en
followed his audience. That he deplored this is evident from some of his
later work, and we have his statement that he wrote only one play, his
best, to please himself. This was _All for Love_, which was written in
blank verse, most of the others being in rimed couplets.

During this time Dryden had become the best known literary man of London,
and was almost as much a dictator to the literary set which gathered in the
taverns and coffeehouses as Ben Jonson had been before him. His work,
meanwhile, was rewarded by large financial returns, and by his being
appointed poet laureate and collector of the port of London. The latter
office, it may be remembered, had once been held by Chaucer.

At fifty years of age, and before Jeremy Collier had driven his dramas from
the stage, Dryden turned from dramatic work to throw himself into the
strife of religion and politics, writing at this period his numerous prose
and poetical treatises. In 1682 appeared his _Religio Laici_ (Religion of a
Layman), defending the Anglican Church against all other sects, especially
the Catholics and Presbyterians; but three years later, when James II came
to the throne with schemes to establish the Roman faith, Dryden turned
Catholic and wrote his most famous religious poem, "The Hind and the
Panther," beginning:

A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged,
Fed on the lawns and in the forest ranged;
Without unspotted, innocent within,
She feared no danger, for she knew no sin.

This hind is a symbol for the Roman Church; and the Anglicans, as a
panther, are represented as persecuting the faithful. Numerous other
sects--Calvinists, Anabaptists, Quakers--were represented by the wolf,
boar, hare, and other animals, which gave the poet an excellent chance for
exercising his satire. Dryden's enemies made the accusation, often since
repeated, of hypocrisy in thus changing his church; but that he was sincere
in the matter can now hardly be questioned, for he knew how to "suffer for
the faith" and to be true to his religion, even when it meant misjudgment
and loss of fortune. At the Revolution of 1688 he refused allegiance to
William of Orange; he was deprived of all his offices and pensions, and as
an old man was again thrown back on literature as his only means of
livelihood. He went to work with extraordinary courage and energy, writing
plays, poems, prefaces for other men, eulogies for funeral occasions,--
every kind of literary wor