is a sound box on the ear.

We reach now a most interesting period in Dryden's career and one that
has provoked much controversy. In 1681 he published a long argument in
verse, entitled _Religio Laici_ (the Religion of a Layman), in which he
states his religious faith and his adherence to the Church of England.
When King James came to the throne in 1685 he made an immediate attempt
to establish the Roman Catholic faith; and now Dryden, too, turned
Romanist, and in 1687 supported his new faith in the long poetical
allegory, the _Hind and the Panther_. Of course his enemies cried
turncoat; and it certainly looked like it. Dryden was well into manhood
before the religious instinct stirred in him, and then, once waking, he
naturally walked in the beaten track. But these instincts, though roused
late, possessed the poet's impetuosity; and it was merely a natural
intensifying of the same impulse that had brought him into the Church of
England, which carried him to a more pronounced religious manifestation,
and landed him in the Church of Rome. His sincerity is certainly backed
by his acts, for when James had fled, and the staunch Protestants
William and Mary held the throne, he absolutely refused to recant, and
sacrificed his positions and emoluments. He was stripped of his royal
offices and pensions, and, bitter humiliation, the laurel, torn from his
brow, was placed on the head of that scorned jangler in verse, Shadwell.


Deprived now of royal patronage and pensions, Dryden turned again to the
stage, his old-time purse-filler; and he produced two of his best plays,
_Don Sebastian_ and _Amphitryon_. The rest of his life, however, was to
be spent, not with the drama, but in translation and paraphrase. Since
1684 he had several times published _Miscellanies_, collections of verse
in which had appeared fragments of translations. With that indefatigable