“1658.

“My LORD,—­I received yours, though not without great trouble, but am not guilty of any thing you lay to my charge, nor will I ever alter from the expressions I have formerly made, therefore I hope you will not be so unjust as to beleive all that the world sayes of mee, but rather credit my protestation of never having named you to my friends, being allwayes carefull of that for my own sake as well as yours; and therefore let it not be in the power of any, nor of your own inclinations, to make mee less,

Your very humble Servant.

“If you will meet mee in the Old Exchange, about six a clock, I will justify my selfe.”—­Letters of Philip, second Earl of Chesterfield, 1829, p. 95.  This was the same Earl of Chesterfield to whom Dryden dedicated the Georgics thirty years later.

As Dryden’s detractors have been nearly as anxious to blacken his wife’s character as his own, they have seized on this letter to confirm the reckless and random assertions of contemporary libellers, that her reputation was questionable.  The matter may be left to readers to decide,—­I can see nothing in the phrases necessarily implying any improper intimacy.

Perhaps it is not superfluous to observe that Scott has not shown his accustomed judgment and knowledge of the seventeenth century in his remark about the Howards and the tobacconists.  The separation between classes, as such, was indeed sharp; but it was probably rather more than less usual then than now for scions of noble and gentle families to go into retail trade.  It may be added that the evidence of a quarrel between Dryden and his own family is far from strong, and that one of the causes assigned by Scott for that quarrel, the change of spelling, is very dubious as a matter of fact.  It has been seen that “Driden” appears in the licence, and it is not certain that the poet invented the y, or first used it.

Very shortly after the marriage occurs the first mention of Dryden of a personal kind.  Pepys writes, under date February 3d, 1664:  “In Covent Garden to-night at the great coffee-house, where Dryden the poet I knew at Cambridge and all the wits of the town.”—­ED.]

[17] [To give exact dates, the preface to Sir R. Howard is dated November 10th, 1666.  The poem appeared immediately afterwards.  Pepys bought it on the 2d of February, and pronounced it “a very good poem.”  Some other dates and facts of a more precise kind than those in the text may be given here.  Dryden left London in the summer of 1665, either from dread of the plague, or because the playhouses were shut.  The interval of eighteen months seems to have been wholly spent at Charlton, and Charles Dryden, his eldest son, was born during this time, though the precise date is not known.  Charlton is near Malmesbury in Wiltshire, and as Dryden afterwards speaks of himself as possessed of some property in that county, it has been reasonably conjectured that