eomenes_ (1692); _Love Triumphant_ (1694).

Soon after Dryden's abandonment of heroic couplets in tragedy, he found
new and more congenial work for his favourite instrument in satire. As
usual the idea was not original to Dryden, though he struck in with his
majestic step and energy divine, and immediately took the lead. The
pioneer was Mulgrave in his _Essay on Satire_, an attack on Rochester
and the court, which was circulated in MS. in 1679. Dryden himself was
suspected of the authorship, and it is not impossible that he gave some
help in revising it; but it is not likely that he attacked the king on
whom he was dependent for the greater part of his income, and Mulgrave
in a note to his _Art of Poetry_ in 1717 expressly asserts Dryden's
ignorance. Dryden, however, was attacked in Rose Street, Covent Garden,
and severely cudgelled by a company of ruffians who were generally
supposed to have been hired by Rochester. In the same year Oldham's
satire on the Jesuits had immense popularity, chiefly owing to the
excitement about the Popish plot. Dryden took the field as a satirist
towards the close of 1681, on the side of the court, at the moment when
Shaftesbury, baffled in his efforts to exclude the duke of York from the
throne as a papist, and secure the succession of the duke of Monmouth,
was waiting his trial for high treason. _Absalom and Achitophel_
produced a great stir. Nine editions were sold in rapid succession in
the course of a year. There was no compunction in Dryden's ridicule and
invective. Delicate wit was not one of Dryden's gifts; the motions of
his weapon were sweeping, and the blows hard and trenchant. The
advantage he had gained by his recent studies of character was fully
used in his portraits of Shaftesbury and Buckingham, Achitophel and
Zimri. In these portraits he shows considerable art in the introduction
of redeeming traits to the general outline of malignity and depravity.
It is not impossible that the fact that his pension had not been paid
since the beginning of 1680 weighed with him in writing this satire to
gain the favour of the court. In a play produced in 1681, _The Spanish
Friar_, he had written on the other side, gratifying the popular
feeling by attacking the Roman Catholic priesthood.

Three other satires followed _Absalom and Achitophel_, one of them
hardly inferior in point of literary power. _The Medall_; a _Satyre
against Sedition_ (March 1682) was written in ridicule of the medal