instigator of this cowardly attack was Wilmot Earl of Rochester, who conceived Dryden to be the author of a poem in circulation, an Essay on Satire, in which he was severely attacked. Sheffield Earl of Mulgrave, afterwards Marquis of Normanby and Duke of Buckinghamshire, is now known to have been the author of the poem; but at the time a belief seems to have prevailed that Dryden had written it. It is not impossible that Dryden may have seen the poem before it was put in circulation and given it some revision. Yet it is difficult to believe that Dryden, who was dependent on the King's pleasure for 300l. a year of his income would have been so imprudent as to make himself in any way responsible for a poem in which the King also was severely assailed. It is more likely that the great intimacy which existed at this period between Dryden and Mulgrave is the sole origin of the suspicion. Mulgrave positively asserted in a note in a later edition of the poem that Dryden was entirely innocent of the authorship. In a poem of Rochester's, published the year before, Dryden had been freely and unpleasantly criticised, and Rochester may have expected retaliation and been prone to conclude that Mulgrave's attack on him came from Dryden. These are Rochester's lines in his 'Allusion to the Tenth Satire of the First Book of Horace,' published in 1673.

'Well, sir, 'tis granted, I said Dryden's rhymes
Were stol'n, unequal, nay, dull many times.
What foolish patron is there found of his

So blindly partial to deny me this?

But that his plays, embroidered up and down
With wit and learning, justly pleased the town,
In the same paper as freely own.

Yet having this allowed, the heavy mass

That stuffs up his loose volumes must not pass.'

A publicly advertised offer of a reward of fifty pounds for the discovery of the offenders failed to furnish any clue to the author of this dastardly assault. This Rose Alley assault became the theme of many taunts from Dryden's bitter

adversaries after he threw himself into political controversiesz.

One of Dryden's most successful plays was the 'Spanish Friar, or the Double Discovery,' a satire on the Roman Catholic priesthood, produced at the Duke's Theatre in 1681, at a time when popular feeling was strongly excited against the Papists, and when the question of the day was the exclusion of the Duke of York from the succession because he was a Roman Catholic.

Dryden's pecuniary resources about this time had become much crippled. Through the poverty of the Treasury, his salary and pension were not paid, and in May 1684 there was a four years' accumulation of arrears. After the production of the 'Spanish Friar,' Dryden turned from play-writing to political satire. His famous political poem 'Absalom and Achitophel,' was published in November 1681. The subject of the poem, Shaftesbury and Monmouth, is said to have been suggested by the King himself. Monmouth, the Absalom of the poem, for whom his father, Charles, had always a tender affection is treated through the poem with great delicacy, but Shaftesbury, who is Achitophel, is truculently and unscrupulously assailed. Together with Shaftesbury, Buckingham, who was now one of the great Protestant opposition to the court, is described in Dryden's happiest vein, under the name of Zimri.

Shaftesbury had been lying in the Tower under a charge of high treason since July 2, 1681, and Dryden's poem was published a very few days before his trial, probably with the deliberate object of inflaming public opinion against him and helping to obtain a condemnation. The poem was published on November 17; on November 24 the bill of indictment

z One of these is worth quoting to illustrate the old pronunciation of aches as a word of two syllables as late as 1680

Thus needy Bayes, his Rose Street aches past.'

'The Protestant Satire.'

Dryden himself pronounced the word in the same manner in his first poem, the Elegy on Lord Hastings,' written in 1649. Aches rhymes with catches in Hudibras,' Part II. Canto ii. 1. 456; and see also Part III. Canto ii. 1. 407 of 'Hudibras.'

against Shaftesbury went before a London grand jury, and was thrown out. The decision was received by the people of London with acclamations, and a medal was struck by his friends in commemoration of his triumph. The sale of 'Absalom and Achitophel' was so rapid that a second edition appeared within a month. The medal celebrating Shaftesbury's escape from his persecutors furnished Dryden with a subject and a name for a new political satire, which was even more fierce against Shaftesbury than its predecessor. 'The Medal' was brought out in March 1682. This poem, as well as Absalom and Achitophel,' was published anonymously, but there was no doubt as to the authorship of either poem; and Dryden's opponents were quick to produce answers, all more remarkable for virulence than literary merit. 'The Medal of John Bayes,' by Shadwell, especially roused Dryden's anger. Shadwell and he had formerly been on friendly terms, and Dryden had written in 1678 a prologue to Shadwell's play, 'The True Widow.' They probably now quarrelled only on political grounds. There was now great fury between the partisans of the Duke of York and those of the Duke of Monmouth, and at this period arose the divisions and the names of Whig and Tory. Dryden was with the Tories, and Shadwell with Shaftesbury, Monmouth, and the Whigs. 'The Medal of John Bayes' provoked Dryden to write a new satire, ‘Mac Flecknoe,' in which Shadwell is represented as the poetical heir of Flecknoe, an inferior poet and voluminous author, who had died some five years before. 'Mac Flecknoe' was published in October 1682. In the following month a second part of ‘Absalom and Achitophel' appeared. Of this poem only a small portion was by Dryden; the bulk of the poem being the production of Nahum Tate, who afterwards translated the Psalms into verse, and became in time poet laureate. Dryden contributed two hundred lines, and he perhaps revised the whole of Tate's work.

Dryden now passed from politics to theology, and produced 'Religio Laici,' a clear and argumentative exposition in harmonious verse, of the Protestant faith. The merits of this poem are happily, and without exaggeration, described

by Dryden's friend and brother-poet, Lord Roscommon, in some lines of commendation which were prefixed to the poem on its publication :—

'Let free impartial men from Dryden learn
Mysterious secrets of a high concern,

And weighty truths, solid convincing sense,
Explained by unaffected eloquence.'

A drama, the 'Duke of Guise,' a joint work of Dryden and Nathaniel Lee, was brought out in December 1682. The two rival theatres had now found it necessary to combine, and this was the first new play brought out by the united company. In the prologue Dryden announced the play to be a parallel :

Our play's a parallel; the Holy League

Begot our covenant; Guisards got the Whig.'

In spite of Dryden's zealous championship of the court, his salary remained unpaid, and his pecuniary distress was great. In a letter to Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, a Commissioner of the Treasury, probably written in the latter part of 1683, he prays for the payment of the arrears of his salary, amounting to about 1300/., and asks also for some small appointment. He says in this letter, 'I have three sons growing to man's estate; I breed them all up to learning, beyond my fortune; but they are too hopeful to be neglected, though I want.' Of these sons, Charles, the eldest, born in 1665 or 1666, entered Trinity College, Cambridge, as a Westminster Scholar, in June 1683; the second, John, born 1667 or 1668, was now at Westminster; and the youngest, Erasmus Henry, born in May 1669, had been admitted to the Charterhouse by the nomination of the King in February 1683. It was probably in consequence of Dryden's appeal to Rochester that an Exchequer warrant for the payment of half a year's salary and a quarter's pension was issued on the 6th of May, 1684; and there is reason to believe that in time all arrears were paid to him. He received also in December 1683 the appointment of Collector of Customs in London, which may have been a profitable appointment.

Various literary labours occupied the poet at this time. In 1683 he contributed a life and a preface to a new translation of Plutarch by various hands, and he translated, by order of the King, Maimbourg's 'History of the League.' In 1684 and 1685 he published successively two volumes of poetical Miscellanies, containing, with some poems by other authors, translations of his own from Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. To the second volume his eldest son was a contributor.

On the 5th of February, 1685, Charles the Second died, and the crown passed to his brother James. Before the King's death Dryden had written an opera, ‘Albion and Albanius,' to celebrate the triumph of the court party over the opposition; this had not yet been publicly acted, but it had been several times rehearsed at court with approval. 'Albion and Albanius' was published after James's accession. But before this publication Dryden produced an ode to the memory of Charles under the title of 'Threnodia Augustalis,' in which both Charles and James were extravagantly lauded.

As, on the restoration of Charles the Second, Dryden, to win royal favour, had broken away from all the associations of his youth, and had appeared without delay as the eager champion of monarchy, so now, when a declared Roman Catholic was seated on the throne, and to be a Roman Catholic seemed the best way to advancement, he was soon convinced that it was right to be a Roman Catholic. Before his conversion James had continued him in the posts of Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal; and shortly after it, in March 1686, the additional pension of 100l. a year, which had been granted him by Charles, was renewed by letters patent. Lord Macaulay, who has represented this pension granted by James as the reward of 'Dryden's conversion, wrote before it was known to be merely a renewal of an old pension granted to Dryden by his predecessor, and he has certainly exaggerated its effects in producing that conversion; but it would be difficult to prove that Lord Macaulay has been unjust in ascribing Dryden's change of religion to interested motives.

a History of England, vol. ii. p. 96.