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Notes and documents: Dryden and Dorset in 1692: a new record.

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Charles Sackville (1638-1706), known in his youth as Lord Buckhurst and later as Earl of Middlesex and Earl of Dorset, was among John Dryden's earliest patrons. The poet dedicated his Essay of Dramatick Poesie to Buckhurst in 1667, and the two men remained in frequent contact throughout Dryden's career. Their friendship even survived an awkward moment in 1689, when Dorset, appointed Lord Chamberlain to William and Mary in recognition of his active support of their cause, had the unpleasant task of removing the Catholic convert Dryden from his offices as Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal. With characteristic generosity, the Earl softened the blow with a gift of money, a kindness Dryden gratefully acknowledged in the preface to his Satires of Juvenal and Persius (1693), another work dedicated to Dorset:

I must ever acknowledge, to the Honour of your Lordship, and the Eternal Memory of your Charity, that since this Revolution, wherein I have patiently suffer'd the Ruin of my small Fortune, and the loss of that poor Subsistence which I had from two Kings, whom I had serv'd more Faithfully than Profitably to my self; then your Lordship was pleas'd, out of no other Motive, but your own Nobleness, without any Desert of mine, or the least Sollicitation from me, to make me a most bountiful Present, which at that time, when I was most in want of it, came most seasonably and unexpectedly to my Relief. (1)

There is no primary evidence to tell us exactly when Dorset made this present or how large it was. Matthew Prior, in 1709, claimed that Dorset had replaced Dryden's lost salary with "an Equivalent out of his own Estate," (2) but Dryden speaks of only one present, not a continuing pension, and the displaced Laureate was in frequent financial difficulty during the final decade of his life. I should think it more likely that the present to which Dryden refers here was a one-time event, made at the time of the poet's removal from office.

Two eighteenth-century anecdotes, printed long after both men were dead, record purported instances of Dorset's generosity to Dryden. In one, the poet finds a banknote...

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