The reader must recal to his mind the state of parties during the last years of Charles the Second’s reign, to which so many allusions have been made in the notes upon “Absalom and Achitophel,” and “The Medal.” The flight of Shaftesbury, and the discovery of the Rye-house conspiracy, had been deep wounds to the credit of the Whigs. The wealthy part of the nation dreaded a party, whose chief support was in the riotous mob of London; and men of principle, while they felt the severity of a government, which seemed approaching towards despotism, abhorred the assassination which a part at least of the popular leaders had meditated as a remedy. The king, meanwhile, was anxious to keep the advantage he had gained, and to stigmatise his adversaries as leagued together against him upon principles inimical to all kingly governments. For this purpose, Dryden was employed to translate from the French of the Jesuit Maimbourg, the “History of the League,” a work undertaken in France under the auspices of Louis XIV. The evident intention of bringing out this translation at the time when it appeared, was, to increase the unpopularity of the Whigs, by ascribing to the association which Shaftesbury had proposed, the same motives and principles which actuated the members of the League, and plunged France into the long and bloody civil war between their kings and the house of Guise. Dryden had already drawn such a parallel in the play, called “The Duke of Guise,” which he wrote in conjunction with Lee. The intended parallel between the faction of the League in France, and that of the Solemn League and Covenant, and afterwards of the Whigs in England, was avowed in the first lines of the prologue,[10] and more largely in the vindication of the play, which Dryden published shortly after its appearance.[11] Maimbourg, on the other hand, from whose work the translation was made, was not only a zealous royalist, but a professed enemy of the Huguenots, and had written a history of their religion, calculated to place it in the most odious point of view. There was, therefore, to be found in his “History of the League,” not only an accurate and terrifying account of that famous combination, but many hints towards completing the parallel to be deduced betwixt the principles of the Guisards and those of the Calvinists. With this intention, and under the immediate auspices of the king, the work was translated and published.