Dryden, it may be believed, had, as his comedies well deserved, a liberal share of the general censure; but, however he might have felt the smart of Collier’s severity, he had the magnanimity to acknowledge its justice.  In the preface to the Fables, he makes the amende honorable. “I shall say the less of Mr. Collier, because in many things he has taxed me justly; and I have pleaded guilty to all thoughts and expressions of mine, which can be truly argued of obscenity, profaneness, or immorality, and retract them.  If he be my enemy, let him triumph; if he be my friend, as I have given him no personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance.  It becomes me not to draw my pen in the defence of a bad cause, when I have so often drawn it for a good one.”  To this manly and liberal admission, he has indeed tacked a complaint, that Collier had sometimes, by a strained interpretation, made the evil sense of which he complained; that he had too much “horse-play in his raillery;” and that, “if the zeal for God’s house had not eaten him up, it had at least devoured some part of his good manners and civility.”  Collier seems to have been somewhat pacified by this qualified acknowledgment, and, during the rest of the controversy, turned his arms chiefly against Congreve, who resisted, and spared, comparatively at least, the sullen submission of Dryden.[36]

While these controversies were raging, Dryden’s time was occupied with the translations or imitations of Chaucer and Boccacio.  Among these, the “Character of the Good Parson” is introduced, probably to confute Milbourne, Blackmore, and Collier, who had severally charged our author with the wilful and premeditated contumely thrown upon the clergy in many passages of his satirical writings.  This too seems to have inflamed the hatred of Swift, who, with all his levities, was strictly attached to his order, and keenly jealous of its honours.[37] Dryden himself seems to have been conscious of his propensity to assail churchmen.  “I remember,” he writes to his sons, “the counsel you gave me in your letter; but dissembling, although lawful in some cases, is not my talent; yet, for your sake, I will struggle with the plain openness of my nature, and keep in my just resentments against that degenerate order."[38] Milbourne, and other enemies of our author, imputed this resentment against the clergy, to his being refused orders when he wished to take them, in the reign of Charles, with a view to the Provostship of Eton, or some Irish preferment.[39] But Dryden assures us, that he never had any thoughts of entering the Church.  Indeed, his original offences of this kind may be safely ascribed to the fashionable practice, after the Restoration, of laughing at all that was accounted serious before that period.