struck to commemorate Shaftesbury's acquittal. Then Dryden had to take
vengeance on the literary champions of the Whig party who had opened
upon him with all their artillery. Their leader, Shadwell, had attacked
him in _The Medal of John Bayes_, which Dryden answered in October 1682
by _Mac Flecknoe, or a Satyr upon the True-Blew Protestant Poet, T.S._
This satire, in which Shadwell filled the title-role, served as the
model of the _Dunciad_. To the second part of _Absalom and Achitophel_
(November 1682), written chiefly by Nahum Tate, he contributed a long
passage of invective against Robert Ferguson, one of Monmouth's chief
advisers, Elkanah Settle, Shadwell and others. _Religio Laici_, which
appeared in the same month, though nominally an exposition of a layman's
creed, and deservedly admired as such, was not without a political
purpose. It attacked the Papists, but declared the "fanatics" to be
still more dangerous.

Dryden's next poem in heroic couplets was in a different strain. On the
accession of James, in 1685, he became a Roman Catholic. There has been
much discussion as to whether this conversion was or was not sincere. It
can only be said that the coincidence between his change of faith and
his change of patron was suspicious, and that Dryden's character for
consistency is certainly not of a kind to quench suspicion. The force of
the coincidence cannot be removed by such pleas as that his wife had
been a Roman Catholic for several years, or that he was converted by his
son, who was converted at Cambridge, even if there were any evidence for
these statements. Scott defended Dryden's conversion,--as Macaulay
denounced it, from party motives. It is worth while, however, to notice
that in his earlier defence of the English Church he exhibits a desire
for the definite guidance of a presumably infallible creed, and the case
for the Roman Church brought forward at the time may have appeared
convincing to a mind singularly open to new impressions. At the same
time nothing can be clearer than that Dryden always regarded his
literary powers as a means of subsistence, and had little scruple about
accepting a brief on any side. _The Hind and the Panther_, published in
1687, is an ingenious argument for Roman Catholicism, put into the mouth
of "a milk-white hind, immortal and unchanged." There is considerable
beauty in the picture of this tender creature, and its enemies in the
forest are not spared. One can understand