to my Lady and Mr. Charles, that if they would give him leave to bury Mr. Dryden, he would inter him with a private gentleman's funeral, and afterwards bestow five hundred pounds on a monument in the Abbey; which, as they had no reason to refuse, they accepted. On the Saturday following the company came; the corpse was put into a velvet hearse, and eighteen mourning coaches filled with company attending. When, just before they began to move, Lord Jefferies, with some of his rakish companions, coming by, in wine, asked whose funeral? And being told, 'What!' cries he, shall Dryden, the greatest honour and orna'ment of the nation, be buried after this private 'manner? No, Gentlemen! let all that loved Mr. 'Dryden, and honour his memory, alight, and join with me in gaining my Lady's consent, to let me have the honour of his interment, which shall be ' after another manner than this; and I will bestow 'a thousand pounds on a monument in the Abbey for him. The gentlemen in the coaches, not knowing of the Bishop of Rochester's favour, nor of Lord Halifax's generous design, (these two

have assisted the Duke of Buckingham in writing THE REHEARSAL.

He was only Mr. Montague, in May, 1700. On the 13th of December in that year, he was created Baron Halifax; and in 1714 obtained an Earldom.

The body was first carried from his own house for interment, on Friday morning; as appears from the order of the College of Physicians, which will be inserted in its proper place.

9

noble spirits having, out of respect to the family, enjoined Lady Elzabeth and her son to keep their favour concealed to the world, and let it pass for her own expence, &c.) readily came out of the coaches, and attended Lord Jefferies up to the lady's bed-side, who was then sick. He repeated the purport of what he had before said; but she absolutely refusing, he fell on his knees, vowing never to rise till his request was granted. The rest of the company, by his desire, kneeled also. She being naturally of a timorous disposition, and then under a sudden surprise, fainted away. As soon as she recovered her speech, she cried, No, No.

Enough, gentlemen,' (replied he, rising briskly ;) my Lady is very good; she says-Go, Go. She repeated her former words with all her strength, but alas, in vain! her feeble voice was lost in their acclamations of joy; and Lord Jefferies ordered the hearseman to carry the corpse to Russell's, an undertaker in Cheapside, and leave it there, till he sent orders for the embalment, which, he added, should be after the royal manner. His directions were obeyed; the company dispersed; and Lady Elzabeth and Mr. Charles remained inconsolable.

This lively lady has already said, that the company filled eighteen mourning coaches: so we have here seventytwo persons, kneeling, in a bedchamber, the dimensions of which were probably about eighteen feet by fourteen.

* Here we have a transcript from CLELIA, or PHARAMOND, or some other of the Romances, which Corinna had studied.

"Next morning Mr. Charles waited on Lord Halifax, &c. to excuse his mother and self, by relating the real truth: but neither his Lordship, nor the Bishop, would admit of any plea; especially the latter, who had the Abbey lighted, the ground opened, the Choir attending, an Anthem ready set, and himself waiting for some hours, without any corpse to bury. Russell, after three days expectance of orders for embalment,' without receiving any, waits on Lord Jefferies; who, pretending ignorance of the matter, turned it off with an ill-natured jest, saying- Those who observed the orders of a drunken frolick, deserved no better; that he remembered nothing at all of it, and he might do what he pleased with the corpse.' On this, Mr. Russell waits on Lady Elzabeth and Mr. Dryden; but alas, it was not in their power to answer. The season was very hot; the deceased had lived high and fast; and being corpulent, and abounding with gross humours, grew very offensive. The Undertaker, in short, threatened to bring home the corpse, and set it before their door. It cannot be easily imagined, what grief, shame, and confusion seized this unhappy family. They begged a day's

According to this account, Russell waited for orders concerning the embalment till Tuesday the 7th of May; but from a letter which will be found in a subsequent page, it appears, that the body had been embalmed before Monday; probably on Friday evening, or Saturday morning.

* On the contrary, he was fond of plain things. See his Letters to Mrs. Stewart.

respite, which was granted. Mr. Charles wrote a very handsome letter to Lord Jefferies, who returned it with this cool answer- He knew nothing of the matter, and would be troubled no more about it. He then addressed the Lord Halifax and Bishop of Rochester, who were both too justly, though unhappily, incensed, to do any thing in it. In this extreme distress, Dr. Garth, a man who entirely loved Mr. Dryden, and was withal a man of generosity and great humanity, sends for the corpse to the College of Physicians, in Warwick-Lane, and proposed a funeral by subscription, to which himself set a most noble example: Mr. Wycherley, and several others, among whom must not be forgotten Henry Cromwell, Esq. Captain Gibbons, and Mr. Christopher Metcalfe, Mr. Dryden's apothecary and intimate friend, (since a Collegiate physician,) who with many others contributed most largely to the subscription; and at last, a day, about three weeks' after his decease, was appointed for the interment at the Abbey.

"Dr. Garth pronounced a fine Latin oration over the corpse at the College; but the audience being numerous, and the room large, it was requisite the orator should be elevated, that he might be heard but as it unluckily happened, there was

* Unluckily for this narrative, the corpse was carried to the College on Friday the third, instead of Thursday the eighth, of May, as here stated.

Thirteen days only.

nothing at hand but an old beer-barrel, which the Doctor with much good-nature mounted; and in the midst of his oration, beating time to the accent with his foot, the head broke in, and his feet sunk to the bottom; which occasioned the malicious report of his enemies, that he was turned a tubpreacher. However, he finished the oration with a superiour grace and genius, to the loud acclamations of mirth, which inspired the mixed or rather mob-auditors.

"The procession began to move; a numerous train of coaches attended the hearse; but, good GOD! in what disorder, can only be expressed by a sixpenny pamphlet, soon after published, entitled DRYDEN'S FUNERAL. At last the corpse

In the Theatre of the College of Physicians there is a rostrum or pulpit, in which the Harveain, Cronian, and other orations are always spoken.

This is the natural progress of fiction. A man of wit, for his amusement, or to gratify his malice, sends abroad a ludicrous and distorted poetical account of the last solemn testimony of respect paid by some of the most distinguished characters in England, to one of its greatest poets. Thirty years afterwards, a poor authoress, to gain a few guineas, founds upon it an enlarged fictitious narrative; and in a few years more the two accounts are received and transmitted into all the books of English biography as true history. This fertile lady, like some of our modern fabricators, seems to have relied on the indolence of her readers, and to have been persuaded that no one would take the trouble of detecting her clumsy inven tions, by comparing them with the authentick accounts of the period referred to.