"Dryden" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... whole, and written it anew. But I do not know how it is. I retained, I suppose, some tolerable opinion of my own composition, though Janet did not comprehend it, and felt loath to retrench those Delilahs of the imagination, as Dryden calls them, the tropes and figures of which are caviar to the multitude. Besides, I hate rewriting as much as Falstaff did paying back—it is a double labour. So I determined with myself to consult Janet, in future, only on such things as were within the ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... with him to a college in London one afternoon where he delivered a lecture on Dryden, to prove that poetry can carry a certain cargo of argument but that argument can't raise the smallest flight of poetry. Dry as it sounds, it was as good a literary performance as I ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... the same year William Miller of Albemarle Street published Scott's great edition of Dryden, with a biography, in eighteen volumes; and the editor's industry and critical judgement were the subject of a laudatory article by Hallam ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... is from the English version of The Decameron, first published in 1620, but in 1569 had appeared A Notable Historye of Nastagto and Traversan, or rhymed version of Boccaccio's tale, by C.T., usually supposed to be Christopher Tye the musician. Dryden used this story for his fable Theodore and Honoria. It is curious to note that Anita, Garibaldi's wife, was actually hunted to death here in the Pineta by ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... England; and all that is mortal also of Spenser of the honey'd verse; and of Beaumont, who had caught an echo of Shakespeare's sweetness if not his power; and of sturdy Ben Jonson, held in his own day a not unworthy rival of Shakespeare's self; and of "glorious" and most masculine John Dryden. From his monument Shakespeare looks upon the place with his kindly eyes, and Addison too, and Goldsmith; and one can almost imagine a smile of fellowship upon the marble faces of those later ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... Lieut. Dryden was detailed to take charge of the burial party and the sad work it was, collecting friend and foe from ...
— Over the top with the 25th - Chronicle of events at Vimy Ridge and Courcellette • R. Lewis
... and good cheer, but also the chill of a certain reserve. The talk seems, after all the years, to have been essentially serious—men expressing themselves not lightly, but judicially, and after long deliberation; Mr. Bryant gravely conceding the right of Pope or Dryden or Watts, according to the subject of discussion, to be ranked as a poet, or denying the same, while members of lesser note sat about listening and nodding, but preserving becoming reticence. There was ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... Charles roused himself to listen and the fastidious Buckingham forgot to sneer; men whose address, politeness, and knowledge of the world qualified them to manage the consciences of the wealthy and noble; men with whom Halifax loved to discuss the interests of empires, and from whom Dryden was not ashamed to own that he had learned to write. [88] The other section was destined to ruder and humbler service. It was dispersed over the country, and consisted chiefly of persons not at all ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... his 'Ode' also, and his 'Glance behind the Curtain,' there is much to embolden him toward the highest endeavors in what he would perhaps disdain to call his Art. Poesy, notwithstanding, is an Art, which even HORACE and DRYDEN did not scorn to consider such; and our poet ought to remember that he is bound not only to utter his own sentiments and fantasies according to his own impulse, but moreover to consult in some degree the ears of the world: the poet's task is double; to speak FROM himself ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... acquired a wide knowledge of English poetry. Waller, Spenser, and Dryden were, he says, his great favourites in the order named, till he was twelve. Like so many other poets, he took infinite delight in the Faery Queen; but Dryden, the great poetical luminary of his own day, naturally exercised a predominant ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... living, regarded De Foe as the best known novelist of his country, and thought of Fielding as a young but meritorious novice in the fields of romance. In poetry, she was familiar with then names as late as Dryden, and had once been seduced into reading the "Rape of the Lock"; but she regarded Spenser as the purest type of her country's literature in this line. Genealogy was her favourite insanity. Those things which are the pride of most genealogists were to her ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... parturition, "as well as could be expected," a nervous sympathy yet surviving between the late-severed umbilical cord and the wondrous offspring, doubtfully entering the Mermaid, or the Devil Tavern, or the Coffee-house of Will or Button, blushing under the eye of Ben or Dryden or Addison, as if they must needs know him for the author of the "Modest Enquiry into the Present State of Dramatique Poetry," or of the "Unities briefly considered by Philomusus," of which they have never heard and never will hear so much as the names; we see the country-gentlemen ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... the Macbeth music attributed, perhaps wrongly, to Locke.) It was not for some time that he gained the supremacy at the theatre which he now held in the Church. That very trustworthy weathercock John Dryden, Poet Laureate, continued to flatter others for many long days to come. In this same year he composed the first of a long series of odes of welcome, congratulation or condolence for royal or great personages, and ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... heard