'O happy pair, how well you have increased! What ills in church and state have you redress'd! With teeth, untried, and rudiments of claws, Your first essay was on your native laws; Those having torn with ease, and trampled down, } Your fangs you fasten'd on the mitred crown, } And freed from God and monarchy your town. } What though your native kennel still be small, Bounded betwixt a puddle and a wall; Yet your victorious colonies are sent Where the north ocean girds the continent. Quicken'd with fire below, your monsters breed In fenny Holland, and in fruitful Tweed; And, like the first, the last affects to be Drawn to the dregs of a democracy. As, where in fields the fairy rounds are seen, A rank sour herbage rises on the green; So, springing where those midnight elves advance, Rebellion prints the footsteps of the dance. Such are their doctrines, such contempt they show } To heaven above, and to their prince below, } As none but traitors and blasphemers know. } God, like the tyrant of the skies, is placed, And kings, like slaves, beneath the crowd debased. So fulsome is their food, that flocks refuse To bite, and only dogs for physic use. As, where the lightning runs along the ground, No husbandry can heal the blasting wound; Nor bladed grass, nor bearded corn succeeds, But scales of scurf and putrefaction breeds; Such wars, such waste, such fiery tracks of dearth Their zeal has left, and such a teemless earth. But, as the poisons of the deadliest kind Are to their own unhappy coasts confined; As only Indian shades of sight deprive, And magic plants will but in Colchos thrive So presbytery and pestilential zeal Can only flourish in a commonweal. From Celtic woods is chased the wolfish crew; But ah! some pity e'en to brutes is due; Their native walks, methinks, they might enjoy, Curb'd of their native malice to destroy. Of all the tyrannies on human kind, The worst is that which persecutes the mind. Let us but weigh at what offence we strike; 'Tis but because we cannot think alike. In punishing of this, we overthrow The laws of nations and of nature too. Beasts are the subjects of tyrannic sway, Where still the stronger on the weaker prey; Man only of a softer mould is made, Not for his fellows' ruin, but their aid; Created kind, beneficent and free, The noble image of the Deity.' Dryden produced yet one more poem in the interest of the Court, his _Britannia Rediviva_, an official panegyric on the birth of the Prince of Wales, June, 1688. Literature has perhaps no more signal instance of adulation wasted and prediction falsified. Many lines are spirited, but others betray Dryden's fatal insensibility to the ridiculous in his own person: