iaments he had just dissolved,
and their temper was naturally embittered by the two dissolutions. But
their violence simply played into the king's hands. William's party
still had hopes of bringing about a compromise; but the rejection of a
new Limitation Bill brought forward by Halifax, which while conceding to
James the title of king would have vested the actual functions of
government in the Prince and Princess of Orange during his reign,
alienated the more moderate and sensible of the Country party. They were
alienated still more by a bold appeal of Shaftesbury to Charles himself
to recognize Monmouth as his successor. The attempt of the Lower House
to revive the panic by impeaching an informer named Fitzharris before
the House of Lords, in defiance of the constitutional rule which
entitled him as a commoner to a trial by his peers in the course of
common law, did still more to throw public opinion on the side of the
Crown. Shaftesbury's course, in fact, went wholly on a belief that the
penury of the Treasury left Charles at his mercy, and that a refusal of
supplies must wring from the king his assent to the Exclusion. But the
gold of France had freed the king from his thraldom. He had used the
Parliament simply to exhibit himself as a sovereign whose patience and
conciliatory temper were rewarded with insult and violence; and now that
his end was accomplished he no sooner saw the Exclusion Bill
reintroduced into the Commons than he suddenly dissolved the Houses
after but a month's sitting and appealed in a royal declaration to the
justice of the nation at large.

[Sidenote: Dryden.]

The appeal was met by an almost universal burst of loyalty. The Church
rallied to the king; his declaration was read from every pulpit; and the
Universities solemnly decided that "no religion, no law, no fault, no
forfeiture" could avail to bar the sacred right of hereditary
succession. The arrest of Shaftesbury on a charge of suborning false
witnesses to the Plot marked the new strength of the Crown. The answer
of the nation at large was uttered in the first great poem of John
Dryden. Born in 1631 of a good Northamptonshire family, Dryden had grown
up amidst the tumult of the civil wars in a Puritan household. His
grandfather, Sir Erasmus Dryden, had gone to prison at seventy rather
than contribute to a forced loan. His father had been a committee-man
and sequestrator under the Commonwealth. He entered life under the
protection of a