Thomas Shadwell was a Norfolk man and about ten years Dryden's junior. Ever since the year 1668 he had been writing plays (chiefly comedies) and hanging about town, and Dryden and he had been in a manner friends. They had joined Crowne in the task of writing down the Empress of Morocco, and it does not appear that Dryden had ever given Shadwell any direct cause of offence. Shadwell, however, who was exceedingly arrogant and apparently jealous of Dryden's acknowledged position as leader of the English drama, took more than one occasion of sneering at Dryden, and especially at his critical prefaces. Not long before the actual declaration of war Shadwell had received a prologue from Dryden, and the outbreak itself was due to purely political causes, though no doubt Shadwell, who was a sincere Whig and Protestant, was very glad to pour out his pent-up literary jealousy at the same time. The personality of his attack on Dryden was, however, in the last degree unwise; for the house in which he lived was of glass almost all over. His manners are admitted to have been coarse and brutal, his conversation unclean, his appearance uninviting; nor was his literary personality safer from attack. He had taken Ben Jonson for his model, and any reader of his comedies must admit that he had a happy knack of detecting or imagining the oddities which, after Ben's example, he called "humours." The Sullen Lovers is in this way a much more genuinely amusing play than any of Dryden's, and the Squire of Alsatia, Bury Fair, Epsom Wells, the Virtuoso, &c., are comedies of manners by no means unimportant for the social history of the time. But whether it was owing to haste, as Rochester pretended, or, as Dryden would have it, to certain intellectual incapacities, there can be no doubt that nobody ever made less use of his faculties than

Shadwell. His work is always disgraceful as writing; he seems to have been totally destitute of any critical faculty, and he mixes up what is really funny with the dullest and most wearisome folly and ribaldry. He was thus given over entirely into Dryden's hands, and the unmatched satire of MacFlecknoe was the result.

Flecknoe, whom but for this work no one would ever have inquired about, was, and had been for some time, a stock-subject for allusive satire. He was an Irish priest who had died not long before, after writing a little good verse and a great deal of bad. He had paid compliments to Dryden, and there is no reason to suppose that Dryden had any enmity towards him; his part indeed is simply representative, and the satire is reserved for Shadwell. Well as they are known, the first twenty or thirty lines of the poem must be quoted once more, for illustration of Dryden's satirical faculty is hardly possible without them :

All human things are subject to decay,

And, when fate summons, monarchs must obey.
This Flecknoe found, who, like Augustus, young
Was called to empire, and had governed long;
In prose and verse was owned without dispute,
Through all the realms of Nonsense, absolute.
This aged prince, now flourishing in peace,
And blessed with issue of a large increase,
Worn out with business, did at length debate
To settle the succession of the state;
And, pondering which of all his sons was fit
To reign, and wage immortal war with wit,
Cried "Tis resolved! for nature pleads, that he
Should only rule, who most resembles me.
Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dulness from his tender years;
Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.

The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.
Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,
Strike through and make a lucid interval;
But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray,
His rising fogs prevail upon the day.
Besides, his goodly fabric fills the eye,

And seems designed for thoughtless majesty;
Thoughtless as monarch oaks, that shade the plain,
And, spread in solemn state, supinely reign."

MacFlecknoe was published in October, 1682, but Dryden had not done with Shadwell. A month later came out the second part of Absalom and Achitophel, in which Nahum Tate took up the story. Tate copied the versification of his master with a good deal of success, though as it is known that Dryden gave strokes almost all through the poem, it is difficult exactly to apportion the other laureate's part. But the second part of Absalom and Achitophel would assuredly never be opened were it not for a long passage of about 200 lines, which is entirely Dryden's, and which contains some of his very best work. Unluckily it contains also some of his greatest licences of expression, to which he was probably provoked by the unparalleled language which, as has been said, Shadwell and others had used to him. The 200 lines which he gave Tate are one string of characters, each more savage and more masterly than the last. Ferguson, Forbes, and Johnson are successively branded, Pordage has his ten syllables of immortalizing contempt, and then come the famous characters of Doeg (Settle) and Og (Shadwell),

Two fools that crutch their feeble sense on verse,
Who by my muse to all succeeding times
Shall live, in spite of their own doggrel rhymes.

The coarseness of speech before alluded to makes it im

possible to quote these characters as a whole, but a cento is fortunately possible with little loss of vigour.

Doeg, though without knowing how or why,
Made still a blundering kind of melody ;

Spurred boldly on, and dashed through thick and thin,

Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in ;

Free from all meaning, whether good or bad,

And, in one word, heroically mad,

He was too warm on picking-work to dwell,
But fagoted his notions as they fell,

And, if they rhymed and rattled, all was well.
Railing in other men may be a crime,

But ought to pass for mere instinct in him ;
Instinct he follows, and no farther knows,
For, to write verse with him is to transprose;
"Twere pity treason at his door to lay,
Who makes heaven's gate a lock to its own key;
Let him rail on, let his invective muse
Have four-and-twenty letters to abuse.
Which, if he jumbles to one line of sense,
Indict him of a capital offence.

In fire-works give him leave to vent his spite,
Those are the only serpents he can write;
The height of his ambition is, we know,
But to be master of a puppet-show;
On that one stage his works may yet appear,
And a month's harvest keep him all the year.

Now stop your noses, readers, all and some,
For here's a tun of midnight work to come,
Og from a treason-tavern rolling home.
Round as a globe, and liquored every chink,
Goodly and great he sails behind his link.
With all this bulk there's nothing lost in Og,
For every inch, that is not fool, is rogue.
The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull,
With this prophetic blessing-Be thou dull!
Drink, swear and roar; forbear no lewd delight
Fit for thy bulk, do anything but write.
Thou art of lasting make, like thoughtless men.
A strong nativity-but for the pen ;

Eat opium, mingle arsenic in thy drink,

Still thou mayest live, avoiding pen and ink.
I see, I see, 'tis counsel given in vain,

For treason, botched in rhyme, will be thy bane;
Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck,
'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck.

Why should thy metre good king David blast?
A psalm of his will surely be thy last.
A double noose thou on thy neck dost pull
For writing treason, and for writing dull;
To die for faction is a common evil,

But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.
Hadst thou the glories of thy king exprest,
Thy praises had been satire at the best;
But thou in clumsy verse, unlickt, unpointed,
Hast shamefully defied the Lord's anointed:
I will not rake the dunghill of thy crimes,
For who would read thy life that reads thy rhymes ?
But of king David's foes, be this the doom,

May all be like the young man Absalom;
And for my foes may this their blessing be,
To talk like Doeg, and to write like thee.

No one, I think, can fail to recognize here the qualities which have already been set forth as specially distinguishing Dryden's satire, the fund of truth at the bottom of it, the skilful adjustment of the satire so as to make faults of the merits which are allowed, the magnificent force and variety of the verse, and the constant maintenance of a kind of superior contempt never degenerating into mere railing or losing its superiority in petty spite. The last four verses in especial might almost be taken as a model of satirical verse.

These verses were the last that Dryden wrote in the directly satirical way. His four great poems-the two parts of Absalom and Achitophel, the Medal, and MacFlecknoe, had been produced in rather more than a year, and, high as was his literary position before, had exalted