O’ th’ compass in their bones and joints, Can by their pangs and aches find All turns and changes of the wind, And better than by Napier’s bones Feel in their own the age of moons: So guilty sinners in a state Can by their crimes prognosticate, And in their consciences feel pain Some days before a shower of rain. He, therefore, wisely cast about All ways he could to ensure his throat.” In Dryden’s great portrait, on the contrary, violent passion, implacable revenge, boldness amounting to temerity, are the most striking features. Ahithophel is one of the “great wits to madness near allied.” And again-- “A daring pilot in extremity, Pleased with the danger when the waves went high, He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit, Would steer too nigh the sands to boast his wit.” (1) (1) It has never, we believe, been remarked, that two of the most striking lines in the description of Ahithophel are borrowed from a most obscure quarter. In Knolles’s History of the Turks, printed more than sixty years before the appearance of Absalom and Ahithophel, are the following verses, under a portrait of the Sultan Mustapha the First: “Greatnesse on goodnesse loves to slide, not stand, And leaves for Fortune’s ice Vertue’s firme land.” Dryden’s words are-- “But wild Ambition loves to slide, not stand, And Fortune’s ice prefers to Virtue’s land.” The circumstance is the more remarkable, because Drvden has really no couplet which would seem to a good critic more intensely Drydenian, both in thought and expression, than this, of which the whole thought, and almost the whole expression, are stolen. As we are on this subject, we cannot refrain from observing that Mr. Courtenay has done Drvden injustice, by inadvertently attributing to him some feeble lines which are in Tate’s part of Absalom and Ahithophel.