The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I | Page 7

had been an early friend of Dryden's, and who certainly possessed a great deal of wit and talent, if he did not attain to the measure of poetic genius. His principal power lay in low comedy--his chief fault lay in his systematic and avowed imitation of the rough and drunken manners of Ben Jonson. In the eye of Dryden--whose own habits were convivial, although not to the same extent--the real faults of his opponent were his popularity as a comic writer, and his politics. Shadwell was a zealous Protestant, and the bitterest of the many who replied to the "Medal." For this he became the hero of "MacFlecknoe"--a masterly satire, holding him up to infamy and contempt--besides sitting afterwards for the portrait of Og, in the second part of "Absalom and Achitophel." Shadwell had, by and by, his revenge, by obtaining the laureateship, after the Revolution, in room of Dryden, and no doubt used the opportunity of drowning the memory of defeat in the butt of generous canary which had now for ever passed the door of his formidable rival.
Dryden's circumstances, at this time, were considerably straitened. His pension as laureate was not regularly paid; the profits from the theatre had somewhat fallen off. He tried in various ways, by prefacing a translation of "Plutarch's Lives," by publishing a miscellany of versions from Greek and Latin authors, and by writing prologues to plays and prefaces to books, to supply his exhausted exchequer. His good-humoured but heartless monarch set him on another task, for which he was never paid, writing a translation of Maimbourg's "History of the League," the object of which was to damage Shaftesbury and his party, by branding them as enemies to monarchy. In 1682 he wrote his "Religio Laici."
Not long after, in February 1684, Charles II. became, for the first time in his life, serious, as he felt death--the proverbial terror of kings--rapidly rushing upon him. He tried to hide the great and terrible fact from his eyes under the shield of a wafer. He died suddenly--a member of the "holy Roman Catholic Church,"--and much regretted by all his mistresses; and apparently by Dryden, who had been preparing the opera of "Albion and Albanius," to commemorate the king's triumph over the Whigs, when this event turned his harp into mourning, and his organ into the voice of them that weep. He set himself to write a poem which should at once express regret for the set, and homage to the rising, sun. This was his "Threnodia Augustalis," a very unequal poem, but full of inimitable passages, and discovering all that careless greatness which characterised the genius of the poet.
Charles II. had, at Dryden's request, to whom arrears for four years had been due, raised his laureate salary to ￡300. The additional hundred dropped at the king's death, and James was mean enough even to curtail the annual butt of sack. He probably had little hope of converting the author of "Religio Laici" to his faith, else he would not have withheld what Charles had so recently granted. Afterwards, when he ascertained that an interesting process was going on in Dryden's mind, tending to Popery, he perhaps thought that a little money cast into the crucible might materially determine the projection in the proper way; or perhaps the prospect_ produced, or at least accelerated, the _process. We admire much in Scott's elaborate and ingenious defence of Dryden's change of faith; and are ready to grant that it was only a Pyrrhonist, not a Protestant, who became a Papist after all--but there was, as Dr Johnson also thinks, an ugly coincidence between the pension and the conversion. Grant that it was not bestowed for the first time by James, it had been withheld by him, and its restoration immediately followed the change of his faith. Dr Johnson was pleased, when Andrew Miller said that he "thanked God he was done with him," to know that Miller "thanked God for anything;" and so, when we consider the blasphemy, profanity, and filth of Dryden's plays, and the unsettled and veering state of his religious and political opinions, we are almost glad to find him becoming "anything," although it was only the votary of a dead and corrupted form of Christianity. You like to see the fierce, capricious, and destructive torrent fixed, although it be fixed in ice.
That he found comfort in his new religion, and proved his sincerity by rearing up his children in the faith which his wife had also embraced, and by remaining a Roman Catholic after the Revolution, and to his own pecuniary loss, has often been asserted. But surely there is a point where the most inconsistent man is obliged to stop, if he would escape the character of an absolute weather-cock; and that there are charms