eate for having written a _Protestant play_, that he
was obliged for a time to throw the reins of government into the hands
of those very persons to whom the Papists were most obnoxious. The
inference drawn from Dryden's performance was that he had deserted the
court; and the Duke of York was so much displeased with the tenor of the
play, that it was the only one of which, on acceding to the crown, he
prohibited the representation. The "Spanish Friar" was often objected to
the author by his opponents, after he had embraced the religion there
satirised. Nor was the idea of his apostasy from the court an invention
of his enemies after his conversion, for it prevailed at the
commencement of the party-disputes; and the name of Dryden is, by a
partisan of royalty, ranked with that of his bitter foe Shadwell, as
followers of Shaftesbury in 1680.[41] But whatever cause of coolness or
disgust our author had received from Charles or his brother, was
removed, as usual, so soon as his services became necessary; and thus
the supposed author of a libel on the king became the ablest defender of
the cause of monarchy, and the author of the "Spanish Friar" the
advocate and convert of the Catholic religion.

In his private circumstances Dryden must have been even worse situated
than at the close of the last Section. His contract with the King's
Company was now ended, and long before seems to have produced him little
profit. If Southerne's biographer can be trusted, Dryden never made by a
single play more than one hundred pounds; so that, with all his
fertility, he could not, at his utmost exertion, make more than two
hundred a year by his theatrical labours.[42] At the same time, they so
totally engrossed his leisure, that he produced no other work of
consequence after the "_Annus Mirabilis._"[43] If, therefore, the
payment of his pension was withheld, whether from the resentment of the
court, or the poverty of the exchequer, he might well complain of the
"unsettled state" which doomed him to continue these irksome and
ill-paid labours.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Malone, vol. i. p. 124.

[2] Dennis's account of these feuds, though not strictly accurate is
lively, and too curious to be suppressed. "Nothing," says Dennis, "is
more certain, than that Mr. Settle, who is now (1717) the city poet, was
formerly a poet of the court. And at what time was he so? Why, in the
reign of King Charles the Second, when that court was more gallant and
more po