its climax when he contrasted Oxford with his own mother university. But a year or two later when he wrote his ' Life of Plutarch' he had no occasion to flatter anyone; and in this Life -- which as a critical essay de- serves more attention than it seems to receive -- he went out of his way to recall the days when he read Plutarch in the library of Trinity College and to add, with manifest sincerity, 'to which foundation I gratefully acknowledge a great part of my education'. This brief acknowledge- ment tells us more of his life at Cambridge than we learn from the college record of his gating for disobedience to the Vice-Master, or from the rumour which was raked up in his later life of his discomfiture at the hands of a young nobleman on whom he had written verses. Dryden was as good a Greek scholar as any English poet between Milton and Gray, and he had not learned all his Greek under Dr Busby at Westminster.
We in our turn are under an obligation to members of this college for their work on Dryden, and to two of them in particular -- W. D. Christie and A. W. Verrall. After Malone with his unexcelled capacity for research had collected the material for our biographical and explana- tory accounts of Dryden, and after Walter Scott had brought out his great edition and furnished it with what is still the most readable life, little work was done on Dryden for about fifty years. Roughly in the twenties of the last century, even while Keats was discovering him, Dryden entered on the period when he suffered more neglect than at any other time. But in 1870 there ap- peared the Globe edition with these words on the title- page, 'edited with a memoir, revised text, and notes, by W. D. Christie, M.A., of Trinity College, Cambridge', and also with these words -- 'Glorious John Dryden'.
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Publication Information: Book Title: John Dryden. Contributors: David Nichol Smith - author. Publisher: Cambridge University Press. Place of Publication: Cambridge, England. Publication Year: 1950. Page Number: 2.
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