'A Clown; a Stupid Rustick; a Low Dolt'

If anyone still reads John Dryden (1631-1700), it’s likely such satirical warhorses of the anthologies as “Absalom and Achitophel” or “Mac Flecknoe.” That’s how I was introduced to Dryden, by a professor who loved his work and stressed how another of her favorites, Alexander Pope, adopted Dryden as a poetic model. She gave me a permanent taste for both of them, as well as Swift, Johnson, Sterne, Smollett and others of that era. Even after more than three centuries, Dryden’s Virgil is eminently readable, and was the first translation of the Aeneid I read, in the Modern Library edition. 

During his lifetime, Dryden’s final work, Fables, Ancient and Modern, published the year of his death, was much admired by Pope and Congreve, and later by Dr. Johnson’s friend, the critic Joseph Warton. Later still, Hazlitt, naturally, dissented. The collection includes a few poems by Dryden himself, but mostly it consists of adaptations of work by earlier writers, including Chaucer and Boccaccio. The collection contains twenty-one tales, more than 11,000 lines of verse. I’ve just read Dryden’s version of the latter’s “Cymon and Iphigenia,” which is great fun. And Dryden taught me a new word:

 

“The slavering Cudden, prop’d upon his Staff,   

Stood ready gaping with a grinning Laugh,

To welcome her awake, nor durst begin 

To speak, but wisely kept the Fool within.”

 

Cudden was new to me, and could prove useful. The OED defines it pithily: “a born fool, a dolt.” The most recent citation dates from 1719, so the word earns the label “obsolete.” I prefer Dr. Johnson’s definition: “a clown; a stupid rustick; a low dolt: a low bad word.”