In 1670 he
succeeded Davenant as Poet Laureate,[10] and Howell as Historiographer,
with a yearly salary of two hundred pounds. This place he lost at the
Revolution, and had the mortification to see his old enemy and butt,
Shadwell, promoted to it, as the best poet the Whig party could muster.
If William was obliged to read the verses of his official minstrel,
Dryden was more than avenged. From 1688 to his death, twelve years later,
he earned his bread manfully by his pen, without any mean complaining,
and with no allusion to his fallen fortunes that is not dignified and
touching. These latter years, during which he was his own man again, were
probably the happiest of his life. In 1664 or 1665 he married Lady
Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. About a hundred
pounds a year were thus added to his income. The marriage is said not to
have been a happy one, and perhaps it was not, for his wife was
apparently a weak-minded woman; but the inference from the internal
evidence of Dryden's plays, as of Shakespeare's, is very untrustworthy,
ridicule of marriage having always been a common stock in trade of the
comic writers.
The earliest of his verses that have come down to us were written upon
the death of Lord Hastings, and are as bad as they can be,--a kind of
parody on the worst of Donne.
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