ndantly prove that he had never sought with
diligence and anxiety to learn the truth, and that his knowledge both
of the Church which he quitted and of the Church which he entered was of
the most superficial kind. Nor was his subsequent conduct that of a
man whom a strong sense of duty had constrained to take a step of awful
importance. Had he been such a man, the same conviction which had led
him to join the Church of Rome would surely have prevented him from
violating grossly and habitually rules which that Church, in common with
every other Christian society, recognises as binding. There would
have been a marked distinction between his earlier and his later
compositions. He would have looked back with remorse on a literary
life of near thirty years, during which his rare powers of diction
and versification had been systematically employed in spreading moral
corruption. Not a line tending to make virtue contemptible, or to
inflame licentious desire, would thenceforward have proceeded from his
pen. The truth unhappily is that the dramas which he wrote after his
pretended conversion are in no respect less impure or profane than those
of his youth. Even when he professed to translate he constantly wandered
from his originals in search of images which, if he had found them in
his originals, he ought to have shunned. What was bad became worse in
his versions. What was innocent contracted a taint from passing
through his mind. He made the grossest satires of Juvenal more gross,
interpolated loose descriptions in the tales of Boccaccio, and polluted
the sweet and limpid poetry of the Georgics with filth which would have
moved the loathing of Virgil.

The help of Dryden was welcome to those Roman Catholic divines who were
painfully sustaining a conflict against all that was most illustrious in
the Established Church. They could not disguise from themselves the fact
that their style, disfigured with foreign idioms which had been picked
up at Rome and Douay, appeared to little advantage when compared with
the eloquence of Tillotson and Sherlock. It seemed that it was no light
thing to have secured the cooperation of the greatest living master of
the English language. The first service which he was required to perform
in return for his pension was to defend his Church in prose against
Stillingfleet. But the art of saying things well is useless to a man who
has nothing to say; and this was Dryden's case. He soon found himself
une