[27] Shadwell, in the Medal of John Bayes,

  “At Cambridge Brat your scurrilous vein began,
  Where saucily you traduced a nobleman;
  Who for that crime rebuked you on the head,
  And you had been expelled, had you not fled.”

[28] He received this degree by dispensation from the Archbishop of Canterbury.

[29] Prologue to the University of Oxford.

[30] Jonathan Dryden, elected a scholar from Westminster into Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1656, of which he became fellow in 1662, was author of some verses in the Cambridge Collections in 1661, on the death of the Duke of Gloucester, and the marriage of the Princess of Orange; and in 1662, on the marriage of Charles II., which have been imputed to our author.  An order, quoted by Mr. Malone, for abatement of the commencement-money paid at taking the Bachelor’s degree, on account of poverty, applies to Jonathan, not to John Dryden.—­MALONE, vol. i. p.17, note.

[31] [This letter will be found in its proper place.  It is the sole personal utterance in prose, and almost the only biographical fact of importance that we have for the first thirty years of Dryden’s life.  Upon it, an entirely baseless romance has been built of disappointed love and parental unkindness.  There is absolutely no evidence that Dryden ever seriously pretended to his cousin’s hand, or that he was rejected, or that this rejection was due to his uncle’s influence.—­ED.]

[32] Elegy on Lady Haddington, in Corbet’s Poems, p. 121.  Gilchrist’s edition.

[33] Sir John Pickering, father of Sir Gilbert, married Susan, the sister of Erasmus Dryden, the poet’s father.  But Mary Pickering, the poet’s mother, was niece to Sir John Pickering; and thus his son Sir Gilbert was her cousin-german also.

[34] In one lampoon, he is called “fiery Pickering.”  Walker, in his “Sufferings of the Clergy,” prints Jeremiah Stevens’ account of the Northamptonshire committee of sequestration in which the character of Pickering, one of the members of that oppressive body, is thus drawn:—­ “Sir G——­ P——­ had an uncle, whose ears were cropt for a libel on Archbishop Whitgift; was first a presbyterian, then an independent, then a Brownist, and afterwards an anabaptist.  He was a most furious, fiery, implacable man; was the principal agent in casting out most of the learned clergy; a great oppressor of the country; got a good manor for his booty of the E. of R. and a considerable purse of gold by a plunder at Lynn in Norfolk.”  He is thus characterized by an angry limb of the commonwealth, whose republican spirit was incensed by Cromwell creating a peerage:—­“Sir Gilbert Pickering, knight of the old stamp, and of considerable revenue in Northamptonshire; one of the Long Parliament, and a great stickler in the change of the government from kingly to that of a commonwealth;—­helped to make those laws of treason against kingship; has also changed with all changes that have been since.