Dryden was, perhaps, the last man of learning that believed in astrology; though an eminent English author, now living, and celebrated for the variety of his acquirements, has been known to procure the casting of horoscopes, and to consult a noted ‘astrologer,’ who gives opinions for a small sum.  The coincidences of prophecy are not more remarkable than those of star-telling; and Dryden and the author I have referred to were probably both captivated into belief by some fatuitous realization of their horoscopic predictions.  Nor can we altogether blame their credulity, when we see biology, table-turning, rapping, and all the family of imposture, taken up seriously in our own time.

On the birth of his son Charles, Dryden immediately cast his horoscope.  The following account of Dryden’s paternal solicitude for his son, and its result, may be taken as embellished, if not apocryphal.  Evil hour, indeed—­Jupiter, Venus, and the Sun were all ‘under the earth;’ Mars and Saturn were in square:  eight, or a multiple of it, would be fatal to the child—­the square foretold it.  In his eighth, his twenty-fourth, or his thirty-second year, he was certain to die, though he might possibly linger on to the age of thirty-four.  The stars did all they could to keep up their reputation.  When the boy was eight years old he nearly lost his life by being buried under a heap of stones out of an old wall, knocked down by a stag and hounds in a hunt.  But the stars were not to be beaten, and though the child recovered, went in for the game a second time in his twenty-third year, when he fell, in a fit of giddiness, from a tower, and, to use Lady Elsabeth’s words, was ‘mash’d to a mummy.’  Still the battle was not over, and the mummy returned in due course to its human form, though considerably disfigured.  Mars and Saturn were naturally disgusted at his recovery, and resolved to finish the disobedient youth.  As we have seen, he in vain sought his fate at the hand of Jeffreys; but we must conclude that the offended constellations took Neptune in partnership, for in due course the youth met with a watery grave.

After abandoning the drama, Congreve appears to have come out in the light of an independent gentleman.  He was already sufficiently introduced into literary society; Pope, Steele, Swift, and Addison were not only his friends but his admirers, and we can well believe that their admiration was considerable, when we find the one dedicating his ‘Miscellany,’ the other his translation of the ‘Iliad,’ to a man who was qualified neither by rank nor fortune to play Maecenas.