prise the reader, Mrs. Thomas thought it expedient to go much further; and to authenticate her account by the minuteness and particularity of circumstantial falsehood.

The plain and simple fact, however, on which she constructed her narrative, was this. Dryden, as has been already mentioned, expired on Wednesday morning, the first of May.' Having died of a gangrene, it was necessary that he should be buried speedily; and accordingly, two days after

"One py spark, one sound as any roach, "One poet and two fidlers in a coach:

"The playhouse drab, that beats the beggar's bush,

*

"By every body kiss'd, good truth,-but such is
"Now her good fate, to ride with Mistress Duchess.
"Was e'er immortal poet thus buffoon'd?
"In a long line of coaches thus lampoon'd!
"A man with gout and stone quite wearied,
"Would rather live, than thus be buried."

'THE POSTBOY, on the following Tuesday, May 7, 1700, thus announces the honours then intended to be paid to the deceased poet :

"The corps of John Dryden, Esq. is to lye in state for some time, in the Colledge of Physicians; and on Monday next he is to be conveyed from thence in a hearse, in great splendour, to Westminster-Abbey, where he is to be interred with Chaucer, Cowley, and the rest of the renowned poets; and I am assured that a person of great quality, who has a mighty esteem for the works of that ingenious gentleman, will erect, at his own proper charge, a noble monument upon him, and so per petuate the name of that great man."

wards, on Friday morning, (not Saturday, as Mrs. Thomas states,) his corpse, at the expence of Mr. Montague, afterwards Lord Halifax, was carried from his house in a very private manner, to be interred, probably in the church-yard of the neighbouring parish. The Earl of Dorset, Lord Jefferies, and some others, either hearing of his intention on that day, or meeting the procession as it moved along, and thinking so great a poet entitled to a more splendid funeral, prevailed on the relations and friends who attended his remains, to consent that the body should be carried for the purpose of embalment, to the house of Mr. Russel, a celebrated undertaker; and the same day,

In a letter from the Rev. Thomas Tanner, (afterwards Lord Bishop of St. Asaph,) to Dr. Arthur Charlett, Master of University College, Oxford, dated [London, Monday, May 6, 1700, is the following paragraph:

“Mr. Dryden died a papist, if at all a Christian. Mr. Montague had given orders to bury him; but some Lords, (my Lord Dorset, Jefferies, &c.) thinking it would not be splendid enough, ordered him to be carried to Russel's: there he was embalmed; and now lies in state at the Physicians' College, and is to be buried with Chaucer, Cowley, &c. at Westminster-Abbey, on Munday next."

MSS. Ballard. in Bibl. Bodl. vol. iv. p. 29.

The foregoing paragraph I transcribed several years ago from the original in the Bodleian Library; which I mention, because an inaccurate transcript of it some time since appeared in a periodical miscellany, in which the

writer's name is mistaken.

Tanner's uncharitable doubt whether our author was at

with the assistance probably of Dr. Garth, they applied to the President and Censors of the College

all a Christian, seems to have been adopted from Milbourne, who in his Notes on the Translation of Virgil, (p. 9.) says," for aught I know, his very Christianity may be questionable." To which Dryden probably alludes in his Preface to the FABLES: "May I have leave to do myself the justice, since my enemies will do me none, and are so far from granting me to be a good poct, that they will not allow me so much as to be a Christian, or a moral man, may I have leave, I say," &c. See vol. iii. p. 630.

Ward's account of this transaction is as follows:

Notwithstanding his merits had justly entitled his corpse to the most magnificent and solemn interment the beneficence of the greatest spirits could have bestowed on him, yet 'tis credibly reported, the ingratitude of the age is such, that they had like to have let him pass in private to his grave, without those funeral obsequies suitable to his greatness, had it not been for that true British worthy, who, meeting with the venerable remains of the neglected bard passing silently in a coach, unregarded, to his last home, ordered the corpse, by the consent of his few friends that attended him, to be respited from so obscure an interment; and most generously undertook, at his own expence, to revive his worth in the minds of a forgetful people, by bestowing on his peaceful dust a solemn. funeral, answerable to his merit. The management

of the funeral was left to Mr. Russel, pursuant to the directions of that honourable great man, the Lord Jef feries, concerned chiefly in the pious undertaking."LONDON SPY, p. 419, 5th edit. 1718.

John, the second Lord Jefferies, the person here meant, was the only son of the Chancellor. He was himself a writer of verse. In the STATE POEMS, vol. iii. p. 380, we

of Physicians, to grant permission that the corpse should be deposited there, and at the proper time

find a burlesque translation of Bentley's Latin Verses on the death of the Duke of Glocester, in 1700. BONDUCA, altered from Fletcher, was dedicated to him in 1696; and ANTIOCHUS THE GREAT, a tragedy, in 1702: in the latter dedication his "admirable gay humour, and eternal vivacity of wit," are highly commended. He died, without issue male, in 1703.

The following most happy application of a well-known fable to King William the Third, in the latter part of his reign, is ascribed to Lord Jefferies, in the Second Volume of the STATE POEMS; but Prior, while he was UnderSecretary of State, was probably the concealed author, the verses having been found in his handwriting among his unpublished MSS., formerly in the library of the Duchess Dowager of Portland.

"A FABLE.

"In Esop's Tales an honest wretch we find,
"Whose years and comforts equally declined.
"He in two wives had two domestick ills,

"For different age they had, and different wills ::
"One pluck'd his black hairs out, and one his grey;
"The man for quietness did both obey;

"Till all the parish saw his head quite bare,
"And thought he wanted brains as well as hair.

"The Moral.

"The parties, hen-peck'd William, are thy wives;
The hairs they pluck, are thy prerogatives.
"Tories thy person hate, the Whigs thy power;
Though much thou yieldest, still they tug for more;
"Till this poor man and thou alike are shown,
"He without hair, and thou without a crown."

should be thence conveyed to Westminster-Abbey for interment; a request, which was immediately

As Mr. Montague appears to have undertaken at firs to bury Dryden at his own expence, Ward's account of his remains being carried in a coach to interment, must be inaccurate. Tanner, who was extremely intimate with Gibson, then a Chaplain to Archbishop Tennison, and was also acquainted with Jacob Tonson, and frequented his shop, was likely to obtain correct information on this subject. It is not however quite clear from his statement, whether the Lords Dorset and Jefferies met the procession in the street, or, hearing of Montague's intent, ordered the corpse to be carried from Dryden's house to that of the undertaker. From Playford's advertisement, which will be given hereafter, the former should seem to have been the

case.

Pope, in the character of Buro, in the Epistle to Arbuthnot, has particularly alluded to Montague's share in this transaction:

་་

Dryden alone (what wonder ?) came not nigh;
Dryden alone escaped his judging eye:

"But still the great have kindness in reserve;
"He help'd to bury whom he help'd to starve."

To which Pope added this note: "Mr. Dryden, after having lived in exigencies, had a magnificent funeral bestowed him by a contribution of several persons of upon quality." It is wonderful, that this remark, as well as various verses in the LucruS BRITANNICI, should have long since prevented the smallest degree of credit being paid to Mrs. Thomases fictitious narrative.

The last of these four lines, which were not in the ori ginal edition of the Epistle to Arbuthnot, but added in the quarto of 1735, was perhaps suggested by the following