ter school
as a king's scholar, under the famous Dr Busby. Some elegiac verses
which Dryden wrote there on the death of a schoolfellow, Henry, Lord
Hastings, son of the earl of Huntingdon, in 1649, were published in
_Lacrymae Musarum_, among other elegies by "divers persons of nobility
and worth" in commemoration of the same event. He appeared soon after
again in print, among writers of commendatory verses to a friend of his,
John Hoddesdon, who published a volume of _Epigrams_ in 1650. Dryden's
contribution is signed "John Dryden of Trinity C.," as he had gone up
from Westminster to Cambridge in May 1650. He was elected a scholar of
Trinity on the Westminster foundation in October of the same year, and
took his degree of B.A. in 1654. The only recorded incident of his
college residence is some unexplained act of disobedience to the
vice-master, for which he was "put out of commons" and "gated" for a
fortnight. His father died in 1654, leaving him master of two-thirds of
a small estate near Blakesley, worth about L60 a year. The next three
years he is said to have spent at Cambridge. In any case they were spent
somewhere in study; for his first considerable poem bears indisputable
marks of scholarly habits, as well as of a command of verse that could
not have been acquired without practice.

The middle of 1657 is given as the date of his leaving the university to
take up his residence in London. In one of his many subsequent literary
quarrels, it was said by Shadwell that he had been clerk to Sir Gilbert
Pickering, his cousin, who was chamberlain to Cromwell; and nothing is
more likely than that he obtained some employment under his powerful
cousin when he came to London. He is said to have lived at first in the
house of his first publisher, Herringman, with whom he was connected
till 1679, when Jacob Tonson began to publish his books. He first
emerged from obscurity with his _Heroic Stanzas_ (1659) to the memory of
the Protector. That these stanzas should have made him a name as a poet
does not appear surprising when we compare them with Waller's verses on
the same occasion. Dryden took some time to consider them, and it was
impossible that they should not give an impression of his intellectual
strength. Donne was his model; it is obvious that both his ear and his
imagination were saturated with Donne's elegiac strains when he wrote;
yet when we look beneath the surface we find unmistakable traces that
the pupil was no