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John Dryden and the Royal Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Claude Lloyd
Claude Lloyd*
Affiliation:
University of New Hampshire
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Extract

For over a hundred years critics and biographers, in commenting on Dryden's interest in experimental science, have assumed that he was an active member of the Royal Society. That Dryden's name was connected with the early affairs of the Society seems to have been discovered by Andrew Kippis and announced by him in the following note to his account of Dryden's life in the second edition of Biographia Britannica.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , December 1930 , pp. 967 - 976
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1930

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References

1 Biographia Britannica .... 2nd. ed., London, 1793, V, 385n.

2 See The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden .... London, 1800, I, 49–50.

3 The Works of John Dryden, illustrated with notes, historical, critical, and explanatory, and a life of the author, by Sir Walter Scott, Bart. Revised and corrected by George Saintsbury. Edinburgh and London, 1882–1893. I, 47.

4 The Poetry of John Dryden. New York, 1920. pp. 18–19.

5 Louis I. Bredvold, “Dryden, Hobbes, and the Royal Society,” Mod. Philol. XXV, 435 and 438.

6 Thomas Thomson, History of the Royal Society, from its Institution to the End of the Eighteenth Century .... London, 1812. See pp. 2–3n; Appendix IV, p. xxii.

7 The Record of the Royal Society of London, 3d ed., London, 1912. See p. 20.

8 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge. London, 1667. p. 53. Sprat, unaware of the earlier meetings in London, refers to the later ones at Oxford.

9 See “Some Account of the Life of Dr. Isaac Barrow” in The Theological Works of Isaac Barrow. Napier ed., Cambridge, 1859, I, xi.

10 Ibid., p. lxii.

11 See Dryden's Life of Plutarch, Works, XVII, 55.

12 Op. cit.

13 Diary, February 3, 1663–4.

14 Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London for improving Natural Knowledge .... London, 1756, I, 125 ff.

15 Ibid., I, 236.

16 Ibid., I, 259.

17 Ibid., I, 274.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., I, 407.

20 Ibid., I, 499–500. John Evelyn, writing to Pepys twenty-five years later, says that this committee held three or four meetings, but does not mention Dryden as attending them. See Diary, Bray ed. III, 456.

21 Ibid., I, 472.

22 Ibid., I, 498.

23 Ibid., II, 7.

24 Ibid., II, 57. Meetings were suspended because of the plague.

25 Ibid., II, 64n.

26 Ibid., II, 64.

27 Ibid., II, 65.

28 Ibid., II, 81.

29 Ibid., II, 80.

30 Ibid., II, 85.

31 Ibid., II, 101.

32 Ibid., II, 118.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid., II, 213.

35 See p. 431 ff. Three of the four names that were dropped along with Dryden's do not appear in this list. It seems impossible to account for the appearance of the fourth, that of Vermuyden, in Sprat's list.

36 See the first two lines of the third stanza and Dryden's explanatory note. Boyle's ideas are developed in his History of Fluidity and Firmness and The Sceptical Chemist, and are summarized in his Essay about the Origin and Virtues of Gems.