34

HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

CHAP,

VII.

1687 .

adulation. Finding that, if he continued to call himself aProtestant, his services would he overlooked, he declaredhimself a Papist. The King’s parsimony instantly relaxed.Dryden was gratified with a pension of a hundred pounds ayear, and was employed to defend his new religion both inprose and verse.

Two eminent men, Samuel Johnson and Walter Scott,have done their best to persuade themselves and others thatthis memorable conversion was sincere. It was natural thatthey should be desirous to remove a disgraceful stain from thememory of one whose genius they justly admired, and withwhose political feelings they strongly sympathized; but theimpartial historian must with regret pronounce a very differentjudgment. There will always be a strong presumption againstthe sincerity of a conversion by which the convert is directlya gainer. In the case of Dryden there is nothing to counter-vail this presumption. His theological writings abundantlyprove that he had never sought with diligence and anxiety tolearn the truth, and that Ills knowledge both of the Churchwhich he quitted and of the Church which he entered was ofthe most superficial kind. Nor was his subsequent conductthat of a man whom a strong sense of duty had constrained totake a step of awful importance. Had he been such a man,the same conviction which had led him to join the Church ofRome would surely have prevented him from violating grosslyand habitually rules which that Church, in common with everyother Christian society, recognises as binding. There wouldhave been a marked distinction between his earlier and hislater compositions, He would have looked back with remorseon a literary life of near thirty years, during which his rarepowers of diction and versification had been systematicallyemployed in spreading moral corruption. Not a line tendingto make virtue contemptible, or to inflame licentious desire,would thenceforward have proceeded from his pen. Thetruth unhappily is that the dramas which he wrote after hispretended conversion are in no respect less impure or profanethan those of his youth. Even when he professed to translatehe constantly wandered from his originals in search of images