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A mass of now forgotten Roman Catholic apologetic and controversial writings appeared in English during Dryden's lifetime. Study reveals the fact that Dryden was acquainted with some of the most notable of these, particularly Hugh Cressy's Exomologesis (1647, 1653), Rushworth-White's Dialogues (1654), John Sergeant's Schisme Dis-Arm'd (1655) and Sure-Footing in Christianity (1665), Edward Worsley's Protestancy Without Principles (1668), and Abraham Woodhead's Rational Account (1673), as well as with the principal Anglican publications of the day (especially those of Stillingfleet and Tillotson). Dryden used the arguments, sometimes the very phraseology, of these and other writings in his poem. The Hind and the Panther thus justifies Charles E. Ward's judgment that the poet's conversion was “a result of long thought and long study of the problems of faith,” and takes its place in the Catholic-Anglican controversy of the age.

Most contemporary students of the subject seem to agree with Wellek and Warren's view that “the meaning of verse simply cannot be ignored in a theory of metrics,” and that “sound and meter must be studied as elements of the totality of a work of art, not in isolation from meaning.” The notorious exception is no doubt John Crowe Ransom's forthright theory which makes of the meters simply sound textures irrelevant to the meaning. Yvor Winters's well-known critique of Ransom's argument disposes of the latter's general thesis convincingly, it seems to me. The story does not, however, end there.

For more than a quarter of a century now Professor Louis I. Bredvold's Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden has remained the virtually unquestioned authority on the subject. Only recently have a few dissenting voices been raised against Bredvold's thesis that Dryden's religious development, particularly as that is revealed in Religio Laici, was tainted with skepticism and fideism, and that his conversion, first to Anglicanism, and later to Catholicism, was motivated by irrational considerations. The few voices I refer to are those of Thomas H. Fujimara, whose article “Dryden's Religio Laici: An Anglican Poem,” appeared in PMLA in June 1961, and Elias Chiasson, whose essay “Dryden's Apparent Skepticism in Religio Laici” came out in another journal about the same time. Both of these scholars, working independently, demonstrated the orthodoxy of Dryden's Anglicanism with convincing evidence from texts of Anglican writers extending from Hooker to Jeremy Taylor. But can we go along with such a judgment as that which Mr. Fujimara makes in the conclusion of his study—“that Dryden became a Catholic cannot be explained by anything in Religio Laici”? I think not, for reasons which, I trust, will appear in this article.

Although Richard Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) is a well-known document in the history of English criticism, there is, curiously enough, only one modern edition of this work, and there exists as yet no study of Hurd's total accomplishment as a critic. Miss Morley's Introduction to her edition of the Letters has been described as “valuable,” but she has done little more than summarize the contents of the book and reprint Hurd's own notes uncritically.