Far on in 1682, when our Dryden was waxing oldish, and when he had given over play-going for somewhat more of church-going, he wrote, in the same verse with his satires, and with the same ringing couplets of sound, a defence of the moderate liberal churchmanship that does not yield to ecclesiastic fetters, and that thinks widely. A little later, in 1687, he writes in a more assured vein, assuming bold defence of Romanism--as it existed in that day in England--to which faith he had become a convert. This last is a curiously designed poem, showing how little he had the arts of construction in hand; it is a long argument between a Hind and a Panther, in the shades of a forest. Was ever ecclesiasticism so recommended before? Yet there are brave and unforgetable lines in it: instance the noble rhythm, and the noble burden of that passage beginning--like a trumpet note-- “What weight of ancient witness can prevail, If private reason hold the public scale?” And again the fine tribute to “the Church:” “Thus one, thus pure, behold her largely spread, Like the fair ocean from her mother bed; From East to West triumphantly she rides; All shores are watered by her wealthy tides; The Gospel-sound, diffused from pole to pole Where winds can carry, and where waves can roll; The self-same doctrine of the sacred page Conveyed to every clime, in every age.” I think Bishop Heber had a reverent and a stealthy look upon these lines when he wrote a certain stanza of his “Greenland’s icy mountains.” The enemies of Dryden did not fail to observe that between the dates of the two professions of faith named, Charles II. had died, summoning a Papist priest, at the very last, to give him a chance--and, it is feared, a small one--of reconcilement with Heaven; furthermore, these enemies remembered that the bigot James II. had come to the throne, full of Papist zeal and of a poor hope to bring all England to a great somerset of faith. Did Dryden undergo an innocent change? Maybe; may not be. Certainly neither Lord Macaulay, nor Elkanah Settle, nor Saintsbury, nor you, nor I, have the right to go behind the veil of privacy which in such matters is every man’s privilege. How odd it seems that this Papist convert of James II.’s time, and author of so many plays that outranked Etherege in rankness, should have put the _Veni, Creator_, of Charlemagne (if it be his) into such reverent and trenchant English as carries it into so many of our hymnals. “Creator Spirit, by whose aid The world’s foundations first were laid, Come, visit every humble mind; Come, pour thy joys on humankind; From sin and sorrow set us free, And make thy temples worthy thee.”