nes into which he
concentrated all the venom of his previous attacks:--

"But though Heaven made him poor, with reverence speaking,
He never was a poet of God's making
The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull,
With this prophetic blessing--_Be thou dull_;
Drink, swear, and roar, forbear no lewd delight
Fit for thy bulk; do anything but write.
Thou art of lasting make, like thoughtless men;
A strong nativity--but for the pen;
Eat opium, mingle arsenic in thy drink,
Still thou mayest live, avoiding pen and ink.
I see, I see, 'tis counsel given in vain,
For treason, botched in rhyme, will be thy bane;
Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck;
'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck.

* * * * *

"A double noose thou on thy neck dost pull,
For writing treason and for writing dull;
To die for faction is a common evil,
But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.
Hadst thou the glories of thy King exprest,
Thy praises had been satires at the best;
But thou in clumsy verse, unlicked, unpointed,
Hast shamefully defied the Lord's anointed.
I will not rake the dunghill of thy crimes,
For who would read thy life that reads thy rhymes?
But of King David's foes be this the doom,--
May all be like the young man Absalom;
And for my foes may this their blessing be,--
To talk like Doeg and to write like thee."

Refinement of tone is not the distinguishing characteristic of satire
of this sort. It does not attack its object by delicate insinuation or
remote suggestion. It operates by heavy downright blows which crush by
the mere weight and power of the stroke. There was in truth in those
days a certain brutality not only permitted but expected in the way
men spoke of each other, and Dryden conformed in this as in other
respects to the manners and methods of his age. But of its kind the
attack is perfect. The blows of a bludgeon which make of the victim a
shapeless mass kill as effectively as the steel or poison which leaves
every feature undisturbed, and to the common apprehension it serves to
render the killing more manifest. At any rate, so long as a person has
been done to death, it makes comparatively little difference how the
death was brought about; and the object in this instance of Dryden's
attack, though a man of no mean abilities, has never recovered from
the demolition which his reputation then underwent.

In 1685 Charles