Lady Elizabeth Dryden’s temper had long disturbed her husband’s domestic happiness.  “His invectives,” says Mr. Malone, “against the married state are frequent and bitter, and were continued to the latest period of his life;” and he adds, from most respectable authority, that the family of the poet held no intimacy with his lady, confining their intercourse to mere visits of ceremony.[73] A similar alienation seems to have taken place between her and her own relations, Sir Robert Howard, perhaps, being excepted; for her brother, the Honourable Edward Howard, talks of Virgil, as a thing he had learned merely by common report.[74] Her wayward disposition was, however, the effect of a disordered imagination which, shortly after Dryden’s death, degenerated into absolute insanity, in which state she remained until her death in summer 1714, probably, says Mr. Malone, in the seventy-ninth year of her life.

Dryden’s three sons, says the inscription by Mrs. Creed, were ingenious and accomplished gentlemen.  Charles, the eldest, and favourite son of the poet, was born at Charlton, Wiltshire, in 1666.  He received a classical education under Dr. Busby, his father’s preceptor, and was chosen King’s Scholar in 1680.  Being elected to Trinity College in Cambridge, he was admitted a member in 1683.  It would have been difficult to conceive that the son of Dryden should not have attempted poetry; but though Charles Dryden escaped the fate of Icarus, he was very, very far from emulating his father’s soaring flight.  Mr. Malone has furnished a list of his compositions in Latin and English.[75] About 1692, he went to Italy, and through the interest of Cardinal Howard, to whom he was related by the mother’s side, he became Chamberlain of the Household; not, as Corinna pretends, “to that remarkably fine gentleman, Pope Clement XI.,” but to Pope Innocent XII.  His way to this preferment was smoothed by a pedigree drawn up in Latin by his father, of the families of Dryden and Howard, which is said to have been deposited in the Vatican.  Dryden, whose turn for judicial astrology we have noticed, had calculated the nativity of his son Charles; and it would seem that a part of his predictions were fortuitously fulfilled.  Charles, however, having suffered, while at Rome, by a fall, and his health, in consequence, being much injured, his father prognosticated he would begin to recover in the month of September 1697.  The issue did no great credit to the prediction; for young Dryden returned to England in 1698 in the same indifferent state of health, as is obvious from the anxious solicitude with which his father always mentions Charles in his correspondence.  Upon the poet’s death, Charles, we have seen, administered to his effects on 10th June 1700, Lady Elizabeth, his mother, renouncing the succession.  In the next year, Granville conferred on him the profits arising from the author’s night of an alteration of Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice;” and his liberality to the son of