the Language of Queen Elizabeth's, or King Harry's Court, in the Suffolk Villages: better a great deal than that spoken in London Societies, whether Fashionable or Literary: and the homely [strength] of which has made Shakespeare, Dryden, South, and Swift, what they could not have been without it. But my Vocabulary if ever done will be a very little Affair, if ever done: for here again it is pleasant enough to jot down a word now and then, but not to equip ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... tractable in the art of speaking,— and, upon such a subject, indolence or indifference would have been resented by the father as crimes quite inexpiable. One of Richard's sisters now and then visited Harrow, and well do I remember that, in the house where I lodged, she triumphantly repeated Dryden's Ode upon St. Cecilia's Day, according to the instruction given to her by her father. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... to-day. Here Richard Blanchard and Francis Child, "at the Marygold in Fleet Street,"—who were goldsmiths with "running cashes,"—were first established in the reign of Charles II. "In the hands of Mr. Blanchard, goldsmith, next door to Temple Bar," Dryden deposited his L50 received for the discovery of the "bullies" by whom Lord Rochester had been ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... British song Scorned not such legends to prolong: They gleam through Spenser's elfin dream, And mix in Milton's heavenly theme; And Dryden, in immortal strain, Had raised the Table Round again, But that a ribald king and court Bade him toil on, to make them sport; Demanded for their niggard pay, Fit for their souls, a looser lay, Licentious satire, song, and play; The world defrauded ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... him. Nature must have been merry when she made this Prince, and in the sort of mood that certain great artists used to exhibit in their comical caricatures; I never saw a countenance which that line in Dryden's M'Flecknoe ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... rigour and tyranny in the one party, it will hardly be denied, on the other hand, that, if the zeal for God's house did not eat up the conventiclers, it devoured at least, to imitate the phrase of Dryden, no small portion of their loyalty, sober sense, and good breeding. We may safely hope, that the souls of the brave and sincere on either side have long looked down with surprise and pity upon the ill-appreciated motives which caused their mutual hatred and hostility, ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... by licentious arts of variety. What satisfaction could a woman of delicacy promise herself in a union with such a man, when the very artlessness of her affection might appear insipid? Thus does Dryden describe the situation: ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... in literature was the same spirit that moved John Smith and his cavaliers to invade the Virginia wilderness, and the Pilgrim Fathers to found a commonwealth for freedom's sake on a stern and rock-bound coast. It was the day of Milton, Dryden, and Bunyan, the day of the Protectorate with its fanatical defenders, the day of the rise and fall of British Puritanism, the day of the Revolution of 1688 which forever doomed the theory of the divine rights of monarchs, the day ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... and having received so much hospitality from the Ambroses she was glad to be able to repay a minute part of it. She looked about accordingly for something to show her. The room did not provide much entertainment. She touched her manuscript. "Age of Chaucer; Age of Elizabeth; Age of Dryden," she reflected; "I'm glad there aren't many more ages. I'm still in the middle of the eighteenth century. Won't you sit down, Miss Vinrace? The chair, though small, is firm. . . . Euphues. The germ of the English novel," she continued, ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... of David, who rebelled against his father, and at whose death David gave vent to a bitter wail of grief. A name given by Dryden to the Duke of Monmouth, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... English poetry. Chaucer, living at the dawn almost of English civilization; Shakspeare, whose varied and marvellous dramas might well have exhausted any vitality; Milton, struggling with domestic infelicity, with political hatred, and with blindness; Dryden, Pope, Swift: none of these burning and shining lights of English literature went out at mid-day. The result is not altered, if you come nearer our own time. That galaxy of talent and genius which shone with such brilliancy in the Scottish capital at the beginning of the century,—Sydney Smith, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... planters of fruit trees think of following the routine which Virgil describes in his second Georgic, as practised by the careful orchardist, when transplanting. Dryden's translation ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... themselves headlong from a precipice, or leaping into a kindled pile, or throwing themselves under the holy chariot wheels, to be crushed to death by the Pagods, when they are carried in triumph about the town.—(Life of St. Francis Xavier, translated by Dryden, 1688.) ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... himself to me, asked, if there were any Looking Glasses in the Times of the Greeks and Romans; for that he had often observed in the Translations of Poems out of those Languages, that People generally talked of seeing themselves in Wells, Fountains, Lakes, and Rivers: Nay, says he, I remember Mr. Dryden in his Ovid tells us of a swingeing Fellow, called Polypheme, that made use of the Sea for his Looking-Glass, and could never dress himself to Advantage but in ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... certainly well worth perusal, as the writer, "KUSTER," has examined the question with considerable care, and proves, by many curious instances, that most of those whom we have been taught to look up to as the greatest authorities in English writing—Dryden, Swift, Pope, Johnson, and others—seem to have had no fixed rule on the subject, but to have used "a" or "an" before the same words with the most ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 25. Saturday, April 20, 1850 • Various
