Poet Squab
Claude Rawson, 3 March 1988
John Dryden and His World
by James Anderson Winn..
Yale, 651 pp., £19.95, November 1987,0 300 02994 2 Show More
by James Anderson Winn..
Yale, 651 pp., £19.95, November 1987,
“... There is an anonymous portrait of Dryden, ‘dated 1657 but probably 1662’, which shows a full-fed figure with plump alert eyes, comfortable and predatory. He seems poised between repletion and dyspepsia, like a bewigged Nigel Lawson, arrested for all time at the moment of incipient eructation. James Winn says: ‘His short, squat figure later led his enemies to call him “Poet Squab”, and the plump birdlike face in this picture justifies the nickname ... ”