" Buckingham
quizzed fairly enough the fume and bombast of Dryden's tragedies. But
Dryden was already echoing his critics' prayer for a year "of prose and
sense." He was tired of being "the Sisyphus of the stage, to roll up a
stone with endless labour, which is perpetually falling down again." "To
the stage," he owned, "my genius never much inclined me," and he had
long had dreams, stirred no doubt by his admiration for Milton, of
undertaking some epic story. But need held him to the boards and years
passed by, and Dryden still stood in the second rank of English poetry,
outdone in comedy by men like Etherege and rivalled in tragedy by men
like Settle. Only in a single poem, that of the "Annus Mirabilis," in
1671, had he given any true indications of his surpassing powers.

[Sidenote: Dryden and the Plot.]

It was in this mood of failure and disappointment that the Popish Plot
found him. Of its reality he made no question; "a plot," he says
emphatically, "there was." But his cool good sense saw how the truth had
been "dashed and brewed with lies." What stirred him more was, as he
believed, the return of anarchy. Puritan as his training had been he had
grown up like the bulk of the men about him with a horror of the social
and religious disorders which the civil war had brought in its train. He
clung to authority as a security against revolution. It was this that
drove him from the Puritanism of his youth to the Anglican dogmatism of
the "Religio Laici," and from thence to the tempered Catholicism of the
"Hind and Panther." It was this which made him sing by turns the praises
of Cromwell and the praises of the king whom Cromwell had hunted from
one refuge to another. No man denounced the opponents of the Crown with
more ruthless invective. No man humbled himself before the throne with
more fulsome adulation. Some of this no doubt was mere flattery, but not
all of it. Dryden like his age was conscious that new currents of
feeling and opinion were sweeping him from the old moorings of mankind.
But he shrank in terror from the wide ocean over whose waters he
drifted. In religion he was a rationalist, a sceptic, whether he would
or no; but he recoiled from the maze of "anxious thoughts" which spread
before him, of thoughts "that in endless circles roll without a centre
where to fix the soul," and clung to the Church that would give him, if
not peace, at least quiet. In politics he was as much a rationalist as
in religion, b