The flight of James and the accession of William and Mary threw Dryden at once out of the favor of the court, upon which to a large extent he had long depended for support. As a Jacobite he could not take the oath of allegiance; but there is hardly any doubt that under any circumstances he would have been deprived of the offices of place and profit he held. In the laureateship he was succeeded by his old antagonist Shadwell; and within a few years he saw the dignity of the position still further degraded by the appointment to it of Nahum Tate, one of the worst of the long procession of poetasters who have filled it. Dryden henceforth belonged to the party out of power. His feelings about his changed relations are shown plainly in the fine epistle with which he consoled Congreve for the failure of his comedy of the 'Double Dealer.' Yet displaced and unpensioned, and sometimes the object of hostile attack, his literary supremacy was more absolute than ever. All young authors, whether Whigs or Tories, sought his society and courted his favor; and his seat at Will's coffee-house was the throne from which he swayed the literary sceptre of England. After the revolution of 1688 Dryden gave himself entirely up to authorship. He first turned to the stage; and between 1690 and 1694 he produced five plays. With the failure in the last-mentioned year of his tragi-comedy called 'Love Triumphant,' he abandoned writing for the theatre. The period immediately following he devoted mainly to his translation of Virgil, which was published in 1697. It was highly successful; but far more reputation came to him from a large folio volume that was brought out in November 1699, under the title of 'Fables.' Its contents consisted mainly of poetical narratives founded upon certain stories of the 'Decameron,' and of the modernization of some of the 'Canterbury Tales.' In certain ways these have been his most successful pieces, and have made his name familiar to successive generations of readers. Of the tales from Boccaccio, that of 'Cymon and Iphigenia' is on the whole the most pleasing. The modernizations of Chaucer were long regarded as superior to the original; and though superior knowledge of the original has effectually banished that belief, there is on the other hand no justification for the derogatory terms which are now sometimes applied to Dryden's versions.