He turned eighteen the year Charles I lost his head. His first job was in Cromwell’s cabinet. When monarchy swung back in, Charles II made him the first Poet Laureate. William and Mary, when they seized the throne, stripped him of his role. Initially buried in a small Soho churchyard, he was disinterred within days and laid beside Chaucer in Westminster Abbey.
John Dryden (1631–1700) may have had the most turbulent career in English letters. Productivity alone seems to have balanced him: stacks upon stacks of plays, occasional poems, political and religious allegories, elegies, histories, and odes that have inspired composers since Handel.
It is astounding to learn that only sixty-two letters, now collected with wonderfully thorough notes by Stephen Bernard and John McTague, survive from such a prolific and public hand. But the molehill is a mountain. Anyone remotely interested in this era will want to know how England’s greatest living poet, in the last year of his life, entertained a young female cousin, the addressee of one letter:
My Journey to London, was yet more unpleasant than my abode at Tichmarsh: for the Coach was Crowded up with an Old woman, fatter than any of my Hostesses on the Rode. I must confess she was for the most part Silent, unless it were, that sometimes her backside talkd; & that discourse was not over savoury to the Nose. Her weight made the horses travel very heavily; but to give them a breathing time, she
