st
writers of English prose--George Savile, then Earl, later Marquis of
Halifax, and John Dryden. Halifax, in the tract lately identified as his
by Hugh Macdonald (Cambridge, 1940), _Observations upon a late
Libel_--though he might scarify an individual opponent like Shaftesbury
or pour ridicule upon a sentence from _A Letter_, set himself the task
of answering the Whig case as a whole. The text he dilated upon was:
"there seemeth to be no other Rule allowed by one sort of Men, than that
they cannot Err, and the King cannot be in the Right." With superb irony
and wit he demonstrated how inconsistent such an attitude was with the
constitution of that day.

Dryden's tract, _His Majesties Declaration Defended_ is, like the one
he is answering, in the form of a letter to a friend who has asked the
writer's opinion of the _Declaration_ and the answer to it. "I shall
obey you the more willingly," Dryden responds, "because I know you are a
lover of the Peace and Quietness of your Country; which the Author of
this seditious Pamphlet, is endeavouring to disturb." He writes to show
the "goodness and equity" of the Prince, because once they are
understood, the faction will lose its power and the well-meaning but
misled crowd will be no longer deceived by "the specious names of
Religion and Liberty." After these introductory paragraphs Dryden began
to reply to the pamphlet point by point. His method is to quote or, more
strictly, partly to quote and partly to paraphrase, a sentence and then
refute its argument. In so doing he is following the method of the
author of _A Letter_. Accordingly, to understand and judge the fairness
of Dryden's refutation, it is well first to read _His Majesties
Declaration_, then _A Letter_, and finally Dryden. The first has not
been reprinted in full but a substantial extract may be found in
Echard's _History of England_ (III, 624-6) and in Arthur Bryant's _The
Letters of Charles II_ (pp. 319-22), the second is available in a not
uncommon folio, _State Tracts: being a Collection of several Treatises
... privately printed in the Reign of K. Charles II_ (1689), and the
third is here reproduced for the first time. After the perusal of these
three tracts, the student may well turn to _Absalom and Achitophel_, and
find instruction in comparing the prose and the verse. He may reach the
conclusion that while both were written to win converts to the royal
cause, the first was designed to weaken the Whig party