impression of him is, that he was thoroughly manly; and while it may be
disputed whether he was a great poet, it may be said of him, as
Wordsworth said of Burke, that "he was by far the greatest man of his
age, not only abounding in knowledge himself, but feeding, in various
directions, his most able contemporaries."[7]

Dryden was born in 1631. He was accordingly six years old when Jonson
died, was nearly a quarter of a century younger than Milton, and may have
personally known Bishop Hall, the first English satirist, who was living
till 1656. On the other side, he was older than Swift by thirty-six, than
Addison by forty-one, and than Pope by fifty-seven years. Dennis says
that "Dryden, for the last ten years of his life, was much acquainted
with Addison, and drank with him more than he ever used to do, probably
so far as to hasten his end," being commonly "an extreme sober man." Pope
tell us that, in his twelfth year, he "saw Dryden," perhaps at Will's,
perhaps in the street, as Scott did Burns. Dryden himself visited Milton
now and then, and was intimate with Davenant, who could tell him of
Fletcher and Jonson from personal recollection. Thus he stands between
the age before and that which followed him, giving a hand to each. His
father was a country clergyman, of Puritan leanings, a younger son of an
ancient county family. The Puritanism is thought to have come in with the
poet's great-grandfather, who made in his will the somewhat singular
statement that he was "assured by the Holy Ghost that he was elect of
God." It would appear from this that Dryden's self-confidence was an
inheritance. The solid quality of his mind showed itself early. He
himself tells us that he had read Polybius "in English, with the pleasure
of a boy, before he was ten years of age, and yet even then _had some
dark notions of the prudence with which he conducted his design_."[8] The
concluding words are very characteristic, even if Dryden, as men commonly
do, interpreted his boyish turn of mind by later self-knowledge. We thus