... but by the founder of modern deism, Lord Herbert of Cherbury. It further argues that both Blount and Dryden were aware of Herbert’s English manuscript of Religio Laici before 1682. Dryden wrote his Religio Laici in a hurry to preempt the deists’ Religio Laici ; Blount then used Dryden’s poem to avoid censorship...

... Press of Kentucky, 1980. xi + 194 pp. $14.00. Dryden scholars still have difficulty explaining to themselves and to their stu- dents Dryden’s conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1685, only three years after he published a defense of his Anglican faith in Religzo Laici. The old charge...

... a defense of his Anglican faith in Religzo Laici. The old charge of political opportunism has long been dropped. So has Bredvold’s ar- gument that Religio Laici is in fact a crypto-Catholic poem. In an important new book on Dryden’s religion G. Douglas Atkins canvasses some recent sugges- tions...

... I. 1-396, Eloisa to Abelard, The Rape of the Lock, and Absalom and Achi- tophel, roughly in descending order of similarity. On the other hand, it is considerably more distantly related to that of such poems as An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, To Augustus, Religio Laici, and particularly...

... Mirabilis.. .” (p. 30). Our distrust increases when we hear that “All these poems [Absalom and Achitophel, Religio Laici, The Medal], however public they are, possess an intense personal drive to discover what is meaningful to John Dryden” (p. 143). We are also told that the plays...

...” does not help: “Dryden’s dis- covery of the personality of public poetry in Annus Mirabilis.. .” (p. 30). Our distrust increases when we hear that “All these poems [Absalom and Achitophel, Religio Laici, The Medal], however public they are, possess an intense personal drive to discover what...

...-Zebe but say almost nothing about Annus Mirabilis and nothing at all about Religio Laici or The Medull? There is much to be learned from this book. Dryden was more of a Jaco- bite than one might have expected, for, as McFadden convincingly shows, his respect for the House of Stuart...

... believe, is to shake the orthodox view of Religzo Laici and at least to reopen this extraordinary poem for further discussion and examination. Although Atkins’s argument will not convince all Dryden scholars, it should be taken seriously...

.... Budick, Sanford. Dryden and the Abyss of Light: A Study of “lieligio Laici” and “The Hind and the Panther.” New Haven and London: Yale University Press, Yale Studies in English, vol. 174, 1970. xiii + 272 pp. $8.75. Cohen, Ralph. The Unfolding of “The Seasons.” Baltimore: Johns...

... struggle or the constant threat of being forgotten by the world. Though Poet Laureate and fresh from his multiple triumphs of 1681-82 (Absalom and Achito- phel, MacFlecknoe, The Medal, Religio Laici), Dryden had to toil, as his latest biographer makes clear, to support himself and his family...

... Saviour” strikingly antici- pates Dryden’s in Religio Laici, but not because of philosophic skepticism.66 In his Enthymiae Raptus; or the Tears of Peace: With Inter- locutions, 1609, written perhaps at about the same time as The Re- venge, Chapman furnishes a commentary on his purpose...