His pioneer was Mulgruve's Essay on Satire, an attack on Rochester and the court, circulated in 1679. Dryden himself was suspected of the authorship, and cudgelled by hired ruffians as the author; but it is not likely that he attacked the king on whom he was dependent for the greater part of his income. In the same year Oldham's satire on the Jesuits had immense popularity, chiefly owing to the excitement about the Popish plot. Dryden took the field as a satirist towards the close of 1681, on the side of the court, at the moment when Shaftesbury, baffled in his efforts to exclude the duke of York from the throne as a papist, and secure the succession of the duke of Monmouth, was waiting his trial for high treason. Absalom and Achitophel produced a great stir. Nine editions were sold in rapid succession in the course of a year. It was a new thing for the public to have the leading men of the day held up to laughter, contempt, and indignation under disguises which a little trouble enabled them to penetrate. There was no compunction in Dryden's ridicule and invective. Delicate wit was not one of Dryden's gifts; the motions of his weapon were sweeping, and the blows hard and trenchant. The advantage he had gained by his recent studies of character was fully used in his portraits of Shaftesbury and Buckingham, Achitophel and Zimri. In these portraits he shows considerable art in the introduction of redeeming traits to the general outline of malignity and depravity. Against Buckingham Dryden had old scores to pay off, but he was too practised in the language of eulogy and invective to need any personal stimulus. "Glorious John" had a mind superior to petty hatreds, as well as, it must be admitted, to petty friendships, and it is not impossible that the fact that his pension had not been paid since the beginning of 1680 weighed with him in writing this satire to gain the favour of the court. In a play produced in 1681, The Spanish Friar, he had written on the other side, gratifying the popular feeling by attacking the Papists. Three other satires, with which he followed up Absalom and Achitophel, dealt with smaller game than this master-piece, though one of them was hardly inferior in point of literary power. The Medal was written in ridicule of the medal struck to commemorate Shaftesbury's acquittal. Then Dryden had to take vengeance on the literary champions of the Whig party, who had opened upon him with all their artillery. Their leader, Shadwell, he essayed to demolish under the nickname of "MacFlecknoe." Besides a separate poem under that title, he contributed a long passage to a second part of Absalom and Achitophel, written chiefly by Nahum Tate, in which Ferguson, Forbes, Settle, and Shadwell were victims of his strident lash. Religio Laid, which came immediately after, in November 1682, though nominally an exposition of a layman's creed, and deservedly admired as such, was not without a political purpose. It attacked the Papists, but declared the "fanatics" to be still more dangerous, which fitted in with Charles's policy of conciliating the church by persecuting the Nonconformists.
Dryden's next poem in heroic couplets was in a different .strain. On the accession of James, in 1685, he became a Roman Catholic. There has been much discussion as to whether this conversion was or was not sincere. It can only be said that the coincidence between his change of faith and his change of patron was suspicious, and that Dryden's character for consistency is certainly not of a kind to quench suspicion. The force of the coincidence cannot be removed by such pleas as that his wife had been a Roman Catholic for several years, or that he was converted by his son, who was converted at Cambridge, even if there were any evidence for these statements. Scott defended Dryden's conversion, as Macaulay denounced it, from party motives; on any other grounds, it is not worth discussing. Nothing can be clearer than that Dryden all his life through regarded his literary powers as a means of subsistence, and had little scruple about accepting a brief on any side. The Hind and Panther, published in 1687, is an ingenious argument for Roman Catholicism, put into the mouth of "a milk-white hind, immortal and unchanged." There is considerable beauty in the picture of this tender creature, and its enemies in the forest are riot spared. One can understand the admiration that the poem received when such allegories were in fashion. It was the chief cause of the veneration with which Dryden was regarded by Pope, who, himself educated in the Roman Catholic faith, was taken as a boy of twelve to see the veteran poet in his chair of honour and authority at Will's coffee-house. It was also very open to ridicule, and was treated in this spirit by Prior and Montagu, the future earl of Halifax. Dryden's other literary services to James were a savage reply to Stillingfleet who had attacked two papers published by the king immediately after his accession, one said to have been written by his late brother in advocacy of the Church of Rome, the other by his late wife explaining the reasons for her conversion and a translation of a life of Xavier in prose. He had writ ten also a panegyric of Charles, and a eulogy oi: James under the title of Britannia Rediviva, which it is interesting to compare with his other productions of the same kind.
Dryden did not abjure his new faith on the Revolution, and so lost his office and pension as laureate and historiographer royal. For this act of constancy he deserves credit, if the new powers would have considered his services worth having after his frequent apostasies. His rival Shadwell reigned in his stead. Dryden was once more thrown mainly upon his pen for support. He turned again to the stage and wrote the plays which we have enumerated. A great feature in the last decade of his life was his translations from the classics. A volume of miscellanies published in 1685 had contained some translations from Virgil, Horace, Lucretius, and Theocritus. He now produced translations more deliberately as a saleable commodity. A volume of miscellanies, which appeared in 1693, contained translations from Homer and Ovid. In the same year he published a translation of the satires of Juvenal and Persius, written with the assistance of his two elder sons. Johnson passes on this work the just criticism that "though, like all other productions of Dryden, it may have shining parts, it seems to have been written merely for wages, in an uniform mediocrity." When Dryden took his farewell of the stage in 1694, he announced his intention of devoting himself to a translation of the whole of Virgil. On this he seems really to have laboured, and great expectations were formed of it. It was published in 1697, and proved a great success. To judge it by its fidelity as a reproduction of the original would be to apply too high a standard, but it is an interesting rendering of Virgil into the style of Dryden, and as a poem was read with delight in its own age. Soon after its publication, Dryden wrote one of his master-pieces, the second Ode on St Cecilia's day. His next work was to render some of Chaucer's and Boccaccio's tales and Ovid's metamorphoses into his own verse. These translations appeared a few months before his death, and are known by the title of Fables. Thus a large portion of the closing years of Dryden's life were spent in translating for bread. He had a windfall of 500 guineas from Lord Abingdon for a poem on the death of his wife in 1691, but generally he was in considerable pecuniary straits. He is supposed to have received occasional presents from rich and powerful friends, but he never received anything from the court, and he was too proud to make advances. Besides, his three sons held various posts in the service of the Pope at Rome, and he could
