you traduced a nobleman;
Who for that crime rebuked you on the head,
And you had been expelled, had you not fled."

[28] He received this degree by dispensation from the Archbishop of
Canterbury.

[29] Prologue to the University of Oxford.

[30] Jonathan Dryden, elected a scholar from Westminster into Trinity
College, Cambridge, in 1656, of which he became fellow in 1662, was
author of some verses in the Cambridge Collections in 1661, on the death
of the Duke of Gloucester, and the marriage of the Princess of Orange;
and in 1662, on the marriage of Charles II., which have been imputed to
our author. An order, quoted by Mr. Malone, for abatement of the
commencement-money paid at taking the Bachelor's degree, on account of
poverty, applies to Jonathan, not to John Dryden.--MALONE, vol. i. p.17,
note.

[31] [This letter will be found in its proper place. It is the sole
personal utterance in prose, and almost the only biographical fact of
importance that we have for the first thirty years of Dryden's life.
Upon it, an entirely baseless romance has been built of disappointed
love and parental unkindness. There is absolutely no evidence that
Dryden ever seriously pretended to his cousin's hand, or that he was
rejected, or that this rejection was due to his uncle's influence.--ED.]

[32] Elegy on Lady Haddington, in Corbet's Poems, p. 121. Gilchrist's
edition.

[33] Sir John Pickering, father of Sir Gilbert, married Susan, the
sister of Erasmus Dryden, the poet's father. But Mary Pickering, the
poet's mother, was niece to Sir John Pickering; and thus his son Sir
Gilbert was _her_ cousin-german also.

[34] In one lampoon, he is called "fiery Pickering." Walker, in his
"Sufferings of the Clergy," prints Jeremiah Stevens' account of the
Northamptonshire committee of sequestration in which the character of
Pickering, one of the members of that oppressive body, is thus drawn:--
"Sir G---- P---- had an uncle, whose ears were cropt for a libel on
Archbishop Whitgift; was first a presbyterian, then an independent, then
a Brownist, and afterwards an anabaptist. He was a most furious, fiery,
implacable man; was the principal agent in casting out most of the
learned clergy; a great oppressor of the country; got a good manor for
his booty of the E. of R. and a considerable purse of gold by a plunder
at Lynn in Norfolk." He is thus characterized by an angry limb of the
commonwealth, whose republican spirit was incensed by Cro