f the factions, after which the Whigs gradually
declined, both in spirit, in power, and in popularity. Their boldest
leaders were for a time appalled;[7] and when they resumed their
measures, they gradually approached rather revolution than reform, and
thus alienated the more temperate of their own party, till at length
their schemes terminated in the Rye-house Conspiracy. The speech having
such an effect, was therefore not improperly adopted as a termination to
the poem of "Absalom and Achitophel."

The success of this wonderful satire was so great, that the court had
again recourse to the assistance of its author. Shaftesbury was now
liberated from the Tower; for the grand jury, partly influenced by
deficiency of proof, and partly by the principles of the Whig party, out
of which the sheriffs had carefully selected them, refused to find the
bill of high treason against him. This was a subject of unbounded
triumph to his adherents, who celebrated his acquittal by the most
public marks of rejoicing. Amongst others, a medal was struck, bearing
the head and name of Shaftesbury, and on the reverse, a sun, obscured
with a cloud, rising over the Tower and city of London, with the date of
the refusal of the bill (24th November 1681), and the motto LAETAMUR.
These medals, which his partisans wore ostentatiously at their bosoms,
excited the general indignation of the Tories; and the king himself is
said to have suggested it as a theme for the satirical muse of Dryden,
and to have rewarded his performance with an hundred broad pieces. To a
poet of less fertility, the royal command, to write again upon a
character which, in a former satire, he had drawn with so much precision
and felicity, might have been as embarrassing at least as honourable.
But Dryden was inexhaustible; and easily discovered, that, though he had
given the outline of Shaftesbury in "Absalom and Achitophel," the
finished colouring might merit another canvas. About the sixteenth of
March 1681, he published, anonymously "The Medal, a Satire against
Sedition," with the apt motto,

"_Per Graium populos, mediaeque per Elidis urbem
Ibat ovans; Divumque sibi poscebat honores._"

In this satire, Shaftesbury's history; his frequent political
apostasies; his licentious course of life, so contrary to the stern
rigour of the fanatics, with whom he had associated; his arts in
instigating the fury of the anti-monarchists; in fine, all the political
and moral bearings