Absalom and Achitophel

Excerpt from Absalom and Achitophel:

‘Thebes did his green unknowing youth engage, He chooses Athens in his riper age.’

But these lines prove nothing, being probably prompted by no other motive than the desire of the moment to please an Oxford audience. A passage in a letter from Dryden to Wilmot Earl of Rochester, written in 1675, in which he sends him copies of a Prologue and Epilogue for Oxford, composed on another occasion, shows that all he wrote for Oxford may not be sincere. He tells Rochester that the pieces were approved, ‘and by the event your lordship will judge how easy ’tis to pass anything upon an University, and what gross attery the learned will endure.

But Dryden’s life at Cambridge had not passed always pleasantly. In the second year of his residence at Trinity…