Happy the man, and happy he alone, he who can call today his own; he who, secure within, can say, tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

Whatever Dryden’s response to this was he clearly respected the Headmaster and would later send two of his own sons to school at Westminster. It was a modern epic in pentameter quatrains that establiJohn Drydend him as the preeminent poet of his generation and was crucial in his attaining the posts of Poet Laureate (1668) and historiographer royal (1670). In 1667 around the same time his dramatic career began he publiJohn Drydend Annus Mirabilis a lengthy historical poem which described the events of 1666; the English defeat of the Dutch naval fleet and the Great Fire of London.

" He was made Poet Laureate in 1668. John Dryden (9 August 1631 – 1 May 1700) was an influential English poet literary critic translator and playwright who dominated the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden.