Dryden’s response is essentially a declaration of faith in the few fundamental truths of Christianity that are “uncorrupt, sufficient, clear, intire, / In all things which our needfull Faith require,” among them such doctrines as Original Sin and its consequences, especially death and the loss of heaven; the Incarnation of Christ; His Redemption and the consequent justification for the sin of Adam by means of the imputed righteousness of Christ extended to mankind. In the late 1650s he seems to have lived with and written prefaces for the bookseller Henry Herringman, and by the early 1660s he had moved into lodgings with Sir Robert Howard, a younger son of Thomas Howard, first Earl of Berkshire, with impeccable Royalist credentials and a budding literary career. Would rather Curse, than break good Company. The problematics of the transmission of the Savior’s “Testament” are developed in terms of homology to a contested will, precisely because an unerring guide is needed in both religious and sociopolitical realms. After the success of All for Love and the growing chances for his security with the Duke’s Company, Dryden must have felt emboldened enough to settle his other score by attacking Rochester himself in his preface to the published version of the new play in early 1678. The result was The Hind and the Panther (1687), Dryden’s longest original poem. Dryden’s poem, despite its aristocratic elements of monarchism and heroic valor, its classical allusions and epic similes, looks forward through its bourgeois celebration of mercantile expansion, maritime dominance, and homely imagery of laboring citizens to the rule of a capitalist Britannia under a constitutional monarch. And blest all other Countries but his own: When his fortunes were sinking, he had appealed to John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, to patronize him, but, after some initial flirtation, Rochester proved inconstant, supported Dryden’s rival Shadwell instead, and lampooned Dryden in “An Allusion to Horace.” Dryden had been feuding with Shadwell over the theory of comedy for years in various prefaces and dedications, but the two had remained relatively conciliatory and had collaborated with John Crowne in the attack on Settle. The same bold Maxime holds in God and Man: Yet nothing still: then poor, and naked come, In many ways Astraea Redux anticipates foundational tropes in Dryden’s later, greater political poems: the iron law of oligarchy that belies rebellion’s rhetoric; the analogy between King Charles and King David; the analogy between the Puritans’ Solemn League and Covenant in Charles’s England and the Catholics’ Holy League in Henri IV’s France; the hypocrisy of glozing the “sin” of rebellion with the name of “Religion”; the counseling of mercy over justice; and, finally, exhortation of the king to concentrate on England’s navy and its trade. The original was by a French priest, Richard Simon, and employed emerging modern methods of scholarship to examine the biblical text, its errors and contradictions. His best-known dramatic play All for Love (1678) is written in blank verse. Ever since, he has been attacked for insincerity and opportunism. The musician Timotheus modulates Alexander the Great through several moods, manipulating him with sure hand. Why a member of so prestigious a family would have stooped to a member of the lesser gentry remains a subject for speculation. He was made Poet Laureate in 1668. I’le trust no Poet, but will write my own. On the other hand, Dryden addresses “London, thou great Emporium of our Isle” again in a lamentory mode, and one cannot help remembering his praise of the city in Annus Mirabilis as the emporium of England’s imperialist trade. In it he continued the metrical experimentations of his translations. It is a tragedy written in blank verse and is an attempt on Dryden’s part to reinvigorate serious drama. A few years later, perhaps out of pique at Dryden’s pride in his success, George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, attacked Dryden as a poetaster in The Rehearsal (1671). Pow’r is thy Essence; Wit thy Attribute! 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