LUTARCH. IN AGESILAO.

THE DUKE OF GUISE.

In the latter part of Charles the Second's reign, the stage, as well
as every other engine which could affect the popular mind, was eagerly
employed in the service of the contending factions. Settle and
Shadwell had, in tragedy and comedy, contributed their mite to the
support of the popular cause. In the stormy session of parliament, in
1680, the famous bill was moved, for the exclusion of the Duke of
York, as a papist, from the succession, and accompanied by others of a
nature equally peremptory and determined. The most remarkable was a
bill to order an association for the safety of his majesty's person,
for defence of the protestant religion, for the preservation of the
protestant liege subjects against invasion and opposition, and for
preventing any papist from succeeding to the throne of England. To
recommend these rigid measures, and to keep up that zealous hatred and
terror of the catholic religion, which the plot had inspired, Settle
wrote his forgotten tragedy of "Pope Joan," in which he revives the
old fable of a female pope, and loads her with all the crimes of which
a priest, or a woman, could possibly be guilty. Shadwell's comedy of
the "Lancashire Witches" was levelled more immediately at the papists,
but interspersed with most gross and scurrilous reflections upon the
English divines of the high church party. Otway, Lee, and Dryden were
the formidable antagonists, whom the court opposed to the whig poets.
Thus arrayed and confronted, the stage absolutely foamed with
politics; the prologues and epilogues, in particular formed channels,
through which the tenets of the opposite parties were frequently
assailed, and the persons of their leaders and their poets exposed to
scandal and derision.

In the middle of these political broils, Dryden was called upon, as he
informs us, by Lee, to return the assistance which that poet had
afforded in composing "OEdipus." The history of the Duke of Guise had
formerly occupied his attention, as an acceptable subject to the court
after the Restoration. A League, formed under pretence of religion,
and in defence of the king's authority, against his person, presented
facilities of application to the late civil wars, to which, we may be
sure, our poet was by no means insensible. But however apt these
allusions might have been in 1665, the events which had taken place in
1681-2 admitted of a closer