FIVE ENGLISH POETS


JOHN DRYDEN

1631-1700

Although Dryden is but little read in these days, he fills an important
place in the history of English literature. As the foremost writer of
the last third of the seventeenth century, he is the connecting link
between Milton, "the last of the Elizabethans," and Pope, the chief
poet of the age of Queen Anne. He was born in Northamptonshire, and
had the good fortune to live in the country until his thirteenth year,
when he was sent to the famous Westminster School, in what is now the
heart of London. A few years after finishing his course at Cambridge
University he went back to London, and lived there chiefly during the
rest of his long and busy life. At the age of thirty-nine he was made
poet-laureate and historiographer-royal, although his best work was not
done until after he was fifty years old. From Milton's death, 1674,
until his own in 1700, "Glorious John," as he was called, reigned
without a rival in English letters; and one can picture him as a short,
stout, somewhat ruddy-faced gentleman, sitting in Will's Coffee House
surrounded by younger authors who vie with one another for the honor of
a pinch out of his snuffbox. He died at the age of sixty-nine, and was
buried in the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, near Chaucer and
Cowley.