John Dryden had been received into the…

John Dryden had been received into the Roman Catholic church in 1685, after the newly acceded king James II seemed to be moving to Catholic toleration.

In his longest poem, the beast fable The Hind and the Panther (1687), he had argued the case for his adopted church against the Church of England and the sects.

His earlier Religio Laici (1682) had argued in eloquent couplets for the consolations of Anglicanism and against unbelievers, Protestant dissenters, and Roman Catholics.

The abdication of James II in 1688 had destroyed Dryden's political prospects, and he lost his laureateship to Shadwell.

He turned again to the theater.

The tragedy Don Sebastian failed in 1689, but Amphitryon was a success in the following year, helped by the music of Henry Purcell.

Dryden collaborated with Purcell in a dramatic opera, King Arthur (1691), which also succeeded.

His tragedy Cleomenes was long refused a license because of what was thought to be the politically dangerous material in it, and with the failure in 1694 of the tragicomedy Love Triumphant, Dryden stops writing for the stage.

Dryden has in the 1680s and '90s supervised poetical miscellanies and translated the works of Juvenal and Persius for the publisher Jacob Tonson with success.

He had in 1692 published Eleonora, a long memorial poem commissioned for a handsome fee by the husband of the Countess of Abingdon, but his great late work is his complete translation of Virgil, contracted in 1694 by Tonson.