Page:Poetical Works of John Oldham.djvu/20

10 medical writer, celebrated amongst his contemporaries by a controversy in which he was engaged on the theory of the transfusion of the blood. Lower appears to have infected Oldham with his enthusiasm, and to have induced him to devote his unoccupied hours to the study of medicine, which, with the caprice of a new passion, he followed sedulously for a whole year, and then abandoned to return to his first love.

At the close of Oldham's engagement, Sir William Hicks proposed that he should accompany his son on his travels into Italy. But, eager to test his powers in a different arena, Oldham declined the offer. The success of his poems made him anxious to escape from the bondage of tuition; and his literary ambition naturally led him to settle in London. Here Rochester, Sedley, and the rest renewed their acquaintance with him; and through their introduction he became personally known to Dryden, who discerned in him a genius kindred to his own. A close and warm friendship grew up between them. Dryden was bringing out his Religio Laici, and his opinions had not yet undergone that change which might have placed an insuperable barrier between him and the author of the Satires on the Jesuits.

Oldham was now in the midst of that brilliant society which, fixing its centre at Will's Coffee-house, radiated to all the points of dissipation and gaiety in the metropolis. It was a