That he found comfort in his new religion, and proved his sincerity by rearing up his children in the faith which his wife had also embraced, and by remaining a Roman Catholic after the Revolution, and to his own pecuniary loss, has often been asserted. But surely there is a point where the most inconsistent man is obliged to stop, if he would escape the character of an absolute weather-cock; and that there are charms and comforts in the Popish creed for one who felt with Dryden, that he had, partly in his practice, and far more in his writings, sinned against the laws of morality and common decency, we readily grant. Whether these charms he legitimate, and these comforts sound, is a very different question. Had Dryden, besides, turned Protestant again, we question if it would have saved him his laureate pensions, and it would certainly have blasted him for ever, under the charge of ingratitude to his benefactor James. On the whole, this passage of the poet's life is not very creditable to his memory, and his indiscriminate admirers had better let it alone. It would have strained the ingenuity and the enthusiasm of Claud Halcro himself to have extracted matter for a panegyrical ode on this conversion of "glorious John." Admitted into the bosom of the Church, he soon found that he must prove his faith by his works. He was employed by James to defend the reasons of conversion to the Catholic faith alleged by Anne Duchess of York, and the two other papers on the same subject which, found in Charles' strong box, James had imprudently given to the world. This led him to a contest with Stillingfleet, in which Dryden came off only second best. He next, in an embowered walk, in a country retirement at Rushton, near his birthplace, composed his strange, unequal, but brilliant and ingenious poem, "The Hind and the Panther," the object of which was to advocate King James' repeal of the Test Act, and to prove the immeasurable superiority of the Church of Rome to that of England, as well as to all the dissenting sects. This piece produced a prodigious clamour against the author. Its plan was pronounced ridiculous--its argument one-sided--its zeal assumed--and Montague and Prior, two young men then rising into eminence, wrote a clever parody on it, entitled the "Town and Country Mouse." In addition to this, he wrote a translation of Varilla's "History of Heresies," and a life of Francis Xavier, the famous apostle of the Indies, whose singular story, a tale of heroic endurance and unexampled labours, but bedropt with the most flagrant falsehoods, whether it be read in Dryden's easy and fascinating narrative, or in the more gorgeous and coloured account of Sir James Stephen, in the "Edinburgh Review," forms one of the most impressive displays of human strength and folly, of the greatness of devoted enthusiasm, and of the weakness and credulity of abject superstition.