Unavailing and
mutual reproaches, for unthankful and pitiless negligence, waste
themselves in newspaper paragraphs, elegies, and funeral processions;
the debt to genius is then deemed discharged, and a new account of
neglect and commemoration is opened between the public and the next who
rises to supply his room. It was thus with Dryden: His family were
preparing to bury him with the decency becoming their limited
circumstances, when Charles Montague, Lord Jefferies, and other men of
quality, made a subscription for a public funeral. The body of the poet
was then removed to the Physicians' Hall, where it was embalmed, and lay
in state till the 13th day of May, twelve days after the decease. On
that day, the celebrated Dr. Garth pronounced a Latin oration over the
remains of his departed friend; which were then, with considerable
state, preceded by a band of music, and attended by a numerous
procession of carriages, transported to Westminster Abbey, and deposited
between the graves of Chaucer and Cowley.
The malice of Dryden's contemporaries, which he had experienced through
life, attempted to turn into burlesque these funeral honours. Farquhar,
the comic dramatist, wrote a letter containing a ludicrous account of
the funeral;[51] in which, as Mr. Malone most justly remarks, he only
sought to amuse his fair correspondent by an assemblage of ludicrous and
antithetical expressions and ideas, which, when accurately examined,
express little more than the bustle and confusion which attends every
funeral procession of uncommon splendour.
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