WRITING a life of John Dryden is like trying to carve in solid rock
with a tablespoon. The difficulty is not accidental; Dryden himself
wished it to be so. He said: "Anything, though never so little,
which a man speaks of himself, in my opinion is still too much".
Aubrey intended Dryden to write an autobiographical sketch for him,
leaving a blank space for it in his MSS with the note "He will write it
for me himself". It was blank still at Aubrey's death.

Of course, Dryden does reveal his opinions, particularly his literary
opinions, not merely by his choice of theme and treatment, but also
directly in asides and personal remarks in his prose prefaces and dis-
courses. In two poems, Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther, he
goes further still, relaxing his rule to allow direct autobiographical
statements about his mind and--it is no exaggeration--his soul. It is
incidentally strange that his remark in his address to the reader at the
beginning of The Hind and the Panther--"What I desire the reader
should know concerning me, he will find in the body of the poem"--
has had so little weight attached to it by those who have written about
him: the passages he refers to, after all, contain considered statements
by the poet about his own deepest nature--a nature no less deep than
that of Wordsworth, statements no less considered than those made in
The Prelude to which so much dogged attention has been paid, and
upon which, naturally, our whole view of Wordsworth is based. So
I have tried to give full weight to what Dryden allows us to know of
himself.

Apart from that, no writer of Dryden's eminence can hope to keep
his private life private; it is natural and proper that those who
admire his works should want to know about the man who wrote
them, and should delve into the past to find out about him. Yet in
fact Dryden has had his desire for privacy largely granted, for in spite
of all the painstaking, if not altogether scientific, inquires in the in the eight-
eenth century by such men as Samuel Derrick and Edward Malone,
surprisingly little of first-rate personal data has turned up. The bare
events of his life, from at least 1668 when be became Poet Laureate
and a public figure, were already well enough known; but where is
the revealing anecdote, the family recollection, the diary, or the personal
reminiscence by friends and acquaintances of the man who met almost
every notable person of his time? Stray remarks, stray references, a
delightful tribute by Congreve--these can be found, but they tell us
really very little. The eighteenth century concluded, not unreason-

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