very creditable to his memory, and his indiscriminate admirers had
better let it alone. It would have strained the ingenuity and the
enthusiasm of Claud Halcro himself to have extracted matter for a
panegyrical ode on this conversion of "glorious John."

Admitted into the bosom of the Church, he soon found that he must prove
his faith by his works. He was employed by James to defend the reasons
of conversion to the Catholic faith alleged by Anne Duchess of York, and
the two other papers on the same subject which, found in Charles' strong
box, James had imprudently given to the world. This led him to a contest
with Stillingfleet, in which Dryden came off only second best. He next,
in an embowered walk, in a country retirement at Rushton, near his
birthplace, composed his strange, unequal, but brilliant and ingenious
poem, "The Hind and the Panther," the object of which was to advocate
King James' repeal of the Test Act, and to prove the immeasurable
superiority of the Church of Rome to that of England, as well as to all
the dissenting sects. This piece produced a prodigious clamour against
the author. Its plan was pronounced ridiculous--its argument
one-sided--its zeal assumed--and Montague and Prior, two young men then
rising into eminence, wrote a clever parody on it, entitled the "Town
and Country Mouse." In addition to this, he wrote a translation of
Varilla's "History of Heresies," and a life of Francis Xavier, the
famous apostle of the Indies, whose singular story, a tale of heroic
endurance and unexampled labours, but bedropt with the most flagrant
falsehoods, whether it be read in Dryden's easy and fascinating
narrative, or in the more gorgeous and coloured account of Sir James
Stephen, in the "Edinburgh Review," forms one of the most impressive
displays of human strength and folly, of the greatness of devoted
enthusiasm, and of the weakness and credulity of abject superstition.