... manifested in the proportions of that nice sequence in which the invertebrates—the fishes, the reptiles, the birds, the marsupials, the placental mammals, and, last of all, man himself—are so exquisitely arranged. It reminds us of the fine figure employed by Dryden in his first Ode for St. Cecilia's Day,—a figure which, viewed in the light cast on it by the modern science of Palaeontology, stands out in bolder relief than that in which it could have appeared to ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... moment Willie got back to Trim he was desirous of at once resuming his former pursuits. He would not eat his breakfast till his uncle had heard him his Hebrew, and he comments on the importance of proper pronunciation. At five he was taken to see a friend, to whom he repeated long passages from Dryden. A gentleman present, who was not unnaturally sceptical about Willie's attainments, desired to test him in Greek, and took down a copy of Homer which happened to have the contracted type, and to his amazement Willie went on with ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... was Borrow's "Lavengro"; an odd theme, purporting to be a translation of something, called a "Ruba'iyat," which the Head said was a poem not yet come to its own; there were hundreds of volumes of verse—-Crashaw; Dryden; Alexander Smith; L. E. L.; Lydia Sigourney; Fletcher and a purple island; Donne; Marlowe's "Faust "; and—this made McTurk (to whom Beetle conveyed it) sheer drunk for three days—Ossian; "The Earthly Paradise"; "Atalanta in Calydon"; and Rossetti—to name ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... the greatest genius, with perhaps the least industry, have at the same time the most splendid and the worst passages of poetry. Shakspeare and Dryden are at once the greatest and the least of our poets. With some, their great fault consists ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... position. His regular work as comptroller (of which a few scattered documentary vestiges are preserved) scarcely offers more points for the imagination to exercise itself upon than Burns's excisemanship or Wordsworth's collectorship of stamps (It is a curious circumstance that Dryden should have received as a reward for his political services as a satirist, an office almost identical with Chaucer's. But he held it for little more than a year.), though doubtless it must have brought him into constant contact with merchants ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... of this comedy is in its personages and in the theory upon which they are conceived. Ben Jonson had theories about poetry and the drama, and he was neither chary in talking of them nor in experimenting with them in his plays. This makes Jonson, like Dryden in his time, and Wordsworth much later, an author to reckon with; particularly when we remember that many of Jonson's notions came for a time definitely to prevail and to modify the whole trend of English poetry. First of all Jonson was a classicist, that is, he ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... of Pericles, which was published in 1609 with the name of Shakespeare in the title-page, and of which Dryden says in one of his prologues to a first play, "Shakespeare's own muse his Pericles first bore," was probably acted in 1590, and appears to have been long popular. Romeo and Juliet was certainly an early production of his muse, and one which excited ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... something perfectly funny with something so flat that you are obliged to turn the conversation. Dryden does the same thing, not with jokes, but with his sublimer passages. But sometimes a child's deliberate banter is quite intelligible to elders. Take the letter written by a little girl to a mother who had, it seems, allowed her family to see that she was inclined to be satisfied with something ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... Dryden himself, in the Annus Mirabilis, had turned aside from his subject, the defeat of the Dutch and England's mastery of the seas, to pay a compliment to the Society, and to prophesy man's mastery ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... vestiges. Instead of these venerable memorials of the past, John Effingham, who retained a pleasing recollection of their beauties as they had presented themselves to his boyish eyes, had bought a few substitutes in a New- York shop, and a Shakspeare, and a Milton, and a Caesar, and a Dryden, and a Locke, as the writers of heroic so beautifully express it, were now seated in tranquil dignity on the old medallions that had held their illustrious predecessors. Although time had, as yet, done little ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... noble Buzzard"—in his Hind and Panther must be familiar to your readers. It was given as "adequate retaliation" for the Bishop's censure of the immorality of Dryden's plays. Applied to Burnet's Sketches of ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... imagination, may, from having taken another road, so neglect its cultivation as to show less of its powers in his latter life. But I am persuaded that scarce a poet is to be found, from Homer down to Dryden, who preserved a sound mind in a sound body, and continued practising his profession to the very last, whose later works are not as replete with the fire of imagination as those which were produced ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... nineteenth century. But so also was his matter. The poetry he really believed in was that of what the nineteenth century came to regard as the age of prose. Of his