JAMES THE SECOND.

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■which, if he had found them inliis originals, he ought to have chap.shunned. What was bad became worse in his versions. What — ]6 §—was innocent contracted a taint from passing tliroughhismind.

He made the grossest satires of Juvenal more gross, inter-polated loose descriptions in the tales of Boccaccio, and pol-luted the sweet and limpid poetry of the Georgies with filthwhich would have moved the loathing of Virgil.

The help of Dryden was welcome to those Roman Catholicdivines who were painfully sustaining a conflict against all thatwas most illustrious in the Established Church. They couldnot disguise from themselves the fact that their style, dis-figured with foreign idioms which had been picked up atRomeand Douay, appeared to little advantage when compared withthe eloquence of Tillotson and Sherlock. It seemed that itwas no light thing to have secured the cooperation of thegreatest living master of the English language. The first ser-vice which he was required to perform in return for his pen-sion was to defend his Church in prose against Stillingfleet.

But the art of saying things well is useless to a man who hasnothing to say; and this was Dryden’s case. He soon foundhimself unequally paired with an antagonist whose whole lifehad been one long training for controversy. The veterangladiator disarmed the novice, inflicted a few contemptuousscratches, and turned away to encounter more formidablecombatants. Dryden then betook himself to a weapon at Tiie Hindwhich he was not likely to find his match. He retired for a J."mher.time from the bustle of coffee-houses and theatres to a quietretreat in Huntingdonshire, and there composed, with un-wonted care and labour, his celebrated poem on the points indispute between the Churches ofRome and England. TheChurch of Rome he represented under the similitude of amilk-white hind, ever in peril of death, yet fated not to die.

The beasts of the field were bent on her destruction. Thequaking hare, indeed, observed a timorous neutrality: butthe Socinian fox, the Presbyterian wolf, the Independentbear, the Anabaptist boar, glared fiercely at the spotlesscreature. Yet she could venture to drink with them at thecommon watering place under the protection of her friend,

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