The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Volume 1: With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory NotesDryden, John
General
The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Volume 1: With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes
Dryden, John
English poetry
has lost the love and confidence of his people; and by your very urging
it, you endeavour what in you lies to make him lose them. All good
subjects abhor the thought of arbitrary power, whether it be in one or
many: if you were the patriots you would seem, you would not at this
rate incense the multitude to assume it; for no sober man can fear it,
either from the king's disposition or his practice; or even, where you
would odiously lay it, from his ministers. Give us leave to enjoy the
government and the benefit of laws under which we were born, and which
we desire to transmit to our posterity. You are not the trustees of the
public liberty; and if you have not right to petition in a crowd, much
less have you to intermeddle in the management of affairs; or to arraign
what you do not like, which in effect is everything that is done by the
king and council. Can you imagine that any reasonable man will believe
you respect the person of his majesty, when it is apparent that your
seditious pamphlets are stuffed with particular reflections on him? If
you have the confidence to deny this, it is easy to be evinced from a
thousand passages, which I only forbear to quote, because I desire they
should die and be forgotten. I have perused many of your papers; and to
show you that I have, the third part of your "No-Protestant Plot" is
much of it stolen from your dead author's pamphlet, called the "Growth
of Popery;" as manifestly as Milton's "Defence of the English People" is
from Buchanan "De jure regni apud Scotos:" or your first Covenant and
new Association from the holy league of the French Guisards. Any one who
reads Davila, may trace your practices all along. There were the same
pretences for reformation and loyalty, the same aspersions of the king,
and the same grounds of a rebellion. I know not whether you will take
the historian's word, who says it was reported, that Poltrot, a
Huguenot, murdered Francis Duke of Guise, by the instigations of
Theodore Beza; or that it was a Huguenot minister, otherwise called a
Presbyterian (for our church abhors so devilish a tenet), who first writ
a treatise of the lawfulness of deposing and murdering kings of a
different persuasion in religion: but I am able to prove, from the
doctrine of Calvin, and principles of Buchanan, that they set the people
above the magistrate; which, if I mistake not, is your own fundamental,
and which carries your loyalty no further than your liking. When a vote
of the House of Commons goes on your side, you are as ready to observe
it as if it were passed into a law; but when you are pinched with any
former, and yet unrepealed act of parliament, you declare that in some
cases you will not be obliged by it. The passage is in the same third
part of the "No-Protestant Plot," and is too plain to be denied. The
late copy of your intended Association, you neither wholly justify nor
condemn; but as the Papists, when they are unopposed, fly out into all
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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