Dryden, again, who had aspired to write an Arthuriad, as he tells us, “for the honour of his native country,” found himself obliged to turn to more immediately profitable forms of literature,--“being encouraged only with fair words by Charles II., my little salary ill-paid, and no prospect of a future subsistence.”[120] But it is doubtful whether he was quite the kind of poet who, in Scott’s words, could “in immortal strain Have raised the Table Round again, But that a ribald King and Court Bade him toil on to make them sport.” Scott’s assumption, at any rate, is scarcely justified by the character of the “dramatic opera” called _King Arthur, or the British Worthy_, which Dryden composed shortly before Charles II.’s death. This “opera” was written with a courtly, if not exactly a patriotic, motive; it was meant to be a glorification of King Charles’s public policy, but, unfortunately, Charles died before any performance of it could be given. It was produced on the stage, ultimately, in 1691, to music by Purcell; but, at that time, William and Mary were the reigning sovereigns, so that the original point of the play was lost, and it had to be “improved” to suit the changed conditions of the day. Thus, what Scott calls an “ingenious political drama” was turned into “a mere fairy-tale” without “any meaning beyond extravagant adventure.”[121] The story of Arthur, also, is in many of its main features turned in this play into something very different from its familiar forms up to Dryden’s time. Several new characters are introduced into it, the most notable being a blind girl, Emmeline,--a creature of Dryden’s own invention,--who, in defiance of all tradition and of Guinevere’s well-attested rights, becomes the wife of “the British Worthy.”