1. The fam'd Italian Muse, etc. "Dryden seems, though perhaps unconsciously, to have borrowed the two first lines of this prologue from Drayton:

The Tuscan poet doth advance
The frantic Paladin of France.

Nymphidia." SCOTT.

The reference is to Ariosto, Orlando Furi080, xxxiv. 70, 82-86. (The editor is indebted for aid to Professor J. B. Fletcher, of Columbia University.)

11. London votes. London was the stronghold of the king's Whig opponents.

1071. PROLOGUE. .. TO THE UNHAPPY FAVORITE. Christie suggests that this play was selected for the occasion because of a possible parallel between the story of Essex and that of Monmouth.

1. When first, etc. Cf. 750, 70 f. 1072. EPILOGUE. The text of this piece printed

with the play furnishes the following variant readings: (11) the Vision; (14) Pent here; (18) their venom daily spit; (20) To the Upper Gallery is inserted as a side-note; (22) Or what is does spite; (24) These are the Authors that have; (25) exercise; (31) You had agreed your Play before the Prize; (32) Faith you may hang your Harps; (36) her if he. 5. Lott'ry cavaliers. "The lottery cavaliers were the loyal indigent officers, to whom the right of keeping lotteries was granted by patent in the reign of Charles II." [SCOTT.] 8. Three last ungiving parliaments. "These were the parliaments of 1679, 1680, and the Oxford parliament of March, 1681. All three refused supplies to the crown, until they should obtain security, as they termed it, for the Protestant religion." (SCOTT.]

10. Seven lean kine. v. Genesis xli. 1-4. 108, 13. Playhouse earth. Cf. 117, 636, 637. 14. Our last fire. v. headnote, p. 64. On Lilly, v. n. 11, 288; n. 542, 13 (Epil.).

15. Third-days. The third day of a play was the author's benefit performance: cf. 417, 13 (Epil.).

21. The Hatfield Maid. This was a pamphlet telling of the apparition of a ghost of Whiggish inclinations to one Elizabeth Freeman, later called the Maid of Hatfield. [SCOTT.] 23. Democritus, etc. "Heraclitus Ridens was a paper published weekly on the part of the court, and answered by one called Democritus on that of the Whigs." [ScoгT.] Cf. 4422, 3, n.

32. Hang their harps, etc. v. Psalm cxxxvii. 2. ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL. On the general occasion of this poem, see B. S. xxvii, xxviii. The motto: "If you stand nearer, it will attract you more," is from Horace, Ars Poet. 361, 362. In the following notes, F designates the first edition, Q the second; later editions are called ed. 3, ed. 4, etc. In 1716, in The Second Part of Miscellany Poems, Tonson published a Key to both parts of Absalom and Achitophel, to which all succeeding commentators are indebted.

1082, 4. Whig and Tory. "These famous expressions of party distinction were just coming into fashion. Whig, a contraction of Whigamore, is derived from a word used by the peasantry in the west of Scotland in driving their horses, and gave a name to those fanatics who were the supporters of the Covenant in that part of Scotland. The Tories owe their name [Irish toiridhe, a pursuer] to the Irish banditti." [SCOTT.] Thus one side were fanatic rebels, the other Popish thieves.

109, 1. A treasury of merits. The saints, according to the Catholic doctrine, have merits more than sufficient for their own salvation; these merits may be applied to the saving of less holy persons.

6. Enough. F reads enow.

Anti-Bromingham. Anti-Whig. For the reputation of Birmingham, see 1031, 11, n. The Tories applied the term to the Whigs, perhaps in allusion to Monmouth's spurious pretensions to legitimacy. Or, according to another story, the Tories gave the name Birmingham Protestants to the Whigs, in sarcastic allusion to their claim of being the only True Blue Protestants: cf. the title of Mac Flecknoe, 134. Cf. 1241, 40, n.

1092, 20. Origen. Origen believed that salvation was possible for every rational creature. "The evil spirits which fell have not lost that spirit by which they are akin to God, which in its essence is inaccessible to evil, though it can be overgrown and overpowered." WESTCOTT, in Dictionary of Christian Biography.

