What was innocent contracted a taint from passing through his mind.

He made the grossest satires of Juvenal more gross, interpolated loose descriptions in the tales of Boccaccio, and polluted the sweet and limpid poetry of the Georgics with filth which would have moved the loathing of Virgil.
The help of Dryden was welcome to those Roman Catholic divines who were painfully sustaining a conflict against all that was most illustrious in the Established Church.

They could not disguise from themselves the fact that their style, disfigured with foreign idioms which had been picked up at Rome and Douay, appeared to little advantage when compared with the eloquence of Tillotson and Sherlock.

It seemed that it was no light thing to have secured the cooperation of the greatest living master of the English language.

The first service which he was required to perform in return for his pension was to defend his Church in prose against Stillingfleet.