three great Lives we feel that those of Dryden and Pope express the pleasure he spontaneously and unconsciously felt, while that of Milton is a reluctant tribute extorted from him by a genius he could not resist. Among the few poets in his long list ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... mirabilis, a well-known invigorating cordial, cf. Dryden's Marriage a la Mode (1672), III, i: 'The country gentlewoman ... who ... opens her dear bottle of Mirabilis beside, for a gill glass ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... of an evolution which can be traced back to the swift privateers which were built during the War of 1812. In this type of vessel the shipyards of Chesapeake Bay excelled and their handiwork was known as the "Baltimore clipper," the name suggested by the old English verb which Dryden uses to describe the flight of the falcon that "clips it down the wind." The essential difference between the clipper ship and other kinds of merchant craft was that speed and not capacity became the chief consideration. This was a radical departure for large vessels, which in all maritime ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... sounds they beat. Intent to hear, and eager to repeat. Error sits brooding there, with added train Of vain Credulity, and Joys as vain: Suspicion, with Sedition joined, are near, And Rumours raised, and Murmurs mixed, and panic Fear." J. DRYDEN. [T.S.]] ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... coronation, was a favourite pastime with the mob of London, and often employed by their superiors as a means of working upon their passions and prejudices." A full account of this ceremony is given in his edition of Dryden's Works, 1808, vol. vi., p. 222. An account of the attempt "to revive an old ceremony," referred to by Swift, was published also in "The Post Boy" for November 20th, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... extant) and confer them with the literary product of the said ages. Professor Wilson has begun something of the kind apparently, in his initiatory paper of the last Blackwood number on critics, beginning with Dryden—but he seems to have no design in his notice—it is a mere critique on the critic. And then, he should have begun earlier than Dryden—earlier even than Sir Philip Sydney, who in the noble 'Discourse on Poetry,' gives such singular evidence of being stone-critic-blind to the gods who ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... threw aside many books before he found the right one for the hour. [Footnote: He would attach himself to a book or a poem apparently by some law perceptible only to himself, perhaps often giving an interest by his own genius. A poem On Solitude, in Dryden's Miscellany, was at one time a special favorite ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... of criticism which he produced about this time was entitled, "Account of the English Poets." A significant feature of the work is that Shakespeare is not mentioned, even once, while Dryden is placed as the standard of excellence, just as in "Modern Painters," Ruskin takes Turner and lets him stand for one hundred, and all other artists grade down ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... intelligent genius who shaped the Arthuriad has escaped this danger, and that not merely by the simple process which Dryden, with his placid irony, somewhere describes as "leaving scarce three of the characters alive." We have reached, and feel that we have reached, the conclusion of the whole matter when the Graal has been taken to Heaven, and Arthur has gone to Avalon. Nobody wants ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... is looked up to by his gang of blackguards. Alexander himself was not much better,—a foolish, fiery young madcap. How often is he mentioned except as a warning? His best record is that he served to point a moral as 'Macedonian's madman.' He made a figure, it is true, in Dryden's great Ode, but what kind of a figure? He got drunk,—in very bad company, too,—and then turned fire-bug. He had one redeeming point,—he did value his Homer, and slept with the Iliad under his pillow. A poet like Homer seems to me worth a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Egypt, a Tragedy, acted 1626, and printed in 12mo. London, 1639, and dedicated to Sir Kenelme Digby: The author has followed the historians of those times. We have in our language two other plays upon the same subject, one by Shakespear, and the other by Dryden. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... his "Men of Genius," quite a list—Corneille, Descartes, Virgil, Addison, La Fontaine, Dryden, Manzoni, and Newton—of those who could not express themselves in public. Whatever part self-consciousness played in the individual case, we must class the peculiarity among the defects, not signs, of genius. "A tender heel makes no ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... then yielded to a gentle slumber, from which, however, he was instantly recalled at the sound of Adelaide's voice, when he exclaimed, "Ah! Charming—very charming, ah!"—Lady Emily looked from them as she hummed some part of Dryden's Ode— ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... philosophers who had cast off the yoke of Aristotle and all "other Mens Light," is one which had appeared at least as early as 1661 in Robert Boyle's Considerations Touching the Style of Holy Scripture. It had been reiterated by Dryden and several others who refused to recognize an ipse dixit in letters ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... stage, it would have been an irretrievable loss to have neglected the opportunity of that great master's doing justice to this work; he having already added new life and spirit to some of the finest things in the English language, particularly that inimitable ode[5] of Dryden's which no age nor ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... the fashion to compare the style of Addison and Johnson, and to depreciate, I think very unjustly, the style of Addison as nerveless and feeble[661], because it has not the strength and energy of that of Johnson. Their prose may be balanced like the poetry of Dryden and Pope. Both are excellent, though in different ways. Addison writes with the ease of a gentleman. His readers fancy that a wise and accomplished companion is talking to them; so that he insinuates ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... of comparison, as do adjectives."