followed the act of perversion, there are registered dates which show that in reality the pension came first, and indeed was not James's grant, but the Merry Monarch's, his more liberal predecessor. Charles granted it, and James, at his accession, stopped it. But in the course of twelve months or so, James renewed it. When Dryden therefore ratted, it was not a new, but a renewed, pension with which he was "gratified." Now we are sorry, heartily sorry for it; but really we cannot see that the gravamen of the old charge against Dryden, whatever be its justice, is sensibly lightened by this discovery of Mr. Bell. The old pleading is, that on Dryden's conversion to the faith of King James a pension was granted him. The new query will be, Would the lapsed pension have been renewed had no such conversion occurred?
But, on the other hand, we do cordially assent to the tone of Mr. Bell's remarks on this step in the poet's life, and on the assumptions made thereupon by his commentators and detractors. Dryden, according to Mr. Macaulay, "knew little and cared little about religion" at all,—the only sentiment deeply fixed in him being "an aversion to priests of all persuasions."[1] Another assailant, but a more kindly one, whose expression is that Dryden literally "ratted" from the Protestant faith—"for he abjured it as rats abjure a ship in which their instinct of divination has deciphered a destiny of ruin"—is yet sufficiently impressed by the manly breadth of the convert's character to add, that "such is the overruling force of a nature originally sincere, that the apostate Dryden wore upon his brow the grace of sincerity,"[2] although his act was stigmatised as that of a base time-server. While another living critic, speaking of Dryden's poetic faith, observes that it was a good deal like his religious: "he could turn it to one point after another, and be just enough in earnest to make his belief be taken for knowledge."[3] Now we hold with that large-hearted scholar, Hartley Coleridge,[4] that supposing Dryden was not, in the highest sense of the word, sincere in his reunion to the Church of Rome, there is still no reason in the world to assume that he was an absolute and deliberate impostor. The generally accepted persuasion that he was indifferent to religion itself, is in fact adverse to that assumption; for it is to a man in that state of indifferentism—a worldly Adiaphorist—"caring for none of these things" in any valid sense—that the merest trifle on one side or the other will often determine what seems, but in his case is not, a momentous change. But we will give Mr. Bell's reflections on the subject—their calm, but not cold, impartiality and good sense are worthily emphasised: "Dryden's change of religion must ever remain an open question, to be discussed with such candour as the prejudices of men will permit them to bring to the consideration of topics of this nature. The apostate is always exposed to distrust. The community he joins is hardly more charitable in its constructions than the community he deserts; and the least instructed of mankind, whose profession of faith is a matter of habit and inheritance, and not of inquiry and conviction, stands on his barren steadfastness, and believes himself entitled to impugn the motives of him who, in the face of social obloquy, deliberately renounces the creed in which he was educated. The few alone will endeavour to judge more
- ↑ Hist, of Eng. II.
- ↑ De Quincey on Pope (1851).
- ↑ Leigh Hunt: Table-talk.
- ↑ Northern Worthies, vol. iii.
