of some of his works, so it will not permit us to chronicle with precision the events of the last seven or eight years of his life. We must ask our readers to picture to themselves John Dryden as pre-eminently the first poet and greatest literary man of his era, spending his morning at his house in Gerard Street editing miscellanies for Tonson, translating Virgil, paraphrasing Chaucer and Bocaccio; and spending his afternoon at his club, where his chair was reserved for him by the fireside in winter, in summer in the balcony, and where, to a faithful band of admirers and disciples, he laid down the law on all questions of contemporaneous criticism. We should think of him in all the relations of life: as a husband, not as loving as he should have been, making long sojourns in the country while his wife was in town, and telling Lady Elizabeth, when she wished herself a book that she might enjoy more of his company, that he would prefer her being an almanack, that he might change her once a year. As a father, we find him writing to Busby about his boys at Westminster, remonstrating most respectfully with the flogging head-master about the treatment which one of the lads had received, writing a preface to the comedy of his son John, and corresponding most affectionately with them all.
His friends consisted of those persons of rank and fortune at whose country seats he translated an "Æneid," or wrote a preface, and of those literary associates and satellites who gathered round him at the Club. Here at Will's Coffee-house it was, that if he gave a rising young man a pinch from his snuff-box, the patronized aspirant was deemed to have taken a degree in literature and wit. Here it was that Southerne and Congreve spoke to him with confidence and familiarity, while Sir Henry Shere, Moyle, Motteaux, Walsh and Dennis did honour to him with a more distant deference. It was here that
