. Of Will's Coffee-house, Congreve says, in _Love for Love_, "Oh,
confound that Will's Coffee-house; it has ruined more young men than the
Royal Oak Lottery:" this speaks at once of the fashion and social license
of the time.

Charles II. was happy to have so fluent a pen, to lampoon or satirize his
enemies, or to make indecent comedies for his amusement; while Dryden's
aim seems to have been scarcely higher than preferment at court and
honored contemporary notoriety for his genius. But if the great majority
lauded and flattered him, he was not without his share in those quarrels
of authors, which were carried on at that day not only with goose-quills,
but with swords and bludgeons. It is recorded that he was once waylaid by
the hired ruffians of the Earl of Rochester, and beaten almost to death:
these broils generally had a political as well as a social significance.
In his quarrels with the literary men, he used the shafts of satire. His
contest with Thomas Shadwell has been preserved in his satire called
McFlecknoe. Flecknoe was an Irish priest who wrote dull plays; and in this
poem Dryden proposes Shadwell as his successor on the throne of dulness.
It was the model or suggester of Pope's _Dunciad_; but the model is by no
means equal to the copy.

ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL.--Nothing which he had yet written is so true an
index to the political history as his "Absalom and Achitophel," which he
published in 1681. The history may be given in few words. Charles II. had
a natural son by an obscure woman named Lucy Walters. This boy had been
created Duke of Monmouth. He was put forward by the designing Earl of
Shaftesbury as the head of a faction, and as a rival to the Duke of York.
To ruin the Duke was their first object; and this they attempted by
inflaming the people against his religion, which was Roman Catholic. If
they could thus have him and his heirs put out of the succession to the
throne, Monmouth might be named heir apparent; and Shaftesbury hoped to be
the power behind the throne.

Monmouth was weak, handsome, and vain, and was in truth a puppet in wicked
hands; he was engaged in the Rye-house plot, and schemed not only against
his uncle, but against the person of his father himself. To satirize and
expose these plots and plotters, Dryden (at the instance of the king, it
is said,) wrote _Absalom and Achitophel_, in which are introduced, under
Scripture names, many of the principal political characters of the da