It has raised none of the reproaches which have been cast at the suspected apostasy of Wordsworth.

Dryden had little interest in political or religious questions; his instinct, one must conceive, was to conform to the prevailing mode and to trouble himself no further about the matter.
Defoe told the truth about him when he wrote that "Dryden might have been told his fate that, having his extraordinary genius slung and pitched upon a swivel, it would certainly turn round as fast as the times, and instruct him how to write elegies to Oliver Cromwell and King Charles the Second with all the coherence imaginable; how to write _Religio Laici_ and the _Hind and the Panther_ and yet be the same man, every day to change his principle, change his religion, change his coat, change his master, and yet never change his nature." He never changed his nature, he was as free from cynicism as a barrister who represents successively opposing parties in suits or politics; and when he wrote polemics in prose or verse he lent his talents as a barrister lends his for a fee.

His one intellectual interest was in his art, and it is in his comments on his art--the essays and prefaces in the composition of which he amused the leisure left in the busy life of a dramatist and a poet of officialdom--that his most charming and delicate work is to be found.

In a way they begin modern English prose; earlier writing furnishes no equal to their colloquial ease and the grace of their expression.

And they contain some of the most acute criticism in our language--"classical" in its tone (_i.e._, with a preference for conformity) but with its respect for order and tradition always tempered by good sense and wit, and informed and guided throughout by a taste whose catholicity and sureness was unmatched in the England of his time.
The preface to his _Fables_ contains some excellent notes on Chaucer.
They may be read as a sample of the breadth and perspicuity of his critical perceptions.
His chief poetical works were most of them occasional--designed either to celebrate some remarkable event or to take a side and interpret a policy in the conflict, political or religious, of the time.
_Absalom and Achitophel_ and _The Medal_ were levelled at the Shaftesbury-Monmouth intrigues in the closing years of Charles II.
_Religio Laici_ celebrated the excellence of the Church of England in its character of _via media_ between the opposite extravagances of Papacy and Presbyterianism.