John Dryden was born on 9 August 1631 in the village of Aldwincle in Northamptonshire, where his maternal grandfather was Rector of All Saints. He was the eldest of the fourteen children of Erasmus and Mary Dryden, Puritan landowning gentry from the nearby village of Titchmarsh, where Dryden lived as a boy and probably received his first education. Around 1644 he was sent as a King's Scholar to Westminster, one of the most celebrated schools in the land, in which many of the most famous Englishmen of the century – including Ben Jonson, George Herbert, Abraham Cowley, Christopher Wren, and John Locke received their education. His headmaster was Dr Richard Busby, a charismatic teacher and legendarily severe disciplinarian. Dryden was later to quip to his fellow-Westminster, Charles Montagu, that Busby ‘usd to whip a Boy so long, till he made him a Confirmd Blockhead’ (Letters, 120). The religious and political ethos of Westminster was markedly different from that of Dryden's home. Busby encouraged an ethos of staunch royalism and Laudian high Anglicanism, and the Dean of Westminster was later to tell Cromwell that ‘it would never be well with the nation till Westminster was suppressed’. However Dryden reacted to these aspects of Westminster, he certainly retained a lifelong respect for Busby, and sent two of his own sons to his old school.

It was under Busby's tutelage that Dryden first became acquainted with the classical authors who were to form such a constant focus of his reading and reflection for the rest of his life. Oral repetition was a central feature of the Westminster syllabus. Boys were required to keep a commonplace book into which salient passages from classical literature were transcribed for future use as models in prose and verse composition. They were also required to make regular translations into English verse and prose from classical authors. Dryden recalled many years later that he had rendered the third satire of Persius, a notoriously difficult Latin poet, ‘for a Thursday Nights Exercise’, which, along with ‘many other’ of his ‘Exercises of this nature, in English Verse’, was ‘still in the Hands’ of his ‘Learned Master, the Reverend Doctor Busby’ (Works, iv. 293).