the effects of a vigorous genius, operating upon large materials.”

Dryden’s works have been constantly before the public, in various shapes and successive editions. Those best deserving a place in the library are, his Prose Works in four volumes, edited by Mr. Malone; his Poetical Works in four volumes, with notes, by Dr. Joseph Warton, and his son, the Rev. John Warton; and the whole of his Works in eighteen volumes octavo, by Sir Walter Scott. The earlier authorities for his Life are Wood’s AthenÆ Oxonienses; the Biographia Britannica; and a Life by Derrick, poorly executed, prefixed to Tonson’s edition, in 1760. Johnson’s admirable Essay on this subject is in the hands of every reader, and is one of the most masterly among his Lives of the Poets. He was peculiarly well qualified to appreciate a writer in whom, to use his own words, “strong reason rather predominated than quick sensibility.” Scott also has written a copious Life, occupying the first volume of his edition of Dryden’s Works.