“All eyes you draw, and with the eyes, the heart: Of your own pomp yourself the greatest part: Next to the sacred temple you are led, Where waits a crown for your more sacred head: The grateful choir their harmony employ, Not to make greater, but more solemn joy. Wrapt soft and warm your name is sent on high, As flames do on the waves of incense fly: Music herself is lost, in vain she brings Her choicest notes to praise the best of kings; Her melting strains in you a tomb have found, And lie like bees in their own sweetness drown’d.” No wonder that he came ultimately to have the place of Poet-laureate, and thereafter an extra £100 a year with it! No wonder that, with all his cleverness--and it was prodigious--he never did, and never could, win an unsullied reputation for sterling integrity and straightforward purpose. I know that his latest biographer and advocate, Mr. Saintsbury, whose work you will be very apt to encounter in the little series edited by John Morley, sees poems like those I have cited with other eyes, and fashions out of them an agreeable poetic consistency very honorable to Dryden; but I cannot twist myself so as to view the matter in his way. I think rather of a conscienceless thrifty newspaper, setting forth the average every-day drift of opinion, with a good deal more than every-day skill. Meantime John Dryden has married, and has married the daughter of an earl; of just how this came about we have not very full record; but there were a great many who wondered why she should marry him; and a good many more, as it appeared, who persisted in wondering why he should marry her. Such wonderments of wondering people overtake a good many matches. It is quite certain that it was not a marriage which went to make a domestic man of him; and I think you will search vainly through his poems for any indication of those home instincts which, like the “melting strains” he flung about King Charles, “Lie like bees in their own sweetness drown’d.” The only positive worldly good which seemed to come of this marriage was an occasional home at Charlton, in Wiltshire--an estate of the Earl of Berkshire, his father-in-law--where Dryden wrote, shortly after his marriage, his _Annus Mirabilis_, in which he gave to all the notable events of the year 1666 a fillip with his pen; and the odd conceits that lie in a single one of his stanzas keep yet alive a story of the capture by the British of a fleet of Dutch India ships:-- “Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball, And now their odors armed against them fly; Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall, And some by aromatic splinters die.”