Panther and yet be the same man, every day to change his principle, change his religion, change his coat, change his master, and yet never change his nature.”  He never changed his nature, he was as free from cynicism as a barrister who represents successively opposing parties in suits or politics; and when he wrote polemics in prose or verse he lent his talents as a barrister lends his for a fee.  His one intellectual interest was in his art, and it is in his comments on his art—­the essays and prefaces in the composition of which he amused the leisure left in the busy life of a dramatist and a poet of officialdom—­that his most charming and delicate work is to be found.  In a way they begin modern English prose; earlier writing furnishes no equal to their colloquial ease and the grace of their expression.  And they contain some of the most acute criticism in our language—­“classical” in its tone (i.e., with a preference for conformity) but with its respect for order and tradition always tempered by good sense and wit, and informed and guided throughout by a taste whose catholicity and sureness was unmatched in the England of his time.  The preface to his Fables contains some excellent notes on Chaucer.  They may be read as a sample of the breadth and perspicuity of his critical perceptions.

His chief poetical works were most of them occasional—­designed either to celebrate some remarkable event or to take a side and interpret a policy in the conflict, political or religious, of the time. Absalom and Achitophel and The Medal were levelled at the Shaftesbury-Monmouth intrigues in the closing years of Charles II. Religio Laici celebrated the excellence of the Church of England in its character of via media between the opposite extravagances of Papacy and Presbyterianism. The Hind and the Panther found this perfection spotted.  The Church of England has become the Panther, whose coat is a varied pattern of heresy and truth beside the spotless purity of the Hind, the Church of Rome. Astrea Reddux welcomed the returning Charles; Annus Mirabilis commemorated a year of fire and victories, Besides these he wrote many dramas in verse, a number of translations, and some shorter poems, of which the odes are the most remarkable.

His qualities as a poet fitted very exactly the work he set himself to do.  His work is always plain and easily understood; he had a fine faculty for narration, and the vigorous rapidity and point of his style enabled him to sketch a character or sum up a dialectical position very surely and effectively.  His writing has a kind of spare and masculine force about it.  It is this vigour and the impression which he gives of intellectual strength and of a logical grasp of his subject, that beyond question has kept alive work which, if ever poetry was, was ephemeral in its origin.  The careers of the unscrupulous Caroline peers would have been closed for us were they not visible in the