his father prognosticated he
would begin to recover in the month of September 1697. The issue did no
great credit to the prediction; for young Dryden returned to England in
1698 in the same indifferent state of health, as is obvious from the
anxious solicitude with which his father always mentions Charles in his
correspondence. Upon the poet's death, Charles, we have seen,
administered to his effects on 10th June 1700, Lady Elizabeth, his
mother, renouncing the succession. In the next year, Granville conferred
on him the profits arising from the author's night of an alteration of
Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice;" and his liberality to the son of one
great bard may be admitted to balance his presumption in manufacturing a
new drama out of the labours of another.[76] Upon the 20th August 1704,
Charles Dryden was drowned, in an attempt to swim across the Thames, at
Datchet, near Windsor. I have degraded into the Appendix, the romantic
narrative of Corinna, concerning his father's prediction, already
mentioned. It contains, like her account of the funeral of the poet,
much positive falsehood, and gross improbability, with some slight
scantling of foundation in fact.

John Dryden, the poet's second son, was born in 1667, or 1668, was
admitted a King's Scholar in Westminster in 1682, and elected to Oxford
in 1685. Here he became a private pupil of the celebrated Obadiah
Walker, Master of University College, a Roman Catholic. It seems
probable that young Dryden became a convert to that faith before his
father. His religion making it impossible for him to succeed in England,
he followed his brother Charles to Rome, where he officiated as his
deputy in the Pope's household. John Dryden translated the fourteenth
Satire of Juvenal, published in his father's version, and wrote a comedy
entitled, "The Husband his own Cuckold," acted in Lincoln's Inn Fields
in 1696; Dryden, the father, furnishing a prologue, and Congreve an
epilogue. In 1700-1, he made a tour through Sicily and Malta, and his
journal was published in 1706. It seems odd, that in the whole course of
his journal, he never mentions his father's name, nor makes the least
allusion to his very recent death. John Dryden, the younger, died at
Rome soon after this excursion.

Erasmus Henry, Dryden's third son, was born 2d May 1669, and educated in
the Charterhouse, to which he was nominated by Charles II., shortly
after the publication of "Absalom and Achitophel."[77] He do