On the birth of his son Charles, Dryden immediately cast his horoscope.
The following account of Dryden's paternal solicitude for his son, and
its result, may be taken as embellished, if not apocryphal. Evil hour,
indeed--Jupiter, Venus, and the Sun were all 'under the earth;' Mars and
Saturn were in square: eight, or a multiple of it, would be fatal to the
child--the square foretold it. In his eighth, his twenty-fourth, or his
thirty-second year, he was certain to die, though he might possibly
linger on to the age of thirty-four. The stars did all they could to
keep up their reputation. When the boy was eight years old he nearly
lost his life by being buried under a heap of stones out of an old wall,
knocked down by a stag and hounds in a hunt. But the stars were not to
be beaten, and though the child recovered, went in for the game a second
time in his twenty-third year, when he fell, in a fit of giddiness, from
a tower, and, to use Lady Elsabeth's words, was 'mash'd to a mummy.'
Still the battle was not over, and the mummy returned in due course to
its human form, though considerably disfigured. Mars and Saturn were
naturally disgusted at his recovery, and resolved to finish the
disobedient youth.
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