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“... Norris’s embassy to the court of Jahangir’s grandson, Aurangzeb, in 1699. On the London stage, John Dryden had presented audiences with flattering parallels between Aurangzeb and James’s grandson, Charles II, in Aureng-Zebe: A Tragedy (1675). On the diplomatic stage, however, Norris’s mission was a failure. Sent to secure trading concessions for ...”

“... sinfulness, until Jesus finally shows mercy and lets her in. In Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), John Dryden rendered ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ in contemporary English, ‘not daring … to adventure on her prologue, because ’tis too licentious’. Voltaire took the opposite approach: when he reworked ...”

“... republican utopias, you could catch James Harrington at Miles’s; if you wanted literary wit, John Dryden and his mates would be at Will’s; and in the 1710s you could join in polite conversation with Addison and Steele at Button’s. If you wanted to gamble, the Young Man’s was a good bet; if experimental natural philosophy was your thing, Royal ...”

“... by his nephew, of securing the rights to the works of writers such as Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden, and endowing them with the prestige of a national canon. His anthologies of new verse, launched in 1684 as Miscellany Poems … by the Most Eminent Hands, continued for decades and made him an arbiter of modern writing: Alexander Pope made his print debut ...”

“... Farewel, too little and too lately known,’ Dryden wrote in a pompous, self-serving poem prefixed to John Oldham’s Remains in Verse and Prose (1684). Oldham had died of smallpox the previous December, at the age of 30, at the house of the Earl of Kingston, a young nobleman who had recently become his patron ...”

“... When, in 1682, the Reverend Mr Busby, headmaster of Westminster School, expelled or suspended John Dryden’s son, the poet wrote him an excellent letter. Busby had already been at Westminster for more than forty years: he was that terrifying thing, a Great Headmaster. Moreover, Dryden had himself been among his pupils and knew well enough what tricks the old autocrat could get up to ...”

“... much with our weddings and how many children were born – and so are Horace, Charles Kingsley, Dryden, Tennyson – Locksley Hall bursts into new ebullience, together with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And then, per contra, we have some ingenious and penetrating little lyric about the oddities of life, in a style that Gay or Prior would recognise. The ...”

“... one professional. In the mid-17th century, the Royal Society established a committee including Dryden, John Evelyn and Edmund Waller, ‘to improve the English tongue’. Nothing much came of this. In 1658, Milton’s nephew Edward Philips had published a New World of English Words which reached its seventh edition by ...”

“... pioneering work, a rich seed which has produced a sacred wood. However, it wasn’t until Dryden’s translation of 1697 that the Aeneid became naturalised as a major English poem. Like Gavin Douglas, Dryden writes out of pride in his nation and his native language, and he aims to create a consolidating, monumental ...”

“... is why Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are read all over the world while Pushkin, despite the efforts of John Fennell, Antony Wood. DM. Thomas and Vladimir Nabokov, remains primarily a writer for readers of Russian. The myriad imperfections of rendering in any translation of a novel do not seriously impede what looks like genuine literary enjoyment: we weep for Anna ...”

“... It shaped the canon of English poetry and set the terms for critical discussion of Donne, Milton, Dryden, Swift and Pope over at least two centuries. This is all the more amazing given that its own life began effectively with a commercial problem. In 1777 the Scottish printer John Bell was flooding the London market with ...”

“... completed) drama of modern life called ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, as well as a translation of Saint-John Perse’s prose poem Anabase, which didn’t appear until 1930. ‘I thought my poetry was over after “the Hollow Men”,’ he acknowledged later. It was some years before he discovered that this wasn’t the case. Overwhelmingly, these letters give us ...”

“... and financial pressures, and as its principal exemplum the troubled career of the poet laureate, Dryden. In The Enemy’s Country, based on the 1986 Clark Lectures, Hill considers a number of 17th-century writers, including Dryden, Donne, Henry Wotton, Izaac Walton and Hobbes, together with Ezra Pound. The essays focus ...”

“... Shortly after Oliver Cromwell’s death in September 1658, Dryden wrote some ‘Heroique Stanza’s, Consecrated to the Glorious Memory of his most Serene and Renowned Highnesse Oliver Late Lord Protector of this Common Wealth, &c’. His poem’s sentiments were as reverential as its title. After maintaining that Cromwell’s ‘Grandeur he deriv’d from Heav’n alone’, that all his ‘parts [were] so equal perfect’, and that ‘Peace was the Prize of all his toils and care,’ Dryden predicted that ‘His Ashes in a peaceful Urne [would] rest ...”

“... Hume, ‘Fielding quickly made himself the most dominant professional playwright in London since Dryden.’ There is a report in a recently discovered manuscript by the poet and playwright John Hoadly of Fielding arriving at rehearsals incongruously decked out ‘in a compleat Suit of Black Velvet’ – the outfit for ...”