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 | | John Dryden (1631-1700) English poet, born on or about the 8th of August 1631, at Aidwinkle, in Northamptonshire was of Cumberland stock, though his family had been settled for three generations in Northamptonshire, had acquired estates and a baronetcy, and intermarried with landed families in that county. |
 | | Dryden chooses, as it were, a fragment of a historical action, a single moment during which motives play within a narrow circle, the culminating point in the relations between his two personages. |
 | | Dryden took the field as a satirist towards the close of 1681, on the side of the court, at the moment when Shaftesbury, baffled in his efforts to exclude the duke of York from the throne as a papist, and secure the succession of the duke of Monmouth, was waiting his trial for high treason. |
| www.stillman.org /ebdryden.htm (5157 words) |
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