—Priestley cor. "But the author who, by the number and reputation of his works, did more than any one else, to bring our language into its present state, was Dryden."—Blair cor. "In some states, courts of admiralty have no juries, nor do courts of chancery employ any at all."—Webster cor. "I feel grateful to my friend."—Murray cor. "This requires a writer to have in his own mind a very clear apprehension of the object which he ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... stormy skies when Autumn weighs The year, and adds to nights and shortens days, And suns declining shine with feeble rays."—DRYDEN'S VIRGIL. ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... enough, yet seemed to me but bad play-acting; and brought to my remembrance how, when I was a little fellow, Mr. Glennie once made me recite a battle-piece of Mr. Dryden before my betters; and how I could scarce get out the bloody threats for shyness and rising tears. So it was with Maskew's words; for he had much ado to gather breath to say them, and they came in a thin voice that had no sting of wrath ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... proper to mention what Johnson, at a subsequent period, said of him both as a writer and an editor: 'Sir, I have often said, that if Derrick's letters had been written by one of a more established name, they would have been thought very pretty letters.' And, 'I sent Derrick to Dryden's relations to gather materials for his life; and I believe he got all that ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... which cannot be affirmed of the writers of any earlier epoch. Poetry, too, shone forth with dazzling splendour. A galaxy of poets made their appearance, among whom two particular stars were Tufu and Lipai, the Dryden and ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... madness" is well known. The "first and obvious defect" of Dryden's Threnodia "is the irregularity of its metre." The "lax and lawless versification" of this type of poetry, he wrote in the Life of Cowley, "concealed the deficiencies of the barren, and flattered the laziness of the idle." One cannot but wonder ...
— A Pindarick Ode on Painting - Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq. • Thomas Morrison
... playgoers of the Restoration we have abundant information from the poet Dryden, and the diarist Pepys. For some eighteen years the theatres had been absolutely closed, and during that interval very great changes had occurred. England, under Charles II., seemed as a new and different country ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... it out to be, because ships obliged to go to a base must expend coal in doing so, and coal costs money. It is not surprising that consideration of the secondary base system should evoke a recollection of the expression applied by Dryden to the militia of ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... designed to crush had not minced their own words. The press was violence itself, and was not tempered with justice; when the poet looked round he saw "afflicted virtue insolently stabbed with all manner of reproaches," as Dryden said. ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... The frequenters were of the fashionable classes, and came in the evening to sit in small arbours, and "be regaled with cheesecakes, syllabubs, and wine sweetened with sugar." In this form the place was extremely popular, and is often mentioned in contemporary literature. Dryden came there to eat tarts with "Mrs." Anne Reeve, and doubtless Evelyn and Pepys often strolled about in the gay crowd, a crowd much gayer than it would now be—in the matter of costume, at all events. The scene of "The Mulberry Gardens," a play by Sir Charles Sedley ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... these characters, is more known from having his name affixed to one of the severest satires ever written by Dryden, than from any excellence of his own as a poet or dramatic writer. Mr. Reed conceives him to have been a Jesuit, and Pope terms him an Irish priest. Langbaine says, that "his acquaintance with the nobility was more than ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... Chaucer's Complaint to His Empty Purse, onward, English poetry has borne the record of its maker's poverty. The verse of our period is filled with names from the past that offer our poets a noble precedent for their destitution,—Homer, Cervantes, Camoeens, Spenser, Dryden, Butler, Johnson, Otway, Collins, Chatterton, Burns,—all these have their want exposed in ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... this change, had written copies been preserved. If Chaucer's poetry, for instance, had not been written, it could only have come down to us in a softened form, more like the effeminate version of Dryden, than the rough, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... in the sense of MISCHIEVOUS. In Worcester's Dictionary an example is given of its employment by Dryden ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... half a score." "Half a score! half a thousand, child!" answered the other. "I read a good deal in Daniel's English History of France; a great deal in Plutarch's Lives, the Atalantis, Pope's Homer, Dryden's Plays, Chillingworth, the Countess ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... that Cicero, when holding up Catiline to detestation; and (without going to such an extreme case) that Dryden and Pope, when they are describing characters like Buckingham, Shaftsbury, and the Duchess of Marlborough, should represent qualities and actions at war with each other and with themselves; and that the page should be suitably crowded with antithetical expressions. But all this argues an obtuse ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... marriage,' said Ethelberta. 