Appendix: Johnson's Summary of Contemporary Accounts of Dryden's Funeral
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Appendix: Johnson's Summary of Contemporary Accounts of Dryden's Funeral On the Wednesday morning following, being May-day, 1700, under the most excruciating dolours, [Dryden] died ... Lord Halifax sent ... to My Lady [Elizabeth, Dryden's widow] and Mr. Charles [Dryden, his son], that, if they would give him leave to bury Mr. Dryden, he would inter him with a gentleman's private funeral, and afterwards bestow 550 [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 attended; when, just before they began to move, Lord Jeffries, with some of his rakish companions, coming by, in wine, asked whose funeral? On being told, 'What,' cries he, 'Shall Dryden, the greatest honor and ornament 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 1000 [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 the lord Halifax's generous design (these two having, out of respect for the family, enjoined Lady Elizabeth and her son to keep their favour concealed to the world, and let it pass for her own expense, etc.), readily came out of the coaches, and attended Lord Jeffries up to the lady's bedside, who was then sick; 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 202 Appendix 203 with all her strength; but alas! in vain! her feeble voice was lost in their acclamations of joy; and Lord Jeffries ordered the hearsemen to carry the corpse to Russell's, an undertaker in Cheapside, and leave it there till he sent orders for an embalmment, which, he added, should be after the Royal manner. His directions were obeyed, the company dispersed, and Lady Elizabeth and Mr. Charles remained inconsolable. Next morning Mr. Charles waited on Lord Halifax, etc. to excuse his mother and himself, by relating the real truth. But neither his Lordship nor the Bishop would admit any plea; especially the latter, who had the Abbey lighted, the ground opened, the choir attending, an anthem already set, and himself waiting for three hours without any corpse to bury. Russell, after three days' expectance of orders for embalmment without receiving any, waits on Lord Jeffries; who, pretending ignorance of the matter, turned it off with an ill-natured jest, saying, that those who observed the orders of a drunken frolic deserved no better; that he remembered nothing at all of it; and that he might do what he pleased with the corpse. On this, Mr. Russell waits on the Lady Elizabeth and Mr. [Charles] 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 under taker, in short, threatened to bring the corpse home 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 respite, which was granted. Mr. Charles wrote a very handsome letter to Lord Jeffries, who returned it with this cool answer: -'He knew nothing about the matter, and would be troubled no more about it.' He then addressed the Lord Halifax and the Bishop of Rochester, who were both too justly, though unhappily, incensed to do anything in it. In this distress, Dr. Garth, a man who entirely loved Mr. Dryden, and was withal a man of generosity and great humanity, sent for the corpse to the college of physicians, in Warwick Lane, and proposed a funeral by 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 nothing at hand but an old beer-barrel, which the Doctor with much good-nature 204 Appendix 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 Tub-Preacher: however, he finished the oration with a superior grace, to the loud acclimations 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 arrived at the Abbey, which was all unlighted. No organ played, no anthem sung; only two of the singing boys preceded the corpse, who sung an ode of Horace with each a small candle in their hand. The butchers and other mob broke in like a deluge, so that only about eight or ten gentlemen could get admission, and those forced to cut the way with their drawn swords. The coffin, in this disorder, was let down into Chaucer's grave, with as much confusion and as little ceremony as was possible, every one glad to save themselves from the gentle men's swords or the clubs of the mob .... ' (Johnson, Lives, 145-7) Notes 1 OCCASIONAL POETICS IN THE EARLY MODERN LYRIC 1. Hunter Davies, William Wordsworth (London, 1980). 2. Philip Stewart, Imitation and Illusion in the French Memoir-Novel, 1700-1750: The Art of Make-Believe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969). 3. Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears: the English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 4. Russell Fraser, The War against Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). 5. Samuel Johnson, 'Johnson's Lives of the English Poets', in Chalmers, Works of the English Poets from Chaucer to Cowper (21 vv.). 6. Philip Pinkus, Grub Street Stripped Bare (London, 1968). 7. F. W. Hillis, ed. Portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds (New York, 1952). 8. Paul Fry, The Poet's Calling in the English Ode (New Haven, 1980). 9. Malcolm Lip king, The Life of a Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago, 1981). 2 'PARDON, BLEST SOUL, THE SLOW PAC'D ELEGIES': AMBITION AND OCCASION IN JUST A EDOVARDO KING 1. R. B. Jenkins, Milton and the Theme of Fame (The Hague/Paris: Mouton, 1973). 2. Complete Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953). 3. Eric Smith, By Mourning Tongues: Studies in English Elegy (London, 1977). 4. Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York/Oxford, 1986). 5. Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates (Berkeley, 1986). 6 Graham Parry, The Seventeenth Century: the Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1603-1700 (London, 1989). 7. John Guillory, Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton and Literary History (New York, 1983). 8. E. M. W. Tillyard, Milton (London, 1966). 9. E. P. J. Corbett, introduction, The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle, ed. Corbett (New York: Random House, 1984). 10. Don M. Wolfe, Milton and His England (New York, 1970). 11. The Poems of John Milton, eds John Carey and Alistair Fowler (London: Longmans Green, 1968). 12. The Poems of Thomas Carew, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949). 205 206 Notes 13. A. N. Wilson, The Life of John Milton (New York, 1983). 14. Barbara Johnson, 'Fiction and Grief' Milton Quarterly (1984): [p]. 15. Dustin Griffin, 'The Beginnings of Modern Authorship: Milton and Dryden'. Milton Quarterly 24.11 (1990): [p]. 16. Justa Edovardo King I & II, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (New York, 1939). 3 CARRION CROWS: OCCASION IN THE BEGINNING AND END OF DRYDEN'S LITERARY LIFE 1. W. H. Auden, ed. A Choice of Dryden's Verse (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), p. 9. 2. Arthur L. Cooke, 'Did Dryden Hear the Guns?' Notes & Queries, 196 (1951): 204-5. 3. Walter Scott, The Life of John Dryden from Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (Edinburgh, 1834; Omaha, NE, 1963). 4. James Osborn, John Dryden: Some Biographical Facts and Problems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940). 5. James A. Winn, John Dryden and His World (New Haven/London: Yale University Press (1987). 4 NADIR: THE GENERATION OF NAMUR AND THE FAMINE OF OCCASIONS 1. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown, New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (New York/London, 1987). 2. Claude Rawson, Order from Confusion Sprung: Studies in Eighteenth Century Literature from Swift to Cowper (London, 1985). 3. Alexander Chalmers, ed., Works of the English Poets from Chaucer to Cowper; Vols. 9-18 include Lives of the English Poets by Samuel Johnson (London, 1810). 4. James Boswell, Boswell's London Journal 1763-1764, ed. Frederick Pottle (New York, 1950). 5. Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven/London, 1985).