out L100 a year, to maintain the poet's widow and
children; enough in these times to support them in decent frugality.

Lady Elizabeth Dryden's temper had long disturbed her husband's domestic
happiness. "His invectives," says Mr. Malone, "against the married state
are frequent and bitter, and were continued to the latest period of his
life;" and he adds, from most respectable authority, that the family of
the poet held no intimacy with his lady, confining their intercourse to
mere visits of ceremony.[73] A similar alienation seems to have taken
place between her and her own relations, Sir Robert Howard, perhaps,
being excepted; for her brother, the Honourable Edward Howard, talks of
Virgil, as a thing he had learned merely by common report.[74] Her
wayward disposition was, however, the effect of a disordered imagination
which, shortly after Dryden's death, degenerated into absolute insanity,
in which state she remained until her death in summer 1714, probably,
says Mr. Malone, in the seventy-ninth year of her life.

Dryden's three sons, says the inscription by Mrs. Creed, were ingenious
and accomplished gentlemen. Charles, the eldest, and favourite son of
the poet, was born at Charlton, Wiltshire, in 1666. He received a
classical education under Dr. Busby, his father's preceptor, and was
chosen King's Scholar in 1680. Being elected to Trinity College in
Cambridge, he was admitted a member in 1683. It would have been
difficult to conceive that the son of Dryden should not have attempted
poetry; but though Charles Dryden escaped the fate of Icarus, he was
very, very far from emulating his father's soaring flight. Mr. Malone
has furnished a list of his compositions in Latin and English.[75] About
1692, he went to Italy, and through the interest of Cardinal Howard, to
whom he was related by the mother's side, he became Chamberlain of the
Household; not, as Corinna pretends, "to that _remarkably fine
gentleman_, Pope Clement XI.," but to Pope Innocent XII. His way to this
preferment was smoothed by a pedigree drawn up in Latin by his father,
of the families of Dryden and Howard, which is said to have been
deposited in the Vatican. Dryden, whose turn for judicial astrology we
have noticed, had calculated the nativity of his son Charles; and it
would seem that a part of his predictions were fortuitously fulfilled.
Charles, however, having suffered, while at Rome, by a fall, and his
health, in consequence, being much injured,