'Otherwise perhaps the poetess may live to become what Dryden called himself when he got old and poor—a rent-charge on Providence. . . . . Yes, I must try that way,' she continued, with a sarcasm towards people out of hearing. I must buy a "Peerage" for one thing, and a "Baronetage," and a "House of Commons," and a "Landed Gentry," and learn ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... a Spenserian; he owned to Dryden in later years that "Spenser was his original," and in some of his earliest lines at Horton he dwells lovingly on "the sage and solemn tones" of the "Faerie Queen," its "forests and enchantments drear, where more is meant than meets the ear." But ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope; Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey; Because the first is crazed beyond all hope, The second drunk,[86] the third so quaint and mouthy: With Crabbe it may be difficult to cope, And Campbell's Hippocrene ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... special publications by the Society will be a volume including Elkanah Settle's The Empress of Morocco (1673) with five plates; Notes and Observations on the Empress of Morocco (1674) by John Dryden, John Crowne and Thomas Shadwell; Notes and Observations on the Empress of Morocco Revised (1674) by Elkanah Settle; and The Empress of Morocco. A Farce (1674) by Thomas Duffet, with an Introduction by Maximillian E. Novak. Already published in this series are reprints ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... novelist are revealed in the historian and the collector of antiquities. Scott before The Lay of the Last Minstrel looked like a young adventurer in the study of history and legend, who had it in him to do solid work on a large scale (like his edition of Dryden) if he chose to take it up. He is not a poet from the beginning like Wordsworth and Keats, devoted to that one service; he turns novelist late in life when the success of his poetry seems to be over. His early experiments in verse are queerly suggested ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... Dryden's Charles—that king Indeed was never any mighty thing; He merited few honors from the pen: And yet he was a devilish hearty fellow, Enjoyed his beef, and bottle, and got mellow, And mind—kept company ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... to the subject as to who wrote these clever little tomes. In my "Angler's Garland," printed at the Dryden Press, 1870 and 1871, I fully announced my intention of issuing a reprint of the first edition of "Goody Two Shoes," but the intended volume was published by the firm at the corner, "Griffith, Farren, Okenden, and Welsh," now in the direct line of business descent from ...
— Banbury Chap Books - And Nursery Toy Book Literature • Edwin Pearson
... 'The first time Dryden's Alexander's Feast fell into his hands, he told me, he was prodigiously charmed with it: and, having never heard any body speak of it before, thought, as thou dost of the Bible, that he had made ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... ruins of an older edifice, an ancient description running, "The old Chappel of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Pateley Brigg in Nidderdale." We climbed the hill, and on our way came to an old well on which was inscribed the following translation by Dryden from the Latin of Ovid [43 ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... favorites with the King. It has been supposed by some that the great Puritan poet had them in his mind when he represented the Pandemonic debate. Shaftesbury and Buckingham are also two of the most prominent characters in Dryden's noted political satire of "Absalom and Achitophel," published in 1681; and ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... to fixed canons, during which scholarly efforts are made to purify style and impose laws on taste. The ensuing period of sense is also marked by profounder inquiries into nature and more exact analysis of mental operations. The correct school of poets, culminating in Dryden and Pope, holds sway in England; while Newton, Locke, and Bentley extend the sphere of science. In France the age of Rabelais and Montaigne yields place to the age of Racine and Descartes. Germany was so distracted ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... between Antony and Ventidius in Dryden's All for Love is copied from The Maid's Tragedy. "Ventidius" is in the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... to be the subject of a profound conviction that he was the individual predestinated to superintend our farming interests. He was so well persuaded of this high calling that none of us dreamed of questioning it, and he was forthwith installed in the coveted office. At his suggestion another man, Dryden by name, was engaged to assist old man Spafford and take care of Sancho, and a boy, called Solomon, to wait upon Dryden and do chores. A few day-laborers were also temporarily hired, the season being so far advanced and work pressing. The carpenters were recalled, for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... John Dryden (1631-1700), the great representative figure in the literature of the latter part of the seventeenth century, exemplifies in his work most of the main tendencies of the time. He came into notice with a poem on the death of Cromwell in 1658, and two years later was composing couplets expressing ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... rose[Footnote: In a pastoral habit, and a hat turned up with pink], &c. when he shewed them the famous lines, Avoir peu de parens, moins de train que de rente, &c. which do certainly bear a very near affinity to