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 L300. 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 o