33. Ense rescindendum. "Something that must be cut off with the sword." Ovid, Met. i. 191, has ense recidendum; Virgil, Æneid, xii. 389, 390, has ense . . . rescindant. Cf. 3141, 27. 1 (verse). In pious times, etc. The profanity of these lines, which seek to excuse the profligacy of Charles II, aroused the wrath of a Nonconformist parson, who in 1682 published A Whip for the Fools Back, who styles Honorable Marriage a Curs'd Confinement, in his Profane Poem of Absalom and Achitophel, followed by, A Key (with the Whip) to open the Mystery and Iniquity of the Poem call'd Absalom and Achitophel. The two form one pamphlet, paged continuously: the first consists of just but crude raillery at the immorality of Dryden's opening lines. Dryden sneers at this writer in his Epistle to the Whigs, prefixed to The Medal; v. 1272, 30. Halkett and

Laing's Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature identifies him with Christopher Nesse.

7. Israel's monarch, etc. David (v. 1 Samuel xiii. 14) and, in the parallel, King Charles II. 11. Michal. Queen Catherine of Portugal, the wife of Charles II, resembled the daughter of Saul in the circumstance mentioned in the text." [SCOTT.] v. 1 Samuel xviii. 27; 2 Samuel vi. 23.

13. Several mothers, etc. This refers to Charles II's numerous family of illegitimate children. 110, 18. Absalon. F reads Absolon. The same variation occurs in line 221.

"James Scott, Duke of Monmouth and Buccleuch, was born at Rotterdam, April 9, 1649. He was the son of Charles II and of Lucy Walters, a beautiful young lady of a good Welsh family. After the Restoration, the king sent for this young gentleman to court, where the royal favor and his own personal and acquired accomplishments soon made him very remarkable. 'Nature,' says Count Hamilton, 'perhaps never formed anything so perfect as the external graces of his person.' Yet his mental qualities did not altogether support this prepossessing exterior. [Cf. 906, 56.] He was married, by the king's interference, to Anne Scott, Countess of Buccleuch, and heiress of the extensive estate which the powerful family she represented had acquired on the frontiers of Scotland. Thus favored at home, he was also fortunate enough to have an opportunity of acquiring military fame by serving two campaigns in Louis XIV's army against the Dutch, in 1672 and 1673. He also served with the Dutch against the French in 1678, and is on all hands allowed to have displayed great personal bravery. On his return to England, the duke met with a distinguished reception from Charles, by whom he was loaded with favors.

"Thus highly distinguished by rank, reputation, and royal favor, he appears for some time to have dedicated himself to the pleasures of the court. During the agitations over the Popish Plot, he was led to head the faction most inimical to the interests of the Duke of York, and speedily became distinguished by the name of the Protestant Duke. The prospect which now opened itself before Monmouth was such as might have turned the head of a man of deeper political capacity. The heir apparent, his personal enemy, had become the object of popular hatred to such a degree that the bill excluding him from the succession seemed to have every chance of being carried through the House of Lords, as it had already passed the Commons. It seems generally to have been believed that Charles was too fond of Monmouth, and too jealous of his brother, to hesitate at declaring this favorite youth his legitimate successor.