our Old Man's Wish, published in Dryden's Miscellanies; who, among other luxuries, resolves to eat ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... the books that we read that are worth reading, and a good many of their own, some of which have not yet reached us; that there are probably more readers in the United States of Milton, and Shakespeare, and Dryden, and Pope, and Byron, and Wordsworth, and Tennyson, than are to be found in this country; because, I think, it will probably be admitted by everybody who understands the facts of both countries, that out of the twenty millions of population ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... but plain English. Let me, however, humbly represent that the style, such as it is, was not adopted without a purpose, and that the English I have called "old-fashioned," was not in the remotest degree intended to be modelled upon the diction of Swift, or Pope, or Addison, or Steele, or Dryden, or Defoe, or even Nash or Howel. Such a feat of elegant pedantry has already been accomplished by Mr. Thackeray in his noble story of Esmond; and I had no wish to follow up a dignified imitation by a sorry caricature. I simply endeavoured to make Captain Dangerous express himself as ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... poetry of the time of Pope and Dryden betray a state of association so completely heathenized, that an old Greek or Roman raised from the dead could scarce learn from them that any change had taken place in the religion of the world; and even Milton often pains one by introducing ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... especially for its account of the contemporary stage. In describing an actor or actress he had few equals—witness his skilful portrait of Nokes, and his admirably graphic vignette of Mrs. Verbruggen as that "finish'd Impertinent," Melantha, in Dryden's Marriage a-la-Mode. ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... turn to the great English satirists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, we find that they had this rough but firm grasp of the size and strength, the value and the best points of their adversary. Dryden, before hewing Ahitophel in pieces, gives a splendid and spirited account of the insane valour and inspired cunning ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... a familiar occurrence, by way of simile, describes a dove haunting the cavern of a rock in such engaging numbers, that I cannot refrain from quoting the passage: and John Dryden has rendered it so happily in our language, that without further excuse I shall ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... for his knowledge of human nature, as he always will be read, the chivalric age which moves in his pages was taken more seriously at the South, as if it were of continuing importance in life. In any of its rich private libraries you find yourself in the age of Pope and Dryden, and the classics were pursued in the spirit of Oxford and Cambridge in the time of Johnson. It was little disturbed by the intellectual and ethical agitation of modern England or of modern New England. During this period, while the South excelled in the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the world.' I begin to think he was right, and it is not always the superficial flirting and love-making which is a part of your coeducational schools,—a thing simply trivial and naughty,—but often tragic passion instead, quite in harmony with the title of Dryden's play, 'All for Love, or the World ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... of honour has no doubt arisen that of garlanding guests. This is not confined to India but obtained in Rome and probably in other countries. The word 'chaplet' [166] originally meant a garland or wreath to be worn on the head; and a garland of leaves with four flowers at equal distances. Dryden says, 'With chaplets green upon their foreheads placed.' The word mala originally meant a garland, and subsequently a rosary or string of beads. From this it seems a legitimate deduction that rosaries or strings of beads of a sacred wood were substituted for flower-garlands as ornaments ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... Pit-a-pat.—A word formed from pat, and particularly applied to the pulsations of the heart, when accelerated by emotion. Used by Ben Jonson and Dryden. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... are seen floating upon the sea and singing in the rocks, foretelling their danger.' This little piece gave me keener pleasure than ever in after years I received from the grandest comedies of Mr. Congreve and of Mr. Dryden, though acted by Kynaston, Betterton, and the whole strength of the King's own company. At Chichester once I remember that I paid a penny to see the left shoe of the youngest sister of Potiphar's wife, but as it looked much like any other old shoe, and was just about the size to have fitted the ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Greek Professor in the University of Cambridge, which was published in two large quarto volumes in the year 1780, and reprinted in four volumes in 1781. Lucian had been translated before in successive volumes by Ferrand Spence and others, an edition, completed in 1711, for which Dryden had written the author's Life. Dr. Francklin, who produced also the best eighteenth century translation of Sophocles, joined to his translation of Lucian a little apparatus of introductions and notes by which the ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... quibbles and quirks. "With periods, points, and tropes, he slurs his crimes; He robb'd not, but he borrowed from the poor."—Dryden. