“Of the person, private life, and domestic manners of Dryden, very few particulars are known. His picture by Kneller would lead us to suppose that he was graceful in his person; but Kneller was a great mender of nature. From the State Poems we learn that he was a short, thick man. The nickname given him by his enemies was Poet Squab. ‘I remember plain John Dryden’ (says a writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine for February 1745, who was then eighty-seven years of age) ‘before he paid his court to the great, in one uniform clothing of Norwich drugget. I have eat tarts with him and Madam Reeve (the actress) at the Mulberry Garden, when our author advanced to a sword and Chedreux wig (probably the wig that Swift has ridiculed in The Battle of the Books). Posterity is absolutely mistaken as to that great man. Though forced to be a satirist, he was the mildest creature breathing, and the readiest to help the young and deserving. Though his comedies are horribly full of double entendre, yet ’twas owing to a false compliance for a dissolute age; he was in company the modestest man that ever conversed.’... From those notices which he has very liberally given us of himself, it appears, that ‘his conversation was slow and dull, his humour saturnine and reserved, and that he was none of those who endeavour to break jests in company, and make repartees.’”

“As to his habits and manners little is known, and that little is worn threadbare by his many biographers. In appearance he became in his maturer years fat and florid, and obtained the name of ‘Poet Squab.’ His portraits show a shrewd but rather sluggish face, with long gray hair floating down his cheeks, not unlike Coleridge, but without his dreamy eye like a nebulous star. His conversation was less sprightly than solid. Sometimes men suspected that he had ‘sold all his thoughts to his booksellers.’ His manners are by his friends pronounced ‘modest,’ and the word modest has since been amiably confounded by his biographers with ‘pure.’ Bashful he seems to have been to awkwardness; but he was by no means a model of the virtues. He loved to sit at Will’s coffee-house and be the arbiter of criticism. His favourite stimulus was snuff, and his favourite amusement angling. He had a bad address, a down look, and little of the air of a gentleman.”

“Some notion of Dryden’s personal appearance may be gathered from contemporary notices. He was of short stature, stout, and ruddy in the face. Rochester christened him ‘Poet Squab,’ and Tom Brown always calls him ‘Little Bayes.’ Shadwell, in his Medal of John Bayes, sneers at him as a cherry-cheeked dunce; another lampooner calls him ‘learned and florid.’ Pope remembered him as plump and of fresh colour, with a down look. Lady de Longueville, who died in 1763 at the age of a hundred, told Oldys that she remembered Dryden dining with her husband, and that the most remarkable part of his appearance was an uncommon distance between his eyes. He had a large mole on his right cheek. The friendly writer of some lines on his portrait by Closterman says:

‘A sleepy eye he shows, and no sweet feature.’

He appears to have become gray comparatively early, and he let his gray hair grow long. We see him with his long gray locks in the portrait by which, through engravings, his face is best known to us, painted by Kneller in 1698. The face, as we know it by that picture and the engravings, is handsome, it indicates intellect, and sensual characteristics are not wanting.”