his secret partiality, he became more and more deeply involved in the plots of Shaftes bury, whose bustling and intriguing spirit saw at once the use to be made of Monmouth's favor with the king and popularity with the public. From that time their union became close and inseparable. Some of Monmouth's partisans had even the boldness to assert his legitimacy, which, however, was formally denied by the king. When the insurrection of the Covenanters broke out in Scotland, Monmouth was employed against them, a duty which he executed with fidelity and success. This was in the year 1679, and Monmouth's good fortune had then attained its summit. He was beloved by the people and general of all the forces; London was at the devotion of Shaftesbury; the Duke of York banished to Brussels, and universally detested on account of his religion. But either the king's attachment to the Catholic religion, or his sense of justice and hereditary right, occasioned an extraordinary alteration of measures at this momentous crisis. The Duke of York was summoned from abroad, and by his presence and activity at once assumed his ascendance over Charles. For although he was obliged to retire to Scotland to avoid the fury of the exclusionists, yet a sharper exile awaited his rival Monmouth, who, deprived of his commission as general, was sent into the foreign banishment from which his uncle had just been recalled. Accordingly he retired to Holland. Meanwhile the factions waxed still more furious, and Shaftesbury utterly embroiled the kingdom by persuading Monmouth to return to England (in November, 1679) without license from his father. This conduct deeply injured Monmouth in his father's favor, who refused to see him, had his chief offices taken from him, and caused him to be formally sent out of the kingdom by order in council. Monmouth, instead of leaving the country, in August, 1680, started on a quasi-royal progress through the west of England, with an affectation of popularity which gained the vulgar, but terrified the reflecting. Above all, by a close alliance with the Machiavel, Shaftesbury, he showed his avowed determination to maintain his pretensions against those of the lawful successor. This was the state of parties in 1681, when Absalom and Achitophel first appeared.

"The permission of so sharp a satire against the party of Monmouth, though much qualified as to his individual person, plainly showed the king's intention to proceed with energy against the leaders of the country party. Monmouth was arrested on September 20, 1682, and obliged to enter bail for his peaceable deportment and appearance when called on to answer any suit against him by the king. He was subsequently involved in the Rye House Plot, but was pardoned by the king. Being banished from court, he retreated to Holland, where he remained until after the

accession of James II. He then headed a rebellion, which resulted in his entire defeat and in his execution on the scaffold, July 15, 1685." [SCOTT.]

19. Inspir'd by. F reads inspir'd with.

34. The charming Annabel. See note on I. 18, and B. S. xvii.

39. Amnon's murther. v. 2 Samuel xiii. 28, 29. Scott and Christie think that this refers to an assault in December, 1670, by some of Monmouth's troopers, upon Sir John Coventry, a member of the House of Commons who had made a sarcastic allusion to the king's amours. Coventry was not murdered, though he was brutally disfigured, so that the parallel is not accurate.

42. Sion. London.

45. The Jews. The English.

51. Adam-wits. Probably only an allusion to the state of Adam in Paradise, free except that he was prohibited to eat of the tree of knowledge. Want in the next line means lack. 57. Saul. Oliver Cromwell.

58. Ishbosheth, Richard Cromwell: v. 2 Samuel iii, iv.

59. Hebron. Scotland, where Charles had been crowned on January 1, 1651; in England he was not crowned until April 23, 1661. So David reigned in Hebron before he reigned in Jerusalem: v. 2 Samuel v. 4, 5.

66. A State. The word, as in 1. 24, means republic.

82. Good Old Cause. That is, of the Commonwealth; Dryden's aim is to identify the Whigs with the men who rebelled against Charles I. There is, possibly, a more specific reference to the intrigues between Charles I and the Presbyterians and the parliament in 1647-48, which led ultimately to the execution of the king and the establishment of the Commonwealth.

85. Jerusalem. London.

86. Jebusites. Roman Catholics: for the name, v. Judges i. 21; xix. 10.

87. And theirs the native right. As Professor Collins points out, this and other unfinished lines are probably in imitation of Virgil's hemistichs: cf. 517, 55, n.

88. The chosen people. The Protestants. 90. And every loss, etc. The following lines do not exaggerate the treatment of the Catholics by the government and the people of England. 111, 104. The Jewish rabbins. "Doctors of the Church of England." CHRISTIE. 108. That Plot. The Popish Plot, of which Titus Oates gave the first information in August, 1678. According to Oates' story, Charles was to be murdered and James made king as the agent of the Jesuits. A French army was to support these schemes and aid in suppressing Protestantism. Oates may have had some slight foundation of truth for his structure of lies.

