comedy of the "Virtuoso;" and in the Preface to the same piece he plainly intimated, that he wanted nothing but a pension to enable him to write as well as the poet-laureate.[19] This attack was the more intolerable, as Dryden, in the Preface to that very play of "Aureng-Zebe," probably meant to include Shadwell among those contemporaries who, even in his own judgment excelled him in comedy. In 1678 Dryden accommodated with a prologue Shadwell's play of the "True Widow;" but to write these occasional pieces was part of his profession, and the circumstance does not prove that the breach between these rivals for public applause was ever thoroughly healed; on the contrary, it seems likely, that, in the case of Shadwell, as in that of Settle, political hatred only gangrened a wound inflicted by literary rivalry. After their quarrel became desperate, Dryden resumed his prologue, and adapted it to a play by Afra Behn, called the "Widow Ranter, or Bacon in Virginia."[20] Whatever was the progress of the dispute, it is certain that Shadwell, as zealously attached to the Whig faction as Dryden to the Tories, buckled on his armour among their other poetasters to encounter the champion of royalty. His answer to "The Medal" is entitled "The Medal of John Bayes:" it appeared in autumn 1681, and is distinguished by scurrility, even among the scurrilous lampoons of Settle, Care, and Pordage. Those, he coolly says, who know Dryden, know there is not an untrue word spoke of him in the poem; although he is there charged with the most gross and infamous crimes. Shadwell also seems to have had a share in a lampoon, entitled "The Tory Poets," in which both Dryden and Otway were grossly reviled.[21] On both occasions, his satire was as clumsy as his overgrown person, and as brutally coarse as his conversation: for Shadwell resembled Ben Jonson in his vulgar and intemperate pleasures, as well as in his style of comedy and corpulence of body.[22] Dryden seems to have thought, that such reiterated attacks, from a contemporary of some eminence, whom he had once called friend, merited a more severe castigation than could be administered in a general satire. He therefore composed "Mac-Flecknoe, or a Satire on the True Blue Protestant Poet, T.S., by the Author of Absalom and Achitophel," which was published 4th October 1682. Richard Flecknoe, from whom the piece takes its title, was so distinguished as a wretched poet, that his name had become almost proverbial. Shadwell is represented as the adopted son of this venerable monarch, who so long "In prose and verse was owned without dispute, Through all the realms of Nonsense absolute."