The conversion of Dryden did not long remain unrewarded,[8] nor was his pen suffered to be idle in the cause which he had adopted.  On the 4th of March 1685-6, an hundred pounds a year, payable quarterly, was added to his pension:[9] and probably he found himself more at ease under the regular and economical government of James, than when his support depended on the exhausted exchequer of Charles.  Soon after the granting of this boon, he was employed to defend the reasons of conversion to the Catholic faith, alleged by Anne Hyde, Duchess of York, which, together with two papers on a similar subject, said to be found in Charles II.’s strong box.  James had with great rashness given to the public.  Stillingfleet, now at the head of the champions of the Protestant faith, published some sharp remarks on these papers.  Another hand, probably that of a Jesuit, was employed to vindicate against him the royal grounds of conversion; while to Dryden was committed the charge of defending those alleged by the Duchess.  The tone of Dryden’s apology was, to say the least, highly injudicious, and adapted to irritate the feelings of the clergy of the established church, already sufficiently exasperated to see the sacrifices which they had made to the royal cause utterly forgotten, the moment that they paused in the extremity of their devotion towards the monarch.  The name of “Legion,” which the apologist bestows on his adversaries, intimates the committee of the clergy by whom the Protestant cause was then defended; and the tone of his arguments is harsh, contemptuous, and insulting.  A raker up of the ashes of princes, an hypocrite, a juggler, a latitudinarian, are the best terms which he affords the advocate of the Church of England, in defence of which he had so lately been himself a distinguished champion.  Stillingfleet returned to the charge; and when he came to the part of the Defence written by Dryden, he did not spare the personal invective, to which the acrimonious style of the poet-laureate had indeed given an opening, “Zeal,” says Stillingfleet, “in a new convert, is a terrible thing, for it not only burns, but rages like the eruptions of Mount Etna; it fills the air with noise and smoke, and throws out such a torrent of living fire, that there is no standing before it.”  In another passage, Stillingfleet talks of the “temptation of changing religion for bread;” in another, our author’s words, that

  “Priests of all religions are the same,” [10]

are quoted to infer, that he who has no religion may declare for any.  Dryden took his revenge both on Stillingfleet the author, and on Burnet, whom he seems to have regarded as the reviser of this answer, in his polemical poem of “The Hind and the Panther.”

If we can believe an ancient tradition, this poem was chiefly composed in a country retirement at Rushton, near his birth-place in Huntingdon [Northamptonshire].  There was an embowered walk at this place, which, from the pleasure which the poet took in it, retained the name of Dryden’s Walk; and here was erected, about the middle of last century, an urn, with the following inscription:  “In memory of Dryden, who frequented these shades, and is here said to have composed his poem of ‘The Hind and the Panther.’"[11]