114. Some truth there was, etc. A recent investigator of the Popish Plot, Mr. John Pollock, gives Dryden the following high (perhaps excessive) praise:

Of all men whose reputation was made or raised by the Popish Plot, none have since maintained their fame at so even a height 13 John Dryden. His person but not his name suffered from the changes of fortune, and at a distance of more than two centuries the sum of continuous investigation has little to add to the judgments passed on his times by the greatest of satirists. The flashes of Dryden's insight illumine more than the light shed by many records. In politics, no less than in society, his genius had ample room. The Plot gave him a subject worthy of a master. [Lines 114-117, 134-141 quoted.] The lines are a witness against the two great parties whose intrigues were woven to menace the security of the English state. Oates' false oaths ruined the hopes of the Roman Catholics: the designs of the English Whigs were grounded on them." The Popish Plot, London, 1903, p. 222.

118. Egyptian. French: cf. 113, 281–286. At this time France was the leading Catholic power. The following lines are a sneer at the doctrine of transubstantiation, which Dryden later defends in The Hind and the Panther: v. 219, 220, 85-153. Dryden is indebted to the opening lines of Juvenal, xv, where, after describing the Egyptian worship of animals, the satirist exclaims: "It is impiety to violate and break with the teeth the leek and the onion. O holy races, to whom such deities as these are born in their gardens! Every table abstains from woolly animals; it is impiety there to cut the throat of a young kid; it is lawful to feed on human flesh." (J. D. Lewis's translation.)

121. As serv'd. F reads And serv'd. 128. Hebrew priests. Anglican clergymen. The

fleece is of course the tithes paid by the parishioners; Dryden's sneers at priests are incessant. 150. Of these, etc. Professor Firth calls attention to the following passage in Coleridge's Table Talk, August 6, 1832:

"You will find this a good gauge or criterion of genius whether it progresses and evolves, or only spins upon itself. Take Dryden's Achitophel and Zimri: ... every line adds to or modifies the character, which is, as it were, a-building up to the very last verse; whereas in Pope's Timon, &c., the first two or three couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirized."

Achitophel. Anthony Ashley Cooper (1621– 83), created Earl of Shaftesbury, in 1672. He inherited a large fortune, and became a member of parliament in 1640. On the outbreak of the civil war he supported the king, and in 1643 raised troops in his aid. In 1644 he changed sides, and performed military service under the parliamentary commanders. He sat in the Barebone's Parliament in 1653, where he was a leader of the moderate party. and in later parliaments under Oliver Crom

well and Richard Cromwell. He was also a member of Cromwell's Council of State in 1653-54, but did not receive the usual salary of £1000 for his services, and about the close of 1654 became estranged from Cromwell, from whom he afterwards held aloof, and whom he at times opposed. He actively promoted the Restoration, and after it became prominent in the government. In 1661 he was made Baron Ashley. In 1670-73 he was a member of the Cabal ministry and in 167273 Lord Chancellor. After the fall of the Cabal he became the most conspicuous leader of the Opposition. In 1678 and the following years he took advantage of the belief in the Popish Plot, and was the chief supporter of the Exclusion Bill, which was brought forward to deprive the Duke of York of the succession. In 1679 he was for a short time in office as Lord President of the Council. On July 2, 1681, he was arrested and confined to the Tower on a charge of high treason, but was released when the Middlesex grand jury refused to indict him. When set free, he remained in London, where he was safe so long as Whig sheriffs remained in power. In 1682, when the Tories had gained control of London, Shaftesbury, with Monmouth and others, formed fruitless plans for a rising against the king. In November, 1682, he fled to Holland, where he died on January 21 of the next year. He was a constant supporter, though sometimes by unscrupulous means, of parliamentary government and, except as regards Catholics, whom he dreaded for political reasons, of religious liberty. Dryden's wonderful satires have done permanent injury, it may be feared, to the reputation of a great man. 152. Counsels. F reads Counsell. 154. Principles. F reads principle. 156. A fiery soul, etc. A writer in Notes and Queries, series I. ii. 468, cites the following passages as possibly furnishing Dryden hints for these lines:

"He was one of a lean body and visage, as if his eager soul, biting for anger at the clog of his body, desired to fret a passage through it." FULLER, The Holy State and the Profane State (in the life of Alva).

The purest soul that e'er was sent
Into a clayey tenement.

