himself, though his situation and expectations may have co-operated to effect it. In support of this view Mr. Bell points out the fact that the pension granted by James was, after all, only a renewal of a pension granted by Charles, and which, not being secured by letters patent, had lapsed on that king's decease. Dryden, it is also to be remarked, remained sufficiently staunch to his new faith during the rest of his life, and seems even to have felt a kind of comfort in it. Probably, therefore, the true state of the case is that conformity to the Catholic religion, at the time when Dryden embraced it, was the least troublesome mode of systematizing for his own mind a number of diverse speculations, personal and political, that were then perplexing him, and that, afterwards, in consequence of the very obloquy which his change of religion drew upon him from all quarters, he hugged his new creed more closely, so as to coil round him, for the first time in his life, a few threads of private theological conviction. This is not very different from the notion entertained by Sir Walter Scott, who argues that Dryden's conversion was not, except in outward profession, a change from Protestant to Catholic belief, but rather, like that of Gibbon, a choice of Catholicism as the most convenient resting-place for a mind tired of Pyrrhonism, and disposed to cut short the process of emancipation from it by taking a decisive step at once. At all events, Dryden showed sufficient polemical energy in the service of the religion which he had adopted. He became James's literary factotum, the defender in prose and in verse of the worst measures of his rule; and he was ready to do battle with Stillingfleet, Burnet, or anyone else that dared to use a pen on the other side. As if to make the highest display of his powers as a versifier at a time when his character as a man was lowest, he published in 1687 his controversial allegory of _The Hind and the Panther_, by far the largest and most elaborate of his original poems. In this poem, in which the various churches and sects of the day figure as beasts--the Church of Rome as a "milk-white hind," innocent and unchanged; the Church of England as a "panther," spotted, but still beautiful; Presbyterianism as a haggard ugly "wolf;" Independency as the "bloody bear;" the Baptists as the "bristled boar;" the Unitarians as the "false fox;" the Freethinkers as the "buffoon ape;" and the Quakers as the timid "hare"--Dryden showed that, whatever his new faith had done for him, it had not changed his genius for satire. In fact, precisely as during James's reign Dryden appears personally as a solitary giant, warring on the wrong side, so this poem remains as the sole literary work of any excellence in which the wretched spirit of that reign is fully represented. Dryden himself, as if he had thrown all his force into it, wrote little else in verse till the year 1688, when, on the occasion of