that restless activity which compasses sea and land to make one proselyte, did not hesitate to avail itself of so favourable an opportunity, and he was visited by a Popish priest.
In times when we have witnessed so many perversions, especially among the class of the young and the highly educated to which our poet belonged, we can feel little surprise at his embracing a creed, whose professors had at least been guiltless of grossly neglecting him. That a youth of nineteen, who had most probably only a general knowledge of the points of difference between the rival Churches, should fall a victim to the sophistries of a skilled disputant, need not be matter of marvel: and especially when we call to mind that he was of a morbid and gloomy temperament, and lying in chains neglected and forgotten, and also remember that in those days such perversions were as common as they have been during our Tractarian movement. Jonson's own account of the matter is "that he took the priest's word for it."
Another such change of creed must be chronicled in the Lives of the Poets-Laureate: but one which, however palliated or defended, is, to speak of it in the gentlest terms, far less excusable than this. Dryden was converted, not in youth, but in mature age; not unversed in the controversy, but so skilled in it, that he wrote on both sides; not as a prisoner, when a Protestant Queen was on the throne, but free and unfettered, and to win the favour and patronage of a Papist King. And Dryden never made the atonement, which Jonson did for quitting the faith of his childhood. For he some years after gave the question a serious consideration, and returned from the bosom of that Church, by whose professors his father had been plundered and persecuted, to that one whose scriptural doctrines that father had zealously preached. No one that knows the