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... work after work has issued from the press. This facility of production is too remarkable to be overlooked. It is almost unexampled. Voltaire and Lord Byron have written some of their best works in an inconceivably short time. Dryden produced five act plays at the rate of three a-year. Shakspeare is supposed in one year to have written five, among which is that whereon he must have expended most thought—Hamlet. This, considering ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... by that known as Dryden's. This work, performed by many different hands, is of unequal merit. Some Lives are rendered into a racy and idiomatic, although somewhat archaic English, while others fall far short of the standard of Sir Thomas North's work. Dryden's version has ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... Dryden defended or excused his own offences and those of his contemporaries by pleading the example of the earlier English dramatists; and Mr. Leigh Hunt seems to think that there is force in the plea. We altogether differ from this opinion. The crime charged ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sickness full of woes" Samuel Daniel Love's Perjuries William Shakespeare Venus' Runaway Ben Jonson What is Love John Fletcher Love's Emblems John Fletcher The Power of Love John Fletcher Advice to a Lover Unknown Love's Horoscope Richard Crashaw "Ah, how Sweet it is to Love" John Dryden Song, "Love still has something of the sea" Charles Sedley The Vine James Thomson Song, "Fain would I change that Note" Unknown Cupid Stung Thomas Moore Cupid Drowned Leigh Hunt Song, "Oh! say not woman's love is bought" Isaac Pocock "In the Days of Old" Thomas ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... to his Book, thus giving formal expression to his heresy. 'The greatest wit, though not the best poet of our nation,' Dryden called him; the greatest intellect, that is, which had expressed itself in poetry. Dryden himself was not always careful to distinguish between what material was fit and what unfit for verse; so that we can now enjoy his masterly ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... of noblemen of wit and genius, it was proposed to try their skill in composition, each writing a sentence on whatsoever subject he thought proper, and the decision was left to Dryden, who formed one of the company. The poet having read them all, said, "There are here abundance of fine things, and such as do honor to the noble writers, but I am under the indispensable necessity of giving the palm to my lord Dorset; and when I have ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... has done well. Making an early effort to begin, he, like Dryden, did not really reach the creative epoch until he was fully thirty. His creative period covers about fifty-nine years. It extends from "A Dream of Fair Women," in 1833, to "Crossing the Bar," ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... her performance in this character, in that of Belvidera, and of Isabella, in the Fatal Marriage, Downes says she acquired the name of the famous Mrs. Barry, both at court and in the city. "Mrs. Barry," says Dryden, in his Preface to Cleomenes, "always excellent, has in this tragedy excelled herself, and gained a reputation beyond any woman I have ever seen on the theatre." "In characters of greatness," says Cibber, "Mrs. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... take notice of the Poets, whose monuments stand mostly contiguous. Here are the ancient monuments of Chaucer and Spencer, with those of Ben Johnson, Drayton, Milton, and Butler; also of the great Dryden, the ingenious Phillips, the divine Cowley, the harmonious Prior, and the inimitable Shakespeare, of whose curious effigy I have spoken before: nor must I omit the gentle Mr. John Gay, to whose memory his ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... heart-strings the Titan (Prometheus) fastened with a better clay. (Juvenal, Sat. xiv. 35). Dryden translated the line, with its ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... depicting of vices and virtues, which never fails to be effective if it is well done and if the traits are so recognizable that they cannot be confounded or mistaken; virtue always gets itself loved, however unfortunate, and vice gets itself hated, even though triumphant." Dryden, again, a contemporary of d'Aubignac and a predecessor of Johnson, had a clearer vision than either of them; and his views are far in advance of theirs. "Delight," he said, "is the chief if not the only end of poesy," and by poesy he meant ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... time I did not see or dream of the connection which no doubt does exist between mathematics and poetry—the connection which made the wise Dryden say that every poet ought to be something of a mathematician. Needless to say, my teachers did not see the connection. They were simply amazed that the same person should become as drunk with geometry and algebra as with poetry. Probably they consoled themselves ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... the best are perhaps those of Cowley, Dryden, and Pope. The very worst is, beyond all doubt, that ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... friend Evelyn keeps his performances less far apart from each other: but is certainly, though a representative, not a great letter-writer, and the few that we have of Pepys' patronised fellow-Cantabrigian Dryden are of no great mark, though not superfluous. In the earlier part of the century Latin had not wholly shaken off its control as the epistolary language; and it was not till quite the other end that English itself became supple and docile enough for the purposes of the ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... latter eighty years of the seventeenth century, contains the close of our Early poetical style and the commencement of the Modern. In Dryden we see the first master of the new: in Milton, whose genius dominates here as Shakespeare's in the former book,—the crown and consummation of the early period. Their splendid Odes are far in advance of any prior attempts, Spenser's excepted: they exhibit the wider and grander range which years ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various |
