his Roundhead zeal--as a clerk or secretary. Here he came in contact
with Cromwell; and saw very clearly those great qualities of sagacity,
determination, courage, statesmanship, insight and genuine godliness,
which made him, next to Alfred the Great, the first monarch who ever
sat on the English throne. Two years after Dryden came to London,
Cromwell expired, and the poet wrote and published his Heroic Stanzas on
the hero's death, which we consider really his earliest poem. When
Richard resigned, Dryden, in common with the majority of the nation, saw
that the Roundhead cause was lost, and hastened to carry over his
talents to the gaining side. For this we do not blame him very severely,
although it certainly had been nobler if, like Milton, he had clung to
his party. Sir Walter Scott remarks, that Dryden never retracted the
praise he gave to Cromwell. In "Absalom and Achitophel" he sneers at
Richard as Ishbosheth, but says nothing against the deceased giant Saul.
It is clear, too, that at first his desertion of the Cromwell party was
a loss to the poet. He lost the chance of their favour, in case a
reaction should come, his situation as secretary, and the shelter of
Pickering's princely mansion. As might have been expected, his ancient
friends were indignant at the change, and not less so at the alteration
he thought proper at the same time to make in the spelling of his
name--from Driden to Dryden.

He went to reside in the obscure house of one Herringman, a bookseller,
in the New Exchange, and became for life a professional author. His
enemies afterwards reproached him bitterly for his mean circumstances at
this period of his life, and asserted that he was a mere drudge to
Herringman. He, at all events, did little in his own proper poetic
calling for two years. A poem on the Coronation of Charles, well fitted
to wipe away the stain of Cromwellism, and to attract upon the poet the
eye of that Rising-Sun, whose glory he sang with more zeal than truth; a