Not long after, in February 1684, Charles II. became, for the first time in his life, serious, as he felt death--the proverbial terror of kings--rapidly rushing upon him. He tried to hide the great and terrible fact from his eyes under the shield of a wafer. He died suddenly--a member of the "holy Roman Catholic Church,"--and much regretted by all his mistresses; and apparently by Dryden, who had been preparing the opera of "Albion and Albanius," to commemorate the king's triumph over the Whigs, when this event turned his harp into mourning, and his organ into the voice of them that weep. He set himself to write a poem which should at once express regret for the set, and homage to the rising, sun. This was his "Threnodia Augustalis," a very unequal poem, but full of inimitable passages, and discovering all that careless greatness which characterised the genius of the poet. Charles II. had, at Dryden's request, to whom arrears for four years had been due, raised his laureate salary to £300. The additional hundred dropped at the king's death, and James was mean enough even to curtail the annual butt of sack. He probably had little hope of converting the author of "Religio Laici" to his faith, else he would not have withheld what Charles had so recently granted. Afterwards, when he ascertained that an interesting process was going on in Dryden's mind, tending to Popery, he perhaps thought that a little money cast into the crucible might materially determine the projection in the proper way; or perhaps the _prospect_ produced, or at least accelerated, the _process_. We admire much in Scott's elaborate and ingenious defence of Dryden's change of faith; and are ready to grant that it was only a Pyrrhonist, not a Protestant, who became a Papist after all--but there was, as Dr Johnson also thinks, an ugly _coincidence_ between the pension and the conversion. Grant that it was not bestowed for the first time by James, it had been withheld by him, and its restoration immediately followed the change of his faith. Dr Johnson was pleased, when Andrew Miller said that he "thanked God he was done with him," to know that Miller "thanked God for anything;" and so, when we consider the blasphemy, profanity, and filth of Dryden's plays, and the unsettled and veering state of his religious and political opinions, we are almost glad to find him becoming "anything," although it was only the votary of a dead and corrupted form of Christianity. You like to see the fierce, capricious, and destructive torrent fixed, although it be fixed in ice.