had no chance of sharing the wealth of his principal relations, which might otherwise have been received as an atonement for the guilty confiscations by which it was procured.  He had quarrelled with them, or they with him; his present possession was a narrow independence; and his prospects were founded upon literary success, always precarious, and then connected with circumstances of personal abasement, which rendered it almost disreputable.  A noble family might be allowed to regret, that one of their members was chiefly to rely for the maintenance of her husband, her family, and herself, upon the fees of dedications, and occasional pieces of poetry, and the uncertain profits of the theatre.

Yet, as Dryden’s manners were amiable, his reputation high, and his moral character unexceptionable the Earl of Berkshire was probably soon reconciled to the match; and Dryden seems to have resided with his father-in-law for some time, since it is from the Earl’s seat of Charlton, in Wiltshire, that he dates the introduction to the “Annus Mirabilis,” published in the end of 1667.[17]

So honourable a connection might have been expected to have advanced our author’s prospects in a degree beyond what he experienced; but his father-in-law was poor, considering his rank, and had a large family, so that the portion of Lady Elizabeth was inconsiderable.  Nor was her want of fortune supplied by patronage, or family influence.  Dryden’s preferment, as poet laureate, was due to, and probably obtained by, his literary character; nor did he ever receive any boon suitable to his rank, as son-in-law to an earl.  But, what was worst of all, the parties did not find mutual happiness in the engagement they had formed.  It is difficult for a woman of a violent temper and weak intellects, and such the lady seems to have been, to endure the apparently causeless fluctuation of spirits incident to one doomed to labour incessantly in the feverish exercise of the imagination.  Unintentional neglect, and the inevitable relaxation, or rather sinking of spirit, which follows violent mental exertion, are easily misconstrued into capricious rudeness, or intentional offence; and life is embittered by mutual accusation, not the less intolerable because reciprocally just.  The wife of one who is to gain his livelihood by poetry, or by any labour (if any there be) equally exhausting, must either have taste enough to relish her husband’s performances, or good-nature sufficient to pardon his infirmities.  It was Dryden’s misfortune, that Lady Elizabeth had neither the one nor the other; and I dismiss the disagreeable subject by observing, that on no one occasion, when a sarcasm against matrimony could be introduced, has our author failed to season it with such bitterness as spoke an inward consciousness of domestic misery.[18]