ut he turned horrorstruck from the sight of a "state
drawn to the dregs of a democracy," and in the crisis of the Popish Plot
he struck blindly for the Crown.

[Sidenote: "Absalom and Achitophel."]

Dryden like the Royalists generally believed that the arrest of
Shaftesbury had alone saved England from civil war, and from that worst
of civil wars where a son fights against his father's throne. In his
"Absalom and Achitophel" the poet told the story of the threatened
strife under the thin veil of the revolt against David. Charles was the
Hebrew king, Monmouth was Absalom, Shaftesbury was the wily Achitophel
who drew him into revolt. The "Absalom" was a satire, and it was the
first great English satire, for the satires of Marston and Hall were
already forgotten. It is in ages indeed like the Restoration that satire
naturally comes to the front. In the reaction after a time of high
ideals and lofty efforts the sense of contrast between the aims and the
powers of man, between his hopes and their fulfilment, takes form
whether in the kindly pitifulness of humour or in the bitter revulsion
of satire. And mingled with this in Dryden was an honest indignation at
the hypocrisy around him. The men he attacks are not real men but
actors. Buckingham and Shaftesbury, the infidel leader of the
Independents and the deistical leader of the Presbyterians, were alike
playing a part. But the largeness and fairness of his temper saved
Dryden's satire from the vicious malignity of that of Pope. He has an
artistic love of picturesque contrast, he has a great writer's pride in
the consciousness of power. But he has no love of giving pain for the
mere pain's sake, and he has a hatred of unfairness. Even in his
contempt for the man he is just to Buckingham, and his anger does not
blind him to the great qualities of Shaftesbury.

[Sidenote: Progress of the Reaction.]

The even and effortless force of the poem, the disappearance of
inequalities and faults of taste, showed that Dryden was at last master
of his powers. But it was not this nervous strength alone which suddenly
brought him to the forefront of English letters. It was the general
sense that his "Absalom" was the opening of a new literary developement.
Its verse, free from the old poetic merits as from the old poetic
faults, clear, nervous, condensed, argumentative, proclaimed the final
triumph of the "poetry of good sense." Its series of portraits showed
the new interest in human c