ranged on the side of Parliament in its struggle with Charles I. As a
boy Dryden received his elementary education at Tichmarsh, and went
thence to Westminster School, where he studied under the famous Dr.
Busby. Here he first appeared in print with an elegiac poem on the death
of a schoolfellow, Lord Hastings. It possesses the peculiarities of the
extreme Marinists. The boy had died from smallpox, and Dryden writes:


"Each little pimple had a tear in it To wail the fault its rising did
commit."


He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, May 18, 1650, took his B.A. in
1654, and then, though he received no fellowship, lingered at the
university for three years. Tradition tells us that he had no fondness
for his Alma Mater, and certainly his verse contains compliments only
for Oxford.

His father had died in 1654 and had bequeathed him a small estate. When,
in 1657, he finally left the university, he attached himself to his
uncle, Sir Gilbert Pickering, a general of the Commonwealth. In 1658 he
wrote _Heroic Stanzas on Cromwell's Death;_ but shortly thereafter he
went to London, threw himself into the life of literary Bohemia, and at
the Restoration, in 1660, wrote his _Astroea Redux_, as enthusiastically
as the veriest royalist of them all. This sudden transformation of the
eulogist of Cromwell to the panegyrist of Charles won for Dryden in some
quarters the name of a political turncoat; but such criticism was
unjust. He was by birth and early training a Puritan; add to this a
poet's admiration for a truly great character, and the lines on Cromwell
are explained; but during his London life he rubbed elbows with the