We have so often stopped in our narrative of Dryden’s life, to notice the respectability of his general society, that little need here be said on the subject.  Although no enemy to conviviality, he is pronounced by Pope to have been regular in his hours in comparison with Addison, who otherwise lived the same coffee-house course of life.  He has himself told us, that he was “saturnine and reserved, and not one of those who endeavour to entertain company by lively sallies of merriment and wit;” and an adversary has put into his mouth this couplet—­

  “Nor wine nor love could ever see me gay;
  To writing bred, I knew not what to say.”

Dryden’s Satire to his Muse.

But the admission of the author, and the censure of the satirist, must be received with some limitation.  Dryden was thirty years old before he was freed from the fetters of puritanism; and if the habits of lively expression in society are not acquired before that age, they are seldom gained afterward.  But this applies only to the deficiency of repartee, in the sharp encounter of wit which was fashionable at the court of Charles, and cannot be understood to exclude Dryden’s possessing the more solid qualities of agreeable conversation, arising from a memory profoundly stocked with knowledge, and a fancy which supplied modes of illustration faster than the author could use them.[64] Some few sayings of Dryden have been, however, preserved; which, if not witty, are at least jocose.  He is said to have been the original author of the repartee to the Duke of Buckingham, who, in bowling, offered to lay “his soul to a turnip,” or something still more vile.  “Give me the odds,” said Dryden, “and I take the bet.”  When his wife wished to be a book, that she might enjoy more of his company, “Be an almanac then, my dear,” said the poet, “that I may change you once a year."[65] Another time, a friend expressing his astonishment that even D’Urfey could write such stuff as a play they had just witnessed, “Ah, sir,” replied Dryden, “you do not know my friend Tom so well as I do; I’ll answer for him, he can write worse yet.”  None of these anecdotes intimate great brilliancy of repartee; but that Dryden, possessed of such a fund of imagination, and acquired learning, should be dull in conversation, is impossible.  He is known frequently to have regaled his friends, by communicating to them a part of his labours; but his poetry suffered by his recitation.  He read his productions very ill;[66] owing, perhaps, to the modest reserve of his temper, which prevented his showing an animation in which he feared his audience might not participate.  The same circumstance may have repressed the liveliness of his conversation.  I know not, however, whether we are, with Mr. Malone, to impute to diffidence his general habit of consulting his literary friends upon his poems, before they became public, since it might as well arise from a wish to anticipate and soften criticism.[67]