Dryden added to the duties of Court Poet those of political
pamphleteer and theological controversialist. The strength of his
attachment to the office, his sense of the honor it conferred, and his
appreciation of the salary we may infer from the potent influence such
considerations exercised upon his conversion to Romanism. In the
admirable portrait, too, by Lely, he chose to be represented with the
laurel in his hand. After his dethronement, he sought every occasion
to deplore the loss of the bays, and of the stipend, which in the
increasing infirmity and poverty of his latter days had become
important. The fall of James necessarily involved the fall of his
Laureate and Historiographer. Lord Dorset, the generous but sadly
undiscriminating patron of letters, having become Lord Chamberlain, it
was his duty to remove the reluctant Dryden from the two places,--a
duty not to be postponed, and scarcely to be mitigated, so violent was
the public outcry against the renegade bard. The entire Protestant
feeling of the nation, then at white heat, was especially ardent
against the author of the "Hind and Panther," who, it was said, had
treated the Church of England as the persecutors had treated the
primitive martyr, dressed her in the skin of a wild beast, and exposed
her to the torments of her adversaries. It was not enough to eject him
from office,--his inability to subscribe the test oaths would have
done so much,--but he was to be replaced by that one of his political
and literary antagonists whom he most sincerely disliked, and who
still writhed under his lash. Dorset appears to have executed the
disagreeable task with real kindness. He is said to have settled upon
the poet, out of his own fortune, an annuity equal to the lost
pension,--a statement which Dr. Johnson and Macaulay have repeated
upon the authority of Prior. What Prior said on the subject may be
found in the Dedication of Tonson's noble edition of his works to the
second Earl of Dorset:--"When, as Lord Chamberlain, he was obliged to