“To the best of my knowledge and observation, he was, of all the men that I ever knew, one of the most modest, and the most easily to be discountenanced in his approaches either to his superiors or his equals.”

This portrait is from the pen of friendship; yet, if we consider all the circumstances of Dryden’s life, we cannot deem it much exaggerated.  For about forty years, his character, personal and literary, was the object of assault by every subaltern scribbler, titled or untitled, laureated or pilloried.  “My morals,” he himself has said, “have been sufficiently aspersed; that only sort of reputation, which ought to be dear to every honest man, and is to me.”  In such an assault, no weapon would remain unhandled, no charge, true or false, unurged; and what qualities we do not there find excepted against, must surely be admitted to pass to the credit of Dryden.  His change of political opinion, from the time he entered life under the protection of a favourite of Cromwell, might have argued instability, if he had changed a second time, when the current of power and popular opinion set against the doctrines of the Reformation.  As it is, we must hold Dryden to have acted from conviction, since personal interest, had that been the ruling motive of his political conduct, would have operated as strongly in 1688 as in 1660.  The change of his religion we have elsewhere discussed; and endeavoured to show that, although Dryden was unfortunate in adopting the more corrupted form of our religion, yet, considered relatively, it was a fortunate and laudable conviction which led him from the mazes of scepticism to become a catholic of the communion of Rome.[57] It would be vain to maintain, that in his early career he was free from the follies and vices of a dissolute period; but the absence of every positive charge, and the silence of numerous accusers, may be admitted to prove, that he partook in them more from general example than inclination, and with a moderate, rather than voracious or undistinguishing appetite.  It must be admitted, that he sacrificed to the Belial or Asmodeus of the age, in his writings; and that he formed his taste upon the licentious and gay society with which he mingled.  But we have the testimony of one who knew him well, that, however loose his comedies, the temper of the author was modest;[58] his indelicacy was like the forced impudence of a bashful man; and Rochester has accordingly upbraided him, that his licentiousness was neither natural nor seductive.  Dryden had unfortunately conformed enough to the taste of his age, to attempt that “nice mode of wit,” as it is termed by the said noble author, whose name has become inseparably connected with it; but it sate awkwardly upon his natural modesty, and in general sounds impertinent, as well as disgusting.  The clumsy phraseology of Burnet, in passing censure on the immorality of the stage, after the Restoration, terms “Dryden, the greatest master of dramatic poesy, a monster of immodesty and of impurity of all