CAREW, Epitaph on the Lady Mary
Villiers.

The general idea of the contrast between Shaftesbury's body and his mind is found in Mulgrave's Essay on Satire: v. 907, 100–116. 157. Pigmy body. In reference to Shaftesbury's small stature.

163. Great Wits, etc. Seneca writes, quoting inaccurately from Aristotle (Problems, xxx. 1): "There has been no great genius without a mixture of madness." (De Trang. Animi, xvii.) But Dryden may have taken the idea from Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, i. 3. 3. 170. To that unfeather'd, etc. Shaftesbury's son was a man of no capacity. Dryden contempt

uously applies to him the definition of man attributed to Plato: "A two-legged unfeather'd animal."

112, 175. The triple bond he broke. In 1668 a triple alliance had been formed between England, Sweden, and the Dutch Republic, against France. Shaftesbury played a prominent part in breaking up this alliance and bringing on the Dutch war of 1672-74, in which England was aided by France. He was however not privy to any designs of France against English freedom. In 1672 Dryden had been an ardent advocate of the policy of the Cabal: v. B. S. xxii; 70, 71. In 1673 dread of France, and of Catholic influence in England, replaced the previous jealousy of Holland. There were fears, not entirely groundless, of a French invasion in the Catholic interest.

179. Usurp'd a patriot's. F reads Assum'd a Patron's. The next twelve lines do not appear at all in F. Their absence occasions an abrupt and awkward transition. We may at least conjecture-proof of course is impossible that they were present in Dryden's original draught of the poem, but omitted, in order to deepen the satire on Shaftesbury, when it was first published; and that line 179 was then altered in order partially to bridge the gap caused by their omission. So far as the editor can learn, Shaftesbury was not specially distinguished as a patron, nor can that name be called all-atoning. If this conjecture be correct, Dryden in the second edition simply reverted to his original text.

Patriot was the name affected by the faction (the germ of the Whig party) that in 1680 sent up petitions to Charles asking him to allow Parliament to meet, that the Exclusion Bill might be passed: cf. 121, 122, 963-988. 188. Abbethdin. A rabbinical term for a certain officer of the high court of justice of the Jews: literally, father of the house of judgment. See the Jewish Encyclopedia under bet din. It is here applied to Shaftesbury as Lord Chancellor, the presiding judge in the Court of Chancery.

196, 197. David, etc. Two interpretations are possible for this couplet: David would have made a song in honor of Achitophel, so that (a) one of David's songs (perhaps Psalm iii, or the lament of David for Absalom in 2 Samuel xviii. 33) would have been lacking; or (b) so that Dryden would have had no need to write his immortal poem of Absalom and Achitophel. The former meaning seems the more likely to be true. The application to Charles II is by no means clear.

198, 199. But wild, etc. "In Knolles' History of the Turks, printed more than sixty years before the appearance of Absalom and Achitophel, are the following verses, under a portrait of the Sultan Mustapha I:

Greatnesse on Goodnesse loves to slide, not stand, And leaves for Fortune's ice Vertue's firme land. The circumstance is the more remarkable,

because Dryden has really no couplet more intensely Drydenian than this [lines 198, 199 of A. and A.], of which the whole thought, and almost the whole expression, are stolen." MACAULAY, Essay on Temple.

The poem from which this couplet is taken is found on p. 1370 of the 1621 edition of Knolles' work; it is in a continuation not inIcluded in the earlier editions. The editor

is here indebted to Professor W. A. Neilson of Harvard University.

204. Manifest of crimes. A Latinism, from Sallust's manifestus sceleris (Jugurtha, xxxv). [CHRISTIE.] Cf. 767, 623.

209. More he makes. Christie remarks that the charge against Shaftesbury of fabricating evidence for the Popish Plot is without foundation. Shaftesbury probably shared in the belief in it by which he profited.

213. Proves the king himself a Jebusite. This was, to quote Christie, "no calumnious invention of Shaftesbury." Charles II professed himself a Catholic on his deathbed, and was probably one in heart at the time of the Restoration.

