exercises of the same nature, in English verse, none of which are now in
existence.[25] During the last year of his residence at Westminster, the
death of Henry Lord Hastings, a young nobleman of great learning, and
much beloved, called forth no less than ninety-eight elegies, one of
which was written by our poet, then about eighteen years old. They were
published in 1650, under the title of "_Lachrymae Musarum._"

Dryden, having obtained a Westminster scholarship was admitted to
Trinity College, Cambridge on the 11th May 1650, his tutor being the
reverend John Templer, M.A., a man of some learning, who wrote a Latin
Treatise in confutation of Hobbes, and a few theological tracts and
single sermons. While at college, our author's conduct seems not to have
been uniformly regular. He was subjected to slight punishment for
contumacy to the vice-master,[26] and seems, according to the statement
of an obscure libeller, to have been engaged in some public and
notorious dispute with a nobleman's son, probably on account of the
indulgence of his turn for satire.[27] He took, however, the degree of
Bachelor, in January 1653-4, but neither became Master of Arts,[28] nor
a fellow of the university and certainly never retained for it much of
that veneration usually paid by an English scholar to his Alma Mater. He
often celebrates Oxford, but only mentions Cambridge as the contrast of
the sister university in point of taste and learning:

"Oxford to him a dearer name shall be
Than his own mother-university:
Thebes did his green unknowing youth engage,
He chooses Athens in his riper age."[29]


A preference so uncommon, in one who had studied at Cambridge, probably