But, independently of occasional exertions, our author, now retired from the stage, had bent his thoughts upon one great literary task, the translation of Virgil. This weighty and important undertaking was probably suggested by the experience of Tonson, the success of whose "Miscellanies" had taught him the value placed by the public on Dryden's translations from the classics. From hints thrown out by contemporary scheme was meditated, even before 1964; but in that year the poet, in a letter to Dennis, speaks of it as under his immediate contemplation. The names of Virgil and Dryden were talismans powerful to arrest the eyes of all that were literary in England, upon the progress of the work. Mr. Malone has recorded the following particulars concerning it, with pious enthusiasm. "Dr. Johnson has justly remarked, that the nation seemed to consider its honour interested in the event. Mr. Gilbert Dolben gave him the various editions of his author: Dr. Knightly Chetwood furnished him with the life of Virgil, and the Preface to the Pastorals; and Addison supplied the arguments of the several books, and an Essay on the Georgics. The first lines of this great poet which he translated, he wrote with a diamond on a pane of glass in one of the windows of Chesterton House, in Huntingdonshire, the residence of his kinsman and namesake, John Driden, Esq.[10] The version of the first Georgic, and a great part of the last Aeneid, was made at Denham Court, in Buckinghamshire, the seat of Sir William Bowyer, Baronet; and the seventh Æneid was translated at Burleigh, the noble mansion of the Earl of Exeter. These circumstances, which must be acknowledged to be of no great importance, I yet have thought it proper to record, because they will for ever endear those places to the votaries of the Muses, and add to them a kind of celebrity, which neither the beauties of nature, nor the exertions of art, can bestow."