227. Drawn, etc. This line is repeated in The Hind and the Panther, 220, 211. The hint for it he found in a couplet:

It is decreed, we must be drain'd, I see, Down to the dregs of a democracy,which begins one of the poems in Lachrymæ Musarum, 1649, the volume in which Dryden's poem Upon the Death of the Lord Hastings was first published. The poem is signed M. N., which is expanded into M. Needham in the copy of the book (in the issue of 1650) once owned by the Countess of Huntingdon, Hastings' mother, and now by Mr. Chew. 235. Divides. F reads Shuts up. 240. Thee, Savior, thee, etc. Dryden is indebted, as Professor Collins shows, to Lucretius, i. 6: Te, dea, te fugiunt venti (cf. 182, 7); or to Milton's imitation of that line in Lycidas, 39: Thee, shepherd, thee the woods and desert caves, etc. 113, 264. Gath. Explained in Tonson's Key,

published in The Second Part of Miscellany Poems, 1716, as, "The Land of Exile, more particularly Brussels, where King Charles II long resided."

270-272. He... strand. Cf. 10, 276-279. Jordan's sand here means Dover, but in 120, 820 Jordan's flood is the Irish Channel. 281. Pharaoh. Louis XIV, with whom Charles II was in alliance.

299. And nobler, etc. These lines probably express Shaftesbury's real motive. In desiring a king who should hold power only by the will of the people he anticipated the policy of the Revolution.

310. Metal. Metal and mettle were at this time not distinguished in spelling.

314. Loyal. So F and Q. Eds. 4, 5, and 6 read Royal, probably by a misprint; the editor has not seen ed. 3.

318. Mankind's delight. Copied from a phrase

used by Suetonius of the Emperor Titu amor ac delicia generis humani. Cf. 282', { 114, 353. His brother. James, Duke of York. For further tributes to him by Dryden, v. 204, 36-77; 247, 2200-2231.

381. Contemn. F reads condemn.

390. Sanhedrin. The high council of the Jews: here, the parliament.

402. My arts, etc. "In 1679, when the antipathy to Popery had taken the deepest roet in men's minds, the House of Common passed a vote: 'That the Duke of York's being a Papist, and the hopes of his coming to the crown, had given the highest counte nance to the present conspiracies and design of the Papists against the king and the Pretestant religion.' Charles endeavored to parry the obvious consequences of this vote by proposing to the Council a set of limitations which deprived his successor, if a Catholic, of the chief branches of royalty. Shaftesbury, then President of the Coucrl. argued against this plan as totally inefeetual; urging that when the future king should find a parliament to his mind the limits tions might be as effectually taken off as they could be imposed. When the bill was brought in, for the total exclusion of the Duke of York from the succession, Shaftesbury favored it with all his influence. It passed the Lower House by a very large majority, but was rejected by the House of Lords, where Halifax opposed it with very great ability. Shaftes bury, who had taken so decided a part against the Duke of York in his dearest interests. now could only look for safety in his ruin." [SCOTT.]

416. A nation. F reads a Million.

418. God was their king. Alluding to the Commonwealth "without a king," established in 1649, which is compared to the condition of Israel under the Judges. It was brought to an end by the creation of the Protectorate under Cromwell (Saul) in 1653.

115, 447. And, like a lion, etc. Cf. 795, 242-244. 455. Your case, etc. Shaftesbury's party were justly believed willing and anxious to raise an armed rebellion against the king if they could gain their ends in no other way. 116, 513. Solymaan rout. The London rabble: Solyma is another name for Jerusalem. The following lines refer to the submission of the City to Cromwell, and its later turbulency under Charles II.

517. Ethnic plot. The Popish Plot, made by the Gentiles (rà vn); that is, here, the Jebusites. or Catholics.

519. Hot Levites. The Presbyterian clergymen, who in 1662 had been forced to leave the Church of England by the Act of Uniformity. which required unfeigned consent to everything contained in the Book of Common Prayer as a condition of holding a benefice. Their followers were mainly among the tradesmen and merchants of the towns. 525. Aaron's race. The priesthood: v. 1 Chronicles vi..49.