L50: _by mee_, JOHN DRIDEN" is a receipt, of date "19
October 1657," among Thurloe's papers in the Record Office--the words
"_by mee_, JOHN DRIDEN" in a neat slant hand, different from the
body of the receipt. The poet Dryden, it may be remembered, was the
cousin and client of Sir Gilbert Pickering, one of the most important
men in the Council and one of the most strongly Oliverian. The poet
left Cambridge, his biographers tell us, without his M.A. degree,
"about the middle of 1657," and it was a taunt against him afterwards
that he had begun his London life as "clerk" to Sir Gilbert. As he
cannot have got the L50 from Thurloe for nothing, the probability is
that he had been employed, through Sir Gilbert, to do some clerkly
or literary work for the Council. No harm, at all events, in
remembering the ages at this date of the three men of letters thus
linked to the Protectorate at its centre. Milton was in his
forty-ninth year, Marvell in his thirty-eighth, Dryden in his
twenty-seventh.[2]

[Footnote 1: Council Order Books of date.]

[Footnote 2: Marvell's _Rehearsal Transprosed_ (in Mr. Grosart's
edition of Marvell's Prose Works), I. 322; Receipt in Record Office
as quoted; Christie's Memoir of Dryden prefixed to Globe edition of
Dryden's Poetical Works.--That Marvell was appointed Milton's
colleague or assistant precisely in September 1657 is proved by the
fact that his first quarter's salary appears in certain accounts as
due in the following December (see Thurloe, VII. 487).]

On the day on which Dryden received his fifty pounds from Thurloe
there was this entry in the birth-registers of the parish of St.
Margaret's, Westminster: "October 19, 1657, _Katherin Milton, d. to
John, Esq., by Katherin_." The entry may be still read in the
book, with these words appended in an old hand some time afterwards:
"_This is Milton, Oliver's Secretary_." It is the record of the
birth of a daughter to Milton by his second wife, Katharine Woodcock,
in the twelfth month of their marriage. The little incident reminds
us at this point of the domestic life in Petty France; but it need
not delay us. We proceed with the Secretaryship.

Whatever share of the regular work of the Foreign Department may have
been now allotted to Marvell, an occasional letter was still required
from Milton. The following Latin dispatches were written by him
between September 1657 and Jan. 1657-8, when the Protector's Second
Parliament reassembled for its se