the independent blaze of Athenian speculation from the tributary gleam of Deistical philosophy.

During the interval between the publication of his two argumentative poems, Dryden apostatised to the Roman Catholic faith. The motives of his change have vexed his biographers and his critics. He is branded upon one side as a sycophant who sold first his politics and then his religion to the Court; and he is defended upon another as a conscientious seceder from the Anglican Church. The secession of the Court was, no doubt, very infectious; and the favour of James may have been as important to the pecuniary circumstances of a laureate as to the ambition of a public man. The fact that Dryden has specially excepted from attack, in the Preface to the Hind and Panther, those sections of the Established Church and of the Dissenting Bodies which had expressed their acquiescence in the ecclesiastical policy of the Crown, implies, undoubtedly, that he was actuated at least as much by political as by religious zeal. And in professing the tenets of the Gallican Church, he united with the King in the controversy which had divided the Romish Communion.*

But there are other circumstances which, though they may not vindicate the purity of his motives, account for his secession upon independent grounds. The plea, indeed, which a paradoxical biographer might plausibly set up, in reference to this question, is, that Dryden never seceded at all from the Anglican to the Romish Church. The poet was probably a sincere believer in the leading doctrines of the Church of Rome, but he clearly was never a believer in the distinctive doctrines of the Church of England. The Hind and the Panther' faithfully records the controversial opinions of the Romish faith, or at least of its Gallican branch; but the Religio Laici does not express the acknowledged views of any single church within the Protestant communion. The levity of the court of Charles II. was

Mr. Bell has relieved, indeed, the memory of the poet from an imputation which his assertion in the Hind and Panther, that he had gained no temporal advantage from his secession, had served to throw on his veracity. For James conferred on him an annuity immediately after, and therefore probably in consequence of, his secession. This annuity, it appears from an Exchequer warrant, dated 1684, which Mr. Bell publishes, was, in theory, the confirmation of a grant made to Dryden by Charles II. Yet it is very doubtful whether this grant, which must have already been cancelled by James, would have been revived, but for the circumstance of the poet's change of religion; and the imputation can therefore, perhaps, be simply reduced to disingenuousness.

scarcely compatible with any serious consideration of religious truth; and, accordingly, twenty years after the Restoration, when Dryden appears to have first directed his attention to theology, he propounded a doctrine which, if rigorously analysed, would be found to approximate at least as nearly to the Romish as to the Anglican communion.

The difference between his theory of private judgment, as enunciated in the Religio Laici, and that of the Roman Catholic Church, is simply, in effect, that the poet advocates from expediency what the ecclesiastic demands of right. Dryden recommends in theory that very compromise of opinion for the sake of peace, which the Church of Rome maintains in practice for the sake of political unity. It was the wise policy of the Church of England, with a view at once of obviating individual compromise, and of preserving the general cohesion of its members, to grant a certain latitude of interpretation in respect of certain doctrines. A diversity of opinion was permitted: but that diversity, although the exact line of demarcation may not always have been very clearly drawn, was prescribed and limited. The Church of Rome, on the other hand, by once acknowledging in practice the subordination of individual opinion to external unity, introduced a latitude which was indefinite and unlimited. Professing outwardly a unity of faith from which the idiosyncrasies of private reason inevitably recoiled, she established in effect a latitudinarianism at which such prelates as Hoadley would have stood aghast; and her intolerance of doctrinal distinctions was not incompatible with moral evasions of the rigour of religious truth. When, therefore, Dryden had acknowledged the expediency of a private compromise of a sense of truth, he was clearly nearer to the Roman than to the English system. The Religio Laici recognises the necessity of authentic tradition to a right interpretation of Scripture; and it insists on the antecedent impossibility of a distinction between authentic and corrupt tradition. Consequently its author had already arrived at the conclusion that, whether Scripture might be interpreted in the Church of Rome or not, it at least could not be interpreted elsewhere. Is the transition a difficult one from a sense of paramount expediency to a sense of truth? And yet the Religio Laici' is the poem which has been held up as Dryden's vindication of the distinctive principles of Protestantism. It was rather the apology and the offspring of the scepticism of his own character.

The later conduct of the poet implies undoubtedly that his change of opinion was not produced by a conscientious impulse. His secession, therefore, was to be justified rather by the con

version of the reason than by the conversion of the heart. Bearing, then, this distinction in mind, we may acknowledge the probable sincerity of the following passage, viewed as a selfvindication, whilst we acknowledge its poetical beauty, viewed as an address to the Deity:-

'O teach me to believe thee thus concealed,

And search no farther than thyself revealed;
But her alone for my director take

Whom thou hast promised never to forsake.

My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires;

My manhood, long misled by wandering fires,

Followed false lights; and when their glimpse was gone,
My pride struck out new sparkles of her own.

Such was I, such by nature still I am,

Be thine the glory, and be mine the shame!

Good life be now my task, -my doubts are done.'

