t literary labour indispensable to the support of his
family, although the exertion, and particularly the confinement,
occasioned by his studies, considerably impaired his health. His son
Charles had met with an accident at Rome, which was attended with a
train of consequences perilous to his health; and Dryden, anxious to
recall him to Britain, was obliged to make extraordinary exertions to
provide against this additional expense. "If it please God," he writes
to Tonson, "that I must die of over-study, I cannot spend my life better
than in preserving his." It is affecting to read such a passage in the
life of such a man; yet the necessities of the poet, like the
afflictions of the virtuous, smooth the road to immortality. While
Milton and Dryden were favoured by the rulers of the day, they were
involved in the religious and political controversies which raged around
them; it is to hours of seclusion, neglect, and even penury, that we owe
the Paradise Lost, the Virgil, and the Fables.

Among other projects, Dryden seems to have had thoughts of altering and
revising a tragedy called the "Conquest of China by the Tartars,"
written by his ancient friend and brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard. The
unkindness which had arisen between them upon the subject of blank verse
and rhyme, seems to have long since passed away; and we observe, with
pleasure, that Dryden, in the course of the pecuniary transactions about
Virgil, reckons upon the assistance of Sir Robert Howard, and consults
his taste also in the revisal of the version.[29] But Dryden never
altered the "Conquest of China," being first interrupted by the
necessity of revising Virgil, and afterwards, perhaps, by a sort of
quarrel which took place between him and the players, of whom he speaks
most resentfully in his "Epistle to Granville," upon his tragedy of
"Heroic Love," acted in the beginning of 1698.[30]

The success of Virgil encouraged Dryden about this time to turn his eyes
upon Homer; and the general voice of the literary world called upon him
to do the venerable Grecian the same service which the Roman had
received from him. It was even believed that he had fixed upon the mode
of translation, and that he was, as he elsewhere expresses it, to "fight
unarmed, without his rhyme."[31] A dubious anecdote bears, that he even
regretted he had not rendered Virgil into blank verse, and shows at the
same time, if genuine, how far he must now have disapproved of his own
at