The death of a man like Dryden, especially in narrow and neglected circumstances, is usually an alarum-bell to the public.  Unavailing and mutual reproaches, for unthankful and pitiless negligence, waste themselves in newspaper paragraphs, elegies, and funeral processions; the debt to genius is then deemed discharged, and a new account of neglect and commemoration is opened between the public and the next who rises to supply his room.  It was thus with Dryden:  His family were preparing to bury him with the decency becoming their limited circumstances, when Charles Montague, Lord Jefferies, and other men of quality, made a subscription for a public funeral.  The body of the poet was then removed to the Physicians’ Hall, where it was embalmed, and lay in state till the 13th day of May, twelve days after the decease.  On that day, the celebrated Dr. Garth pronounced a Latin oration over the remains of his departed friend; which were then, with considerable state, preceded by a band of music, and attended by a numerous procession of carriages, transported to Westminster Abbey, and deposited between the graves of Chaucer and Cowley.

The malice of Dryden’s contemporaries, which he had experienced through life, attempted to turn into burlesque these funeral honours.  Farquhar, the comic dramatist, wrote a letter containing a ludicrous account of the funeral;[51] in which, as Mr. Malone most justly remarks, he only sought to amuse his fair correspondent by an assemblage of ludicrous and antithetical expressions and ideas, which, when accurately examined, express little more than the bustle and confusion which attends every funeral procession of uncommon splendour.  Upon this ground-work, Mrs. Thomas (the Corinna of Pope and Cromwell) raised, at the distance of thirty years, the marvellous structure of fable, which has been copied by all Dryden’s biographers, till the industry of Mr. Malone has sent it, with other figments of the same lady, to “the grave of all the Capulets."[52] She appears to have been something assisted by a burlesque account of the funeral, imputed by Mr. Malone to Tom Brown, who certainly continued to insult Dryden’s memory whenever an opportunity offered.[53] Indeed, Mrs. Thomas herself quotes this last respectable authority.  It must be a well-conducted and uncommon public ceremony, where the philosopher can find nothing to condemn, nor the satirist to ridicule; yet, to our imagination, what can be more striking, than the procession of talent and rank, which escorted the remains of DRYDEN to the tomb of CHAUCER!

The private character of the individual, his personal appearance, and rank in society, are the circumstances which generally interest the public most immediately upon his decease.