A milk-white hind, immortal and unchanged,
    Fed on the lawns, and in the forest ranged;
    Without unspotted, innocent within,
    She feared no danger, for she knew no sin.

The other beasts were united to destroy her; but she could “venture to drink with them at the common watering-place under the protection of her friend the kingly lion.”

The Panther is the Church of England: 

    The Panther, sure the noblest, next the hind,
    And fairest creature of the spotted kind;
    Oh, could her inborn stains be washed away,
    She were too good to be a beast of prey!

Then he Introduces.—­

   The Bloody Bear, an Independent beast; the Quaking Hare, for the
   Quakers; the Bristled Baptist Boar.

In this fable, quite in the style of AEsop, we find the Dame, i.e., the Hind, entering into the subtle points of theology, and trying to prove her position.  The poem, as might be supposed; was well received, and perhaps converted a few to the monarch’s faith; for who were able yet to foresee that the monarch would so abuse his power, as to be driven away from his throne amid the execrations of his subjects.

The harmony of Dryden and the power of James could control progressive England no longer.  Like one man, the nation rose and uttered a mighty cry to William of Orange.  James, trembling, flies hither and thither, and at length, fearing the fate of his father, he deserts his throne; the commons call this desertion abdication, and they give the throne to his nephew William and his daughter Mary.  Such was the end of the restored Stuarts; and we can have no regret that it is:  whatever sympathy we may have had with the sufferings of Charles I.,—­and the English nation shared it, as is proved by the restoration of his son,—­we can have none with his successors:  they threw away their chances; they dissipated the most enthusiastic loyalty; they squandered opportunities; and had no enemies, even the bitterest, who were more fatal than themselves.  And now it was manifest that Dryden’s day was over.  Nor does he shrink from his fate.  He neither sings a Godspeeding ode to the runaway king, nor a salutatory to the new comers.

DRYDEN’S FALL.—­Stripped of his laureate-wreath and all his emoluments, he does not sit down to fold his hands and repine.  Sixty years of age, he girds up his loins to work manfully for his living.  He translates from the classics; he renders Chaucer into modern English:  in 1690 he produced a play entitled Don Sebastian, which has been considered his dramatic master-piece, and, as if to inform the world that age had not dimmed the fire of his genius, he takes as his caption,—­

    ... nec tarda senectus
    Debilitat vires animi, mutat que vigorem.

This latter part of his life claims a true sympathy, because he is every inch a man.