'The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull, With this prophetic blessing--"Be thou dull; Drink, swear and roar; forbear no lewd delight Fit for thy bulk; do any thing but write. Thou art of lasting make, like thoughtless men, A strong nativity--but for the pen; Eat opium, mingle arsenic in thy drink, Still thou mayst live, avoiding pen and ink." I see, I see, 'tis counsel given in vain, For treason, botch'd in rhyme, will be thy bane; Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck, 'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck. Why should thy metre good King David blast? A psalm of his will surely be thy last. Darest thou presume in verse to meet thy foes, Thou, whom the penny pamphlet foil'd in prose? Doeg, whom God for mankind's mirth has made, O'ertops thy talent in thy very trade; Doeg, to thee, thy paintings are so coarse, A poet is, though he's the poet's horse. A double noose thou on thy neck dost pull, For writing treason, and for writing dull. To die for faction is a common evil, But to be hang'd for nonsense is the devil. Hadst thou the glories of thy king exprest, Thy praises had been satire at the best; But thou in clumsy verse, unlickt, unpointed, Hast shamefully defiled the Lord's anointed. I will not rake the dunghill of thy crimes, For who would read thy life that reads thy rhymes? But of King David's foes, be this the doom, May all be like the young man Absolom; And, for my foes, may this their blessing be, To talk like Doeg, and to write like thee!' Only a month before the appearance of this annihilating attack, Dryden had devoted an entire poem to Shadwell, who had justly provoked him by a scandalous libel. The title of _MacFlecknoe_ is derived from an Irish priest and, with the exception of some good lines pointed out by Southey and Lamb, a bad poet, already satirized by Marvell. It is a vigorous attack, but not equal to the passage in _Absalom and Achitophel_, and chiefly memorable inasmuch as the machinery evidently suggested that of Pope's _Dunciad_. Dryden's next poetical efforts, the dramatic excepted, were of quite another kind. Simultaneously with the second part of _Absalom and Achitophel_ appeared _Religio Laici_, an argument for the faith of the Church of England as a _juste milieu_ between Popery and Deism. In one respect this takes the highest place among the works of Dryden, for it is the most perfect example he has given of that reasoning in rhyme of which he was so great a master. There is not and could not be any originality in the reasonings themselves, but Pope's famous couplet was never so finely illustrated, except by Pope himself: 'True wit is nature to advantage drest; What oft was thought, but ne'er so well exprest.'