rior to
those of any man of letters in the kingdom. But James cared little for
verses and much for money. From the day of his accession he set himself
to make small economical reforms, such as bring on a government the
reproach of meanness without producing any perceptible relief to the
finances. One of the victims of his injudicious parsimony was the Poet
Laureate. Orders were given that, in the new patent which the demise of
the crown made necessary, the annual butt of sack, originally granted to
Jonson, and continued to Jonson's successors, should be omitted. [231]
This was the only notice which the King, during the first year of his
reign, deigned to bestow on the mighty satirist who, in the very crisis
of the great struggle of the Exclusion Bill, had spread terror through
the Whig ranks. Dryden was poor and impatient of poverty. He knew little
and cared little about religion. If any sentiment was deeply fixed
in him, that sentiment was an aversion to priests of all persuasions,
Levites, Augurs, Muftis, Roman Catholic divines, Presbyterian divines,
divines of the Church of England. He was not naturally a man of high
spirit; and his pursuits had been by no means such as were likely to
give elevation or delicacy to his mind. He had, during many years,
earned his daily bread by pandaring to the vicious taste of the pit,
and by grossly flattering rich and noble patrons. Selfrespect and a fine
sense of the becoming were not to be expected from one who had led a
life of mendicancy and adulation. Finding that, if he continued to call
himself a Protestant, his services would be overlooked, he declared
himself a Papist. The King's parsimony instantly relaxed. Dryden was
gratified with a pension of a hundred pounds a year, and was employed to
defend his new religion both in prose and verse.

Two eminent men, Samuel Johnson and Walter Scott, have done their best
to persuade themselves and others that this memorable conversion
was sincere. It was natural that they should be desirous to remove
a disgraceful stain from the memory of one whose genius they justly
admired, and with whose political feelings they strongly sympathized;
but the impartial historian must with regret pronounce a very different
judgment. There will always be a strong presumption against the
sincerity of a conversion by which the convert is directly a gainer. In
the case of Dryden there is nothing to countervail this presumption.
His theological writings abu