slight alterations, one addition being the apotheosis of the late King. It is an opera; and the music was composed by Monsieur Grabut, a Frenchman, who, in consequence of the rage which then existed for everything French, was preferred to Purcell. Its sixth representation was interrupted by the arrival of the news of the landing of Monmouth in the West; the audience immediately dispersed, and the play, which involved the theatre in a heavy loss for the expenses of dresses and scenery, was never revived.
It was soon after this that Dryden made that change of faith to which we have before alluded,[1] and which has been so lengthily discussed by almost all his biographers. It is an excellent opportunity for advocacy, and nothing is easier than to take a side. At the time he was, of course, welcomed as a sincere convert by his own party, and hooted at and called hard names by his opponents. His conversion, or perversion, Dr. Johnson and Sir W. Scott have, probably from political bias and a charitable sympathy with a man of genius, sought to palliate. Mr. Macaulay has, on the other hand, taken, we think, a more correct but severer view. It becomes, of course, a question of motive, and one, therefore, which it is simply impossible to settle. As Dr. Johnson, in speaking of it, observes: "Inquiries into the heart are not for man—we must now leave him to his Judge."
The circumstances under which he made the change are, as we have before said, most suspicious. James had turned a deaf ear to the sonorous panegyric in the "Threnodia Augustalis," with which Dryden had welcomed his accession. His return for it had been neglect, and to neglect he had added insult and injury, for with a niggard and sordid parsimony he had robbed him of the Tierce of Canary, granted in the letters patent.
- ↑ Life of Ben Jonson.
