Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/188

174 Pope, with boyish enthusiasm, gazed full of reverent admiration on the poet, who was at once his exemplar and his idol. It was probably here that Dryden, after he had read some of the bombastic and obscure Pindaric Odes, which the youthful genius had sent to him, told Swift, with great candour, what Swift never forgave, that he would never be a poet.

His relations to his publisher Tonson are worth a brief notice. Sometimes we find Dryden thanking him for his presents of fruit and wine, and writing to him about his snuff and sherry as Byron did to Murray about his toothpowder. Then again he is quarrelling with Tonson, writing to him to accuse him of meanness and rapacity, abusing Tonson himself, and, among others, one Richard Bentley, who, as Dryden writes to Tonson, "has cursed our Virgil so heartily," and launching anathemas against the whole tribe of publishers. "Upon trial," he says, "I find all your trade are sharpers, and you not more than others; therefore, I have not wholly left you." There is also the rather well-known anecdote of our poet begging Lord Bolingbroke, who was calling on him to outstay Tonson: "I have not completed the sheet which I promised him," said Dryden to his Lordship, "and if you