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D.'s revenge and an ample one was the publication of MacFlecknoe, a satire in which all his opponents, but especially Shadwell, were held up to the loathing and ridicule of succeeding ages, and others had conferred, upon them an immortality which, however unenviable, no efforts of their own could have secured for them. Its immediate effect was to crush and silence all his assailants.
His name has been preserved in Dryden's satire, MacFlecknoe, as "throughout the realms of nonsense absolute;" but according to some authorities his slighter pieces were not wanting in grace and fancy. Scottish statesman and political writer, s. of Sir Robert F. of Saltoun, East Lothian, to which estate he succeeded at an early age.
If his comedies have not, like those of his contemporaries just named, enjoyed the good-fortune to be collected and preserved among the dramatic classics, the fact is primarily owing to the ephemeral interest of the hits and allusions, and secondarily to "MacFlecknoe."
As Laureate Cibber drew near the end of earthly things, a desire, common to poetical as well as political potentates, possessed him, a desire to nominate a successor. In his case, indeed, the idea may have been borrowed from "MacFlecknoe" or the "Dunciad."
Among his comedies, in which he displayed considerable comic power and truth to nature, may be mentioned The Sullen Lovers , Royal Shepherdess , The Humourists , and The Miser . He attached himself to the Whigs, and when Dryden attacked them in Absalom and Achitophel and The Medal, had the temerity to assail him scurrilously in The Medal of John Bayes . The castigation which this evoked in MacFlecknoe and in the second part of Absalom and Achitophel, in which S. figures as "Og," has conferred upon him an unenviable immortality.
Johnson states, who, mistaking the date, also errs in assuming the cause of Dryden's wrath to have been the transfer of the laurel from his own to the brows of Shadwell. "MacFlecknoe" is by common consent the most perfect and perfectly acrid satire in English literature.
The commentators upon "MacFlecknoe" have not made due use of one of Shadwell's habits, in illustration of the reason why a wreath of poppies was selected for the crown of its hero. The dramatist, Warburton informs us, was addicted to the use of opium, and, in fact, died of an overdose of that drug. Hence
André; and this was the style of the famous dancing-master who gave to the courtiers of Charles II. their graceful motions. "St. André's feet ne'er kept more equal time," wrote Dryden, in his "MacFlecknoe"; and the same writer again brings him forward in the third act of "Limberham."
Of the multitudinous rejoinders and counterblasts provoked by this thunder, Dryden, it is supposed, ascribed the authorship of one of the keenest to Shadwell. We are to conceive some new and immediate provocation as added to the old grudge, to call for a second attack so soon; for it was only a month later that the "MacFlecknoe" appeared; not in 1689, as Dr.
Certainly, no one of the Laureates, Cibber excepted, was so mercilessly lampooned. What Cibber suffered from the "Dunciad" Shadwell suffered from "MacFlecknoe." Incited by Dryden's example, the poets showered their missiles at him, and so perseveringly as to render him a traditional butt of satire for two or three generations. Thus Prior:
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