f 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 and
comforts in the Popish creed for one who felt with Dryden, that he had,
partly in his practice, and far more in his writings, sinned against the
laws of morality and common decency, we readily grant. Whether these
charms he legitimate, and these comforts sound, is a very different
question. Had Dryden, besides, turned Protestant again, we question if
it would have saved him his laureate pensions, and it would certainly
have blasted him for ever, under the charge of ingratitude to his
benefactor James. On the whole, this passage of the poet's life is not
very creditable to his memory, and his indiscriminate admirers had
better let it alone. It would have strained the ingenuity and the
enthusiasm of Claud Halcro himself to have extracted matter for a
panegyrical ode on this conversion of "glorious John."

Admitted into the bosom of the Church, he soon found that he must prove
his faith by his works. He was employed by James to defend the reasons
of conversion to the Catholic faith alleged by Anne Duchess of York, and
the two other papers on the same subject which, found in Charles' strong
box, James had