Cromwell. The chief of his family, Sir John Driden, elder brother of the
poet's father, was also a flaming and bigoted puritan,[35] through whose
gifts and merits his nephew might reasonably hope to attain preferment
In a youth entering life under the protection of such relations, who
could have anticipated the future dramatist and poet laureate, much less
the advocate and martyr of prerogative and of the Stuart family, the
convert and confessor of the Roman Catholic faith? In his after career,
his early connections with the puritans, and the principles of his
kinsmen during the civil wars and usurpation, were often made subjects
of reproach, to which he never seems to have deigned an answer.[36]

The death of Cromwell was the first theme of our poet's muse. Averse as
the puritans were to any poetry, save that of Hopkins, of Withers, or of
Wisdom, they may be reasonably supposed to have had some sympathy with
Dryden's sorrow upon the death of Oliver, even although it vented itself
in the profane and unprofitable shape of an elegy. But we have no means
of estimating its reception with the public, if, in truth, the public
long interested themselves about the memory of Cromwell, while his
relations and dependants presented to them the more animated and
interesting spectacle of a struggle for his usurped power. Richard
perhaps, and the immediate friends of the deceased Protector, with such
of Dryden's relations as were attached to his memory, may have thought,
like the tinker at the Taming of the Shrew, that this same elegy was
"marvellous good matter." It did not probably attract much general
attention. The first edition, in 1659, is extremely rare: it was
reprinted, however, along with those of Sprat and Waller, in the course
of the same year. After the Restoration this piece fell into a slate of
oblivion, from which it may be believed that the author, who had seen a
new light in politics, was by no means solicitous to recall it. His
political antagonist did not, however, fail to awaken its memory, when