to condemn Shaftesbury; but when, on his acquittal, a medal was struck by his friends, bearing on one side the head and name of Shaftesbury, and on the other, the sun obscured by a cloud rising over the Tower and City of London, Dryden's aid was again solicited by the Court and the King in person, to make this the subject of a second satire; and, with great rapidity, he produced "The Medal--a Satire against Sedition," which, completing and colouring the photograph of Shaftesbury, formed the real Second Part of "Absalom and Achitophel." What bore that name came a year afterwards, when the times were changed, was written partly by a feebler hand--Nahum Tate; and flew at inferior game--Dryden's own personal rivals and detractors. The principal of these was Shadwell, who had been an early friend of Dryden's, and who certainly possessed a great deal of wit and talent, if he did not attain to the measure of poetic genius. His principal power lay in low comedy--his chief fault lay in his systematic and avowed imitation of the rough and drunken manners of Ben Jonson. In the eye of Dryden--whose own habits were convivial, although not to the same extent--the real faults of his opponent were his popularity as a comic writer, and his politics. Shadwell was a zealous Protestant, and the bitterest of the many who replied to the "Medal." For this he became the hero of "MacFlecknoe"--a masterly satire, holding him up to infamy and contempt--besides sitting afterwards for the portrait of Og, in the second part of "Absalom and Achitophel." Shadwell had, by and by, his revenge, by obtaining the laureateship, after the Revolution, in room of Dryden, and no doubt used the opportunity of drowning the memory of defeat in the butt of generous canary which had now for ever passed the door of his formidable rival. Dryden's circumstances, at this time, were considerably straitened. His pension as laureate was not regularly paid; the profits from the theatre had somewhat fallen off. He tried in various ways, by prefacing a translation of "Plutarch's Lives," by publishing a miscellany of versions from Greek and Latin authors, and by writing prologues to plays and prefaces to books, to supply his exhausted exchequer. His good-humoured but heartless monarch set him on another task, for which he was never paid, writing a translation of Maimbourg's "History of the League," the object of which was to damage Shaftesbury and his party, by branding them as enemies to monarchy. In 1682 he wrote his "Religio Laici."