"By their own arts, 'tis righteously decreed, 66 Against themselves their witnesses will swear ΙΟΙΟ 1015 "Nor doubt the event; for factious crowds engage "In their first onset all their brutal rage. "Then let them take an unresisted course; 1020 "Retire and traverse, and delude their force : "But when they stand all breathless, urge the fight "And rise upon them with redoubled might: "For lawful power is still superior found, "When long driven back at length it stands the ground." 1025 He said. The Almighty, nodding, gave consent; 1030 it would indicate that by Grace her hinder parts he intended Grace's hinder parts. In the other case, with the comma after Grace, the meaning would seem to be that Grace was "the hinder parts" of Law, a very strained metaphor. There is here of course, whichever be the meaning, a reference, as in "Astræa Redux" (lines 262-5), to the appearance of God to Moses: "And he [the Lord] said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me and live. And the Lord said, Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock and it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: and I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen (Exod. xxxiii. 20-3.) The punctuation of the first two editions, which are the most authentic, is followed here. If the comma were away, there would still be difficulty with the word Grace; but if Grace could mean the Divine glory or majesty, the passage would be much improved by doing away with the comma, and treating Grace her as Grace's, and the three lines, 1007-9, as containing a distinct illustration, complete in itself. " Dryden had doubtless here in his mind the language of Virgil in the beginning of the fourth Eclogue: "Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo," and "Incipient magni procedere menses.' And compare, in "Annus Mirabilis," stanza 18: "And now, a round of greater years begun." * THE MEDAL. A SATIRE AGAINST SEDITION. "Per Graium populos mediæque per Elidis urbem Ibat ovans, Divumque sibi poscebat honorem.' VIRG. n. vi. 558. INTRODUCTORY NOTE. The rejection by the London grand jury on November 24, 1681, of the bill of high treason presented against Lord Shaftesbury was celebrated by a medal, having on one side a portrait of Shaftesbury and on the other a sketch of London from the other bank of the river, showing the Bridge and the Tower, with the Sun rising and shining through a cloud, and the inscription, Lætamur. The event had been a great victory for the Whig party and a great discomfiture for the Court. When the foreman of the grand jury announced their decision with the word Ignoramus, the hall rang with cheers, which were caught up and prolonged for an hour by the multitude assembled without, and in the evening bonfires were lighted through the City. Spence says, on the authority of a Roman Catholic priest whom he met at Pope's, that Charles II. suggested this poem to Dryden. The story is thus told: "One day, as the King was walking in the Mall and talking with Dryden, he said, 'If I was a poet, and I think I am poor enough to be one, I would write a poem or such a subject in the following manner.' He then gave him the plan of 'The Medal. Dryden took the hint, carried the poem, so soon as it was written, to the King, and had a present of a hundred broad pieces for it." Like "Absalom and Achitophel," the "Medal" was published anonymously; it was by the author of "Absalom and Achitophel;" and to the last Dryden's name did not appear on the title-page of any edition of either poem in his lifetime. 66 The Medal" was published in the beginning of March 1682, within four months after the first publication of “Absalom and Achitophel." A second edition appeared in 1683, in which year" Absalom and Achitophel" reached its sixth edition; and a third edition, the last in Dryden's lifetime, was published in 1692. The text of this poem has remained remarkably free from change and corruption. After "The Medal," are printed three Prologues of political character written by Dryden in the first half of the year 1682; the first on the occasion of a visit of the King and Queen to the King's Theatre early in the year, the second in honour of the Duke of York on his visiting his Theatre, April 21, after his return from Scotland, and the third in honour of the Duchess on her visiting the same theatre after her return from Scotland in May. As these three Prologues are of an entirely politica! character, they have been separated in this edition from Dryden's Prologues to plays. EPISTLE TO THE WHIGS. FOR to whom can I dedicate this poem with so much justice as to you? 'Tis the representation of your own hero: 'tis the picture drawn at length, which you admire and prize so much in little. None of your ornaments are wanting; neither the landscape of the Tower, nor the rising Sun, nor the Anno Domini of your new sovereign's coronation. This must needs be a grateful undertaking to your whole party: especially to those who have not been so happy as to purchase the original. I hear the graver has made a good market of it all his kings are bought up already; or the value of the remainder so enhanced, that many a poor Polander* who would be glad to worship the image is not able to go to the cost of him, but must be content to see him here. I must confess I am no great artist; but signpost painting will serve the turn to remember a friend by, especially when better is not to be had. Yet for your comfort the lineaments are true; and though he sate not five times to me, as he did to B., yet I have consulted history, as the Italian painters do, when they would draw a Nero or a Caligula; though they have not seen the man, they can help their imagination by a statue of him, and find out the colouring from Suetonius and Tacitus. Truth is, you might have spared one side of your Medal: the head would be seen to more advantage if it were placed on a spike of the Tower, a little nearer to the sun, which would then break out to better purpose. You tell us in your Preface to the "NoProtestant Plot," that you shall be forced hereafter to leave off your modesty: I suppose you mean that little which is left you; for it was worn to rags when you put out this Medal. Never was there practised such a piece of notorious impudence in the face of an established government. I believe, when he is dead, you will wear him in thumb-rings, as the Turks did Scanderbeg, as if there were virtue in his bones to preserve you against