Covent Garden, with the full success which the combined talents of the poet and the musician seemed to insure.[28] Indeed, although the music was at first less successful, the poetry received, even in the author’s time, all the applause which its unrivalled excellence demanded.  “I am glad to hear from all hands,” says Dryden, in a letter to Tonson, “that my Ode is esteemed the best of all my poetry, by all the town.  I thought so myself when I writ it; but, being old, I mistrusted my own judgment.”  Mr. Malone has preserved a tradition, that the father of Lord Chief-Justice Marlay, then a Templar, and frequenter of Will’s coffeehouse, took an opportunity to pay his court to Dryden, on the publication of “Alexander’s Feast;” and, happening to sit next him, congratulated him on having produced the finest and noblest Ode that had ever been written in any language.  “You are right, young gentleman (replied Dryden), a nobler Ode never was produced, nor ever will.”  This singularly strong expression cannot be placed to the score of vanity.  It was an inward consciousness of merit, which burst forth, probably almost involuntarily, and I fear must be admitted as prophetic.

The preparation of a new edition of the Virgil, which appeared in 1698, occupied nine days only, after which Dryden began seriously to consider to what he should next address his pen.  The state of his circumstances rendered constant literary labour indispensable to the support of his family, although the exertion, and particularly the confinement, occasioned by his studies, considerably impaired his health.  His son Charles had met with an accident at Rome, which was attended with a train of consequences perilous to his health; and Dryden, anxious to recall him to Britain, was obliged to make extraordinary exertions to provide against this additional expense.  “If it please God,” he writes to Tonson, “that I must die of over-study, I cannot spend my life better than in preserving his.”  It is affecting to read such a passage in the life of such a man; yet the necessities of the poet, like the afflictions of the virtuous, smooth the road to immortality.  While Milton and Dryden were favoured by the rulers of the day, they were involved in the religious and political controversies which raged around them; it is to hours of seclusion, neglect, and even penury, that we owe the Paradise Lost, the Virgil, and the Fables.

Among other projects, Dryden seems to have had thoughts of altering and revising a tragedy called the “Conquest of China by the Tartars,” written by his ancient friend and brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard.  The unkindness which had arisen between them upon the subject of blank verse and rhyme, seems to have long since passed away; and we observe, with pleasure, that Dryden, in the course of the pecuniary transactions about Virgil, reckons upon the assistance of Sir Robert Howard, and consults his taste also in the revisal of the version.[29] But Dryden never altered the “Conquest of China,” being first interrupted by the necessity of revising Virgil, and afterwards, perhaps, by a sort of quarrel which took place between him and the players, of whom he speaks most resentfully in his “Epistle to Granville,” upon his tragedy of “Heroic Love,” acted in the beginning of 1698.[30]