Tonson sufficiently proves how wretchedly he was paid for his arduous and incessant drudgery, and his letters and dedications are full of complaints about his poverty, his ill-health, and the malice of his enemies. But he had many solaces. Personally he appears to have been a very amiable and very sociable man, the fondest of fathers, the kindest of friends. Many anecdotes are extant of his goodness to young authors and aspirants to literary fame, who repaid him with an affection which has more than once found most touching expression. He was a welcome guest wherever he chose to visit, and many of the most delightful houses in England were open to him. As he drew near his end he is said to have expressed great regret at the immoral tendency of some of his writings, and his only retort to Collier's savage attack on him in the Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage was an acknowledgment of its justice: "If he be my enemy let him triumph. If he be my friend, and I have given him. no personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance."

On the 30th of April, 1700, it was announced in a London newspaper that "John Dryden, the famous poet, lies a-dying." He had been told by his physicians that a not very painful operation would save his life. He chose rather to resign it. "He received," said one who saw him die, "the notice of his approaching dissolution with sweet submission and entire resignation to the Divine will, and he took so tender and obliging a farewell of his friends as none but himself could have expressed." He breathed his last on the 1st of May, 1700. His body lay in state for several days in the College

C

of Physicians, and on May the 13th was honoured with a public funeral more imposing and magnificent than any which had been conceded to an English poet before. He was laid in the Great Abbey by the dust of Chaucer and Spenser, not far from the graves of his old friend Davenant and his old schoolmaster Busby.

INTRODUCTION TO

ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL.

FROM the fall of Clarendon in August, 1667, to the death of Shaftesbury in January, 1683, England was in a high state of ferment and agitation. The mad joy of 1660 had undergone its natural reaction, and this reaction was intensified by a long series of national calamities and political blunders. There were feuds in the Cabinet and among the people; the religion of the country was in imminent peril; the Royal house had become a centre of perfidy and disaffection. Clarendon had been made the scape-goat of the disasters which marked the commencement of the reign, of the miserable squabbles attendant on the Act of Indemnity, of the first Dutch War, of the Sale of Dunkirk; but Clarendon was now in exile, and with him was removed one of the very few honourable ministers in the service of the Stuarts. The Triple Alliance (April, 1668) was followed by the scandalous Treaty of Dover (May, 1670), by which an English king bound himself to re-establish the Roman Catholic religion in England, and to join his arms with those of the French king in support of the House of Bourbon, that he might turn the arms of France

against his own subjects, should they attempt to oppose his designs. Between the end of 1667 and the beginning of 1674 the government was in the hands of the Cabal, the most unprincipled and profligate ministry in the annals of our constitutional history. Then followed the administration of Danby. Danby, with all his faults, had the honesty to exchange the shuffling and ignominious tactics of the Cabal for cordial and consistent hatred of the French abroad and of Papists and Nonconformists at home. The Peace of Nimeguen (August, 1678) threw England back on herself. Danby fell, partly because no minister at such a time could hold his own for long, mainly owing to the machinations of Louis XIV., who was to the England of Charles II. what his predecessor Louis XI. had been to the Switzerland of Charles the Bold, and to the England of Edward IV. From a jarring chaos of Cavaliers, Puritans, Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, country parties, of colliding interests, of maddened Commons, of a corrupted and corrupting ministry, of a disaffected Church, of plots and counter-plots, of a Royal house ostensibly in opposition, but secretly in union, two great parties had been gradually defining themselves.

In May, 1662, the king had married Catharine of Braganza, but he had no issue by her, and as she had now (1679) been his wife for seventeen years they were not likely to have issue, and the question of the succession began to assume prominence. In the event of the king leaving no legitimate children the crown would revert to the Duke of York. But the Duke of York was a Papist, and of all the many prejudices of the English people

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generally, the prejudice against Papacy was strongest. All now began to centre on this question, and two great parties were formed. The one party insisted on the exclusion of the Duke of York from the right of succession, on the ground of his religion. These were the Petitioners, afterwards nicknamed Whigs, and the Exclusionists; their leader was the Earl of Shaftesbury. The other party, strongest among Churchmen and the aristocracy, were anxious, partly in accordance with the theory of the divine right of kings and the duty of passive obedience, and partly with an eye to their own interests, to please the king by supporting the claim of his brother. These were the Abhorrers, afterwards one nicknamed Tories. The object of the Exclusionists was to inflame the populace against the Papists. For this purpose the infamous fictions of Oates and his accom- <

plices were accepted and promulgated (September,.PL. 1678), and the complications which succeeded the fall of Danby took their rise. These were succeeded by a second attempt to exasperate the public mind against the Anti-Exclusionists, which found expression in the Meal-Tub Plot (June, 1680). But to turn to the principal actors in this great public drama.

Anthony Ashley Cooper was the eldest son of Sir John Cooper, and was born July 22, 1621, at Winburne, St. Giles. At the age of fifteen he became a Fellow Commoner of Exeter College, Oxford. On quitting Oxford he removed to Lincoln's Inn, where he acquired that knowledge of constitutional law and history for which, throughout his life, he was celebrated. While still in the nineteenth year he represented in Parliament the town of Tewkesbury. At the beginning of