monarchy. Yet all this while you This refers to a current subject of banter against Shaftesbury, that he aspired to be elected King of Poland, in 1675, when John Sobieski was elected to the throne. So, the Medal is called "The Polish Medal" in the opening of the poem. The idea of course originated with Shaftesbury's detractors. A long and elaborate banter on this subject appeared in a pamphlet published in 1682, with the title "A modest Vindication of the Earl of Shaftesbury, in a Letter to a Friend, concerning his being elected King of Poland;" and singularly enough, Dryden, his present reviler, is bantered with Shaftesbury and treated as one of Shaftesbury's party. Dryden is the Polish king's poet laureat: "Jean Drydenurtziz, our poet laureat for writing panegyrics upon Oliver Cromwell, and libels against his present master, King Charles II. of England; Tom Shadworiski, his deputy." Shadwell too, so soon to be Dryden's fierce adversary, is made his deputy-laureat. This pamphlet must have been published within a few months of the appearance of" Absalom and Achitophel;' so that Dryden must have been regarded as friendly to the Whig party up to the time of the publication of that poem. He had been the reputed author of Mulgrave's Essay on Satire," in which the King had been freely spoken of. + William Bower, the engraver of the medal, This renowned Albanian warrior, so terrible a foe to the Turks, died at Alessio, in Albania, in 1467. Some years after Mahomet took Alessio, and Scanderbeg's biographer says that his tomb was then opened by Mahomet's orders, and his remains were treated with reverence by the Turks, who eagerly sought for his bones that they might wear them as charms. Scanderbeg's name appears to have been current in Dryden's time in vulgar conversation. "Oh scanderbeg villains" is put into the mouth of one of the characters in the play of "Sir Martin Marall," act 5, sc. 3. pretend not only zeal for the public good, but a due veneration for the person of the King. But all men who can see an inch before them may easily detect those gross fallacies. That it is necessary for men in your circumstances to pretend both, is granted you; for without them there could be no ground to raise a faction. But I would ask you one civil question: What right has any man among you, or any association of men (to come nearer to you) who out of parliament cannot be considered in a public capacity, to meet, as you daily do, in factious clubs, to vilify the government in your discourses and to libel it in all your writings? Who made you judges in Israel? Or how is it consistent with your zeal of the public welfare to promote sedition? Does your definition of loyal, which is to serve the King according to the laws, allow you the licence of traducing the executive power with which you own he is invested? You complain that his Majesty has lost the love and confidence of his people; and by your very urging it you endeavour what in you lies to make him lose them. All good subjects abhor the thought of arbitrary power, whether it be in one or many: if you were the patriots you would seem, you would not at this rate incense the multitude to assume it; for no sober man can fear it, either from the King's disposition or his practice, or, even where you would odiously lay it, from his Ministers. Give us leave to enjoy the government and the benefit of laws under which we were born, and which we desire to transmit to our posterity. You are not the trustees of the public liberty: and if you have not right to petition in a crowd, much less have you to intermeddle in the management of affairs, or to arraign what you do not like, which in effect is everything that is done by the King and Council. Can you imagine that any reasonable man will believe you respect the person of his Majesty, when 'tis apparent that your seditious pamphlets are stuffed with particular reflections on him? If you have the confidence to deny this, 'tis easy to be evinced from a thousand passages, which I only forbear to quote, because I desire they should die and be forgotten. I have perused many of your papers and to show you that I have, the third part of your "No-Protestant Plot" is, much of it, stolen from your dead author's pamphlet, called the "Growth of Popery,"§ as manifestly as Milton's "Defence of the English People" is from Buchanan, De Jure Regni apud Scotos," or your First Covenant and New Association || from the 66 *Among Lord Shaftesbury's papers seized, when he was taken prisoner, was a project of an Association for defence of the Protestant religion and of the King's person, and of the liberties of the subject, which had no signature and was not in Shaftesbury's handwriting, but which was much relied on in the unsuccessful prosecution of him for high treason. This new Association is made much of by Dryden in this Preface, and in the Poem, 205 and following lines. + "Zeal of the public welfare," a Gallicism, which has disappeared in all editions, from Broughton's inclusive; for being substituted for of An act of 1661, 13 Car. II. c. 5, which still exists, and was relied on by the Government so late as 1848, prohibited the repairing to the King or Houses of Parliament with any petition accompanied with excessive number of people, nor at any one time with above the number of ten persons.' "Your dead author," so contemptuously referred to, is the celebrated Andrew Marvel, an earnest and incorruptible politician, the friend of Milton, a poet whose political satires are much disfigured by the same coarseness which so often offends in Dryden, but some of whose other pieces show a true soul of poetry. He was Dryden's senior by eleven years. They had both written elegies, in 1648, on the death of the young Lord Hastings; they had both celebrated the praises of Oliver Cromwell. Marvel had died August 28, 1678. Political feeling made Dryden here forget the respect due to kindred talent and superior virtue. Marvel is again referred to sneeringly in the Preface to "Religio Laici." Dryden was fond of the comparison of the Solemn League and Covenant with the French Holy League of the Guises before the late development of organized opposition to the Court under Shaftesbury's energetic direction. His play of "The Duke of Guise," which appeared in the end of this year. 1682, had been projected and begun immediately after the Restoration. "Shocked by a covenanting League's vast powers As holy and as Catholic as ours,' |