But there is no valid evidence to support the assumption that Dryden wrote the Hind and the Panther at the dictation of the Court. There is, in fact, a preponderating evidence in support of an opposite hypothesis. The poem was written in direct opposition to the course ultimately pursued by the Crown. There were two schemes under which it was hoped, at different times, that the ascendancy of the Roman Catholics might be re-established. The one involved the alliance of the Dissenters, the other that of the Church of England. But as the Anglican ecclesiastics began to shrink from the results of their doctrine of passive obedience, the King determined to unite the Romanists and the Dissenting Sects in opposition to the Established Communion. His policy, which was finally announced in the Declaration of Indulgence, on the 4th of April, 1687, had long been wavering. So early as the preceding January, the disposition of the Court to the alliance of the Dissenters was observed by those around it. If Dryden had written at the dictation of the Crown, he would probably have been put into possession, without delay, of the gradual change in the views of the sovereign. The poem was published about a fortnight after the appearance of the Declaration. Now the interval of nearly three months between the publication and the first observation of a change in the policy of the Court, would have sufficed for the indication of a corresponding change-for Dryden must have been a very rapid writer-through a great proportion of the poem. But the fact is that this corresponding change is only observable in two episodical fables, which are thrown into the third book, as clearly later conceptions, and represent the labour of but a few days.

The Declaration, therefore, clearly took Dryden by surprise. The Laureate would not intentionally have denounced the very party who were about to form the alliance of the Court. He evidently thought he had written a capital poem, cursed the wayward conduct of the King, and set to work to extricate himself from the dilemma in which it had placed him between Court favour and literary fame. Accordingly, he published in the preface a counter-declaration, in which he asserted that his sentiments did not apply to those, of whatever persuasion, who had addressed the King in approbation of his policy. This is further illustrated by the internal evidence of the two episodical fables. In one of these, the Fable of the Swallows,' the Catholics defer their migration in consequence of the brightening of their prospects; in the other, the Fable of the Doves,' the Anglican clergy are assailed in a spirit of invective wholly inconsistent with the description of the Panther in other parts of the poem.

The distinctive character of Dryden's design consists in the adaptation of the principle of Fable to religious controversy, as it had already been adapted by the elder poets to political satire. The originality of the poem rests, therefore, not in its allegorical construction, but in the application of allegory to a disquisition upon truth. To clothe the animal creation with unnatural characteristics is the nearly inevitable attribute of all allegoric fable. Yet it is this very feature of Dryden's scheme which has been assailed by Johnson, Montague, and Prior as an absurd novelty.

Now it is certain that this criticism is directed against that very attribute of poetic fable which, beyond almost all others, is to be defended by prescriptive sanction. We need not advert to the venerable authority of Esop, nor to the confirmation of that authority by La Fontaine. Yet no writers are more deeply involved in Johnson's censure. The precedents of the Romantic literature admit of closer application to the question at issue than those which are supplied by the authors and the copyists of the ancient style. Chaucer, in his tale of the Nun's Priest,' has not only endowed a cock with the faculties of an astrologer, and a hen with the functions of a physician, but he has done so as the means of educing a satirical allegory. Spenser, in Mother Hubbard's tale, makes the lion throw off his skin in the sultriness of a summer night; and he vindicates the design of Dryden from another criticism of Montague, by representing the foreign animals which he introduces as natural inhabitants of this country. So plainly did his political satire assail the administration of Lord Burleigh, that he afterwards admitted that Mother Hubbard' had lost him the friendship of a great

man. There is an ancient German allegory, written as a political satire, which is in relation to the modern literature of Germany in some respect what the songs of the Troubadours are in relation to the later literature of Romance. This allegory, which represents the intrigues of different animals at the court of a lion, we must instantly condemn as an absurdity, upon the reasoning of Johnson, unless we can suppose the denizens of the forest to enjoy a common political organisation. The story has become more familiar since Johnson's day, in consequence of its reproduction by Goethe. But the ancient fable was itself translated by Caxton into English nearly three centuries before Johnson wrote.

The object of an allegoric satire is not the creature of the fable, but the person or thing satirised. The ostensible character is subordinated to another, and a real character. If this subordination were not maintained, the principle of allegory would be lost in the principle of similitude. A criticism, therefore, on the design of an allegorical poem must be founded exclusively on the applicability of the satire to its object; and it can scarcely take cognisance of the monstrosity of the fable. Sir Walter Scott very aptly defends the scheme of Dryden on the example of Jotham's Parable of the Trees.' What,' he asks, we quote his words from memory'absurd than the assembly of the trees for the election of a king? And yet, is not this production allowed to be one of the finest allegories that has ever been written?'

can seem more

Dryden certainly creates his representations in the poem of the Hind and the Panther, with great allegorical fidelity. The Roman Catholic Church, which is his standard of purity and truth, is portrayed in a milk-white Hind'-the Church of England, in the Panther, the fairest creature of the spotted 'kind.' The Dissenting Sects are personified, each in some animal possessing a salient characteristic in common with the community it represents. The drift of the fable is thus easily perceived by all, but a few perhaps of the more bigoted of the traduced sectaries, who cannot or will not see their likeness or caricature.

The Church parties of the age of James the Second did not correspond so nearly in reality as in name to the Church parties of the present day. The divisions of the Anglican communion at that time consisted, indeed, of the High and the Low; but the former were the principal supporters of the doctrine of nonresistance, while the politics of the High Church party of the nineteenth century are supposed to be directed to the emancipation of religion from the alleged thraldom of the State. The Low