sorts.”  The expression called forth the animated defence of Granville, Lord Lansdowne, our author’s noble friend.  “All who knew him,” said Lansdowne, “can testify this was not his character.  He was so much a stranger to immodesty, that modesty in too great a degree was his failing:  he hurt his fortune by it, he complained of it, and never could overcome it.  He was,” adds he, “esteemed, courted, and admired, by all the great men of the age in which he lived, who would certainly not have received into friendship a monster abandoned to all sorts of vice and impurity.  His writings will do immortal honour to his name and country, and his poems last as long, if I may have leave to say it, as the Bishop’s sermons, supposing them to be equally excellent in their kind."[59]

The Bishop’s youngest son, Thomas Burnet, in replying to Lord Lansdowne, explained his father’s last expressions as limited to Dryden’s plays, and showed, by doing so, that there was no foundation for fixing this gross and dubious charge upon his private moral character.

Dryden’s conduct as a father, husband, and master of a family, seems to have been affectionate, faithful, and, so far as his circumstances admitted, liberal and benevolent.  The whole tenor of his correspondence bears witness to his paternal feelings; and even when he was obliged to have recourse to Tonson’s immediate assistance to pay for the presents he sent them, his affection vented itself in that manner.  As a husband, if Lady Elizabeth’s peculiarities of temper precluded the idea of a warm attachment, he is not upbraided with neglect or infidelity by any of his thousand assailants.  As a landlord, Mr. Malone has informed us, on the authority of Lady Dryden, that “his little estate at Blakesley is at this day occupied by one Harriots, grandson of the tenant who held it in Dryden’s time; and he relates, that his grandfather was used to take great pleasure in talking of our poet.  He was, he said, the easiest and the kindest landlord in the world, and never raised the rent during the whole time he possessed the estate.”

Some circumstances, however, may seem to degrade so amiable a private, so sublime a poetical character.  The licence of his comedy, as we have seen, had for it only the apology of universal example, and must be lamented, though not excused.  Let us, however, remember, that if in the hey-day of the merry monarch’s reign, Dryden ventured to maintain, that, the prime end of poetry being pleasure, the muses ought not to be fettered by the chains of strict decorum; yet in his more advanced and sober mood, he evinced sincere repentance for his trespass, by patient and unresisting submission to the coarse and rigorous chastisement of Collier.  If it is alleged, that, in the fury of his loyal satire, he was not always solicitous concerning its justice, let us make allowance for the prejudice of party, and consider at what advantage, after the laps of more than a century, and through