Dryden's three sons, says the inscription by Mrs. Creed, were ingenious and accomplished gentlemen. Charles, the eldest, and favourite son of the poet, was born at Charlton, Wiltshire, in 1666. He received a classical education under Dr. Busby, his father's preceptor, and was chosen King's Scholar in 1680. Being elected to Trinity College in Cambridge, he was admitted a member in 1683. It would have been difficult to conceive that the son of Dryden should not have attempted poetry; but though Charles Dryden escaped the fate of Icarus, he was very, very far from emulating his father's soaring flight. Mr. Malone has furnished a list of his compositions in Latin and English.[75] About 1692, he went to Italy, and through the interest of Cardinal Howard, to whom he was related by the mother's side, he became Chamberlain of the Household; not, as Corinna pretends, "to that _remarkably fine gentleman_, Pope Clement XI.," but to Pope Innocent XII. His way to this preferment was smoothed by a pedigree drawn up in Latin by his father, of the families of Dryden and Howard, which is said to have been deposited in the Vatican. Dryden, whose turn for judicial astrology we have noticed, had calculated the nativity of his son Charles; and it would seem that a part of his predictions were fortuitously fulfilled. Charles, however, having suffered, while at Rome, by a fall, and his health, in consequence, being much injured, his father prognosticated he would begin to recover in the month of September 1697. The issue did no great credit to the prediction; for young Dryden returned to England in 1698 in the same indifferent state of health, as is obvious from the anxious solicitude with which his father always mentions Charles in his correspondence. Upon the poet's death, Charles, we have seen, administered to his effects on 10th June 1700, Lady Elizabeth, his mother, renouncing the succession. In the next year, Granville conferred on him the profits arising from the author's night of an alteration of Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice;" and his liberality to the son of one great bard may be admitted to balance his presumption in manufacturing a new drama out of the labours of another.[76] Upon the 20th August 1704, Charles Dryden was drowned, in an attempt to swim across the Thames, at Datchet, near Windsor. I have degraded into the Appendix, the romantic narrative of Corinna, concerning his father's prediction, already mentioned. It contains, like her account of the funeral of the poet, much positive falsehood, and gross improbability, with some slight scantling of foundation in fact.