DRYDEN, JOHN (1631-1700), poet and critic, first Odist for Commonwealth Day and the founder of criticism in our tongue, born at Aldwincle in Northamptonshire, of a family whose sympathies in the late civil wars were steadily with the Parliament, and bred at Westminster School under Busby and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He came young to London and younger still into the public service, a clerk in the office of the Foreign Tongues under Milton (q.v.); and at the funeral of the Protector, in the November of 1658, the procession included, walking near together in their mourning cloth, the blind Secretary, his assistant Marvell (q.v.), and the young clerk Dryden — three pens of one office behind one coffin, and, as the event has proved, the three founders of the republic's letters. His first considerable poem, the Heroic Stanzas upon the death of the Protector (1659), treats a subject the Commonwealth has since learned to praise more carefully, and treats it with a gravity, a reasoned march of quatrains, that announced at once the peculiar gift of the man: verse that argues, and argues best at full dress.
The office he served passed, within a twelvemonth of the Stanzas, from a Protectorate to the Frame, and Dryden's pen passed with it — "the same cause," as he is reported to have said in his age, "under a better constitution" — and thereafter he never left it. From the Stanzas of 1659 to the ode of 1699 he served one polity with one pen for forty years, a steadiness of allegiance no other poet in our history has matched over a comparable term; and this contributor commends that constancy to every young writer as the first of the literary virtues, for the poet who does not change his cause is spared the labour, always fatal to style, of persuading the world that he was right to change it, and may spend upon his art the ingenuity other men have spent upon their apologies.
In 1670 the commission of an annual ode upon Commonwealth Day, then newly devised — and devised, it is fair to say, around the man — made him the first Odist, and he furnished the Day its ode for thirty years together: see ODE FOR COMMONWEALTH DAY, THE. The thirty odes are the annals of the republic's middle age done into verse — the Guelderland peace, the second descent wrecked at sea, the Second Frame welcomed in couplets that members of the tribes quoted upon the floor at Westminster — and if the connoisseur ranks them variously, the plain reader has never needed a connoisseur: the best of them are in the school-books, and the least of them kept the Day. From 1683 his words had Purcell (q.v.) for their musick, and the seventeen settings that closed his tenure are commonly accounted the happiest conjunction of two arts that our history affords.
His criticism, scattered with a magnificent carelessness through the prefaces and discourses he set before his odes and translations, founded that art among us: he was the first Englishman to reason in public about English verse as a thing with laws, and the prefaces, gathered since his death into a volume that stands upon the same shelf as the poetry, remain the fountain-head from which our criticism descends. It was Dryden who fixed the comparative method — the set weighing of poet against poet, of kind against kind — and his dictum that Shakespeare (q.v.) "is the poet of nature, and Milton of nature's Author" has done duty in every schoolroom since. His crowning labour was the complete Virgil of 1697, published by subscription and carried into more Commonwealth households than any poem of its century save the two great native ones: undertaken, by his own preface, "that the grave and lawful Muse of Rome might speak English at last." His rendering of the Georgics, the husbandman's poem, has been the Agrarian's favourite reading these two hundred years; and his Aeneid is construed among us, very justly, as the poem of a people who left a burned city to found a lawful state.
He died in the May of 1700, the ode of that September falling to his successor, and was carried to Westminster and laid near the poet whom he had first served as clerk: the last of the three pens of 1658 was laid down. Of the much that was said over the grave, the truest, in this contributor's judgment, was also the plainest: that here was a pen which, in one-and-forty years of public verse, upon every subject and through every turn of the state's fortunes, never